The Grinnell College Digital Library Application Developer's Blog
About Me 1 min read May 23, 2019 | Updated: Oct 6, 2021 - 08:07
I am DevOps and I love Hugo… in spite of the fact that the logo colors clash with my blog theme. 😄 More About Me What more do you need to know? Ok, so my official title at Grinnell College is actually Digital Library Applications Developer. ...
Lessons Learned: Vacationing In Europe 2 min read Jun 25, 2019
I just returned from 12-days of vacation and travel that took me unexpectedly to Paris and northern Finland, and as-expected to Norway (nearly all of it), and Iceland (expected, but not as promised). Since this is a professional blog I won’t elaborate here, but look for my “personal” blog at https://blog.summittdweller.com/posts/, a perpetual work-in-progress. I will briefly comment on two things: It IS possible to work remotely from Europe, and even from a cruise at sea, but I found it difficult to be really productive. ...
A Dockerized Omeka-S for Development and Staging 3 min read Jun 10, 2019
Update: 24-July-2019 The Docksal process outlined here is NOT working reliably. See this new post for updated info. My fork of the dodeeric/omeka-s-docker project can be found at McFateM/omeka-s-docker, and it introduces a new docker-compose.yml file for spinning Omeka-S up on any Dockerized server, and a Docksal .docksal directory to enable local development using fin up. Note What follows is reflected in the README. ...
Free Ports 80 and 8080 in OSX 2 min read Jun 7, 2019
Ok, this is info I should have documented here a long, long time ago. For many months now this tidbit of wisdom has lived on a post-it in my office. Not the best strategy for someone who works from home and travels a lot. Apparently OSX ships with built-in Apache and/or NGINX servers, presumably to facilitate creation of web content that’s local to the machine. Well, in my Dockerized workflows those port assignments typically get in the way. When they do, like when I do a fin up to launch a local development project using Docksal, I see error messages like the following in my terminal: ...
Drupal Flyover Camp 2019 2 min read Jun 1, 2019
The last couple days I attended Drupal Flyover Camp 2019 at UMKC in Kansas City, MO. I picked up on a few tricks and tools that I thought I’d mention here, just so I don’t forget some of the details. Friday - Day 1 My favorite presentation of the day was Visual Regression Testing with BackstopJS by David Needham. There’s some cool tech here that I think could be very useful with things like Digital Grinnell, Rootstalk, and even this blog. ...
Working with Let's Encrypt to Generate Certs 4 min read May 29, 2019
The workflow I use to create, publish, and update this blog is discussed in three of my earlier posts, namely docker-bootstrap Workflow, Building This Blog, and Developing This Blog. This workflow works nicely in the case of this blog, but my daughter and I created another site, Visualizing Abolition and Freedom, frequently referred to as simply VAF, where the same workflow doesn’t quite work. The problem, I believe is with the manner in which I attempted to obtain TLS certs from Let’s Encrypt. ...
Fixing the VAF Cert Problem 3 min read May 29, 2019
True to form, just after posting my lengthy description of VAF cert problems I figured out what was wrong and how to fix it. Naturally, just after. So, the root of my VAF woes stemmed from the fact that Let’s Encrypt, upon my request, had previously issued an untrusted cert for https://vaf.grinnell.edu (because I used the staging environment during development of this blog), and I was unable to find it or override it with a trusted cert. I was under the impression that in my workflow the cert was being stored inside one of my Docker containers… and it was. ...
Updates to Atom and Themes 1 min read May 25, 2019
Recently I made several significant updates to this blog, including changes to my Atom configuration, and the introduction of a new theme, plus a “theme component” to help manage search. Both of these updates are perhaps best described in this portion of the README.md file in my blog’s Github repo so I won’t bother with the details here. And that’s a wrap. Until next time… ...
New Theme and Search 1 min read May 24, 2019
I recently made changes to this blog that made the old theme “un-responsive”, it no longer reformatted nicely for small, mobile devices. So I’ve switched the theme to use hugo-theme-m10c, and I think it’s a welcome improvement. In addition, I found this repo which provides an awesome wrapper in the form of a very elegant Hugo theme component around some work that I mentioned in an earlier post, namely this awesome gist. Consequently, the mark.js keyword highlighting that was “broken” in my earlier search implementation is now working! ...
Help! 1 min read May 23, 2019
Looking to add a simple, single, new page to this site? Have a look at this content in the site's `./content/add-a-simple-page.md` file. Pay particular attention to the front matter where the type and layout are declared, as well as a list of aliases:: aliases: - help - add-this-page - add-a-page-to-the-site type: page layout: single But note that all of these aliases re-direct to the canonical URL which takes its name, ./add-a-simple-page, from the name of this markdown document, ./content/add-a-simple-page.md. ...