The Grinnell College Digital Library Application Developer's Blog
Call it The GCDLADB if you like.
Enhancing 'motd' with 'server-info' 2 min read May 5, 2020
My memory isn’t what it used to be, but I have this blog. 😄 And on the handful of CentOS and Ubuntu servers that I maintain, I have my server-info script, my replacement for motd. 😁 Requirements: mdv and figlet The server-info script/command relies on a pair of utilities, namely mdv and figlet. The server-info Script You’ll find the script itself in this gist. Sample installation of the script is documented below, and the content template can be found in this gist. ...
Dockerized Traefik Host Using ACME DNS-01 Challenge 11 min read Apr 27, 2020
This post builds on My dockerized-server Config and attempts to change what was a problematic ACME HTTP-01 or httpChallenge in Traefik and Let’s Encrypt to an ACME DNS-01 or dnsChallenge. The problem with the old HTTP-01 or httpChallenge is that it requires the creation of a valid and widely accessible “A” record in our DNS before the creation of a cert; the record has to be in place so that the Let’s Encrypt CA-server can find it to confirm that the request is valid. ...
Exporting, Editing, & Replacing MODS Datastreams: Technical Details 8 min read Apr 23, 2020 Superseded by posts/115-exporting-editing-replacing-mods-datastreams-updated-technical-details
Attention: On 21-May-2020 an optional, but recommended, sixth step was added to this workflow in the form of a new Drush command: islandora_mods_post_processing, an addition to my previous work in islandora_mods_via_twig. See my new post, Islandora MODS Post Processing for complete details. A 5-Step Workflow This document is follow-up, with technical details, to Exporting, Editing, & Replacing MODS Datastreams, post 069, in my blog. In case you missed it, the aforementioned post was written specifically for metadata editors working on the 2020 Grinnell College Libraries review of Digital Grinnell MODS metadata. ...
Updating DG's Collection Views 3 min read Mar 17, 2020
Digital.Grinnell employs a custom-built Drupal “view” we call the dg7 Collection View; it’s part of the code in our custom dg7 module where all of Digital.Grinnell’s hook implementations are also defined. Experience leads me to beleive that keeping a complex Drupal view in code is prudent, but overriding that code with a database copy of the view helps tremendously in terms of system performance. So, I recommend keeping the view code in the module, but that means that when significant changes are made, like the addition of a new colleciton, the code should be updated in the database to speed things up. ...
Exporting, Editing, & Replacing MODS Datastreams 5 min read Mar 17, 2020
Attention: On 21-May-2020 an optional, but recommended, sixth step was added to this workflow in the form of a new Drush command: islandora_mods_post_processing, an addition to my previous work in islandora_mods_via_twig. See my new post, Islandora MODS Post Processing for complete details. The transition to distance learning, social distancing, and more remote work at Grinnell College in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic may afford GC Libraries an opportunity to do some overdue and necessary metadata cleaning in Digital.Grinnell. ...
New Blog Style and Features 1 min read Mar 10, 2020
Welcome to my new blog theme/style with new features. All of the content, aka ‘posts’, from my old blog have been moved here, but there are still lots of remnants of the new theme, Zzo, lurking here. Please be patient with this new format while I work to fully implement all the features that this setup provides. Also, thank you, Mackenzie. My daughter played an important role in helping me with this transition. And it’s time to do some real work… I’ll be back to share more here soon. ...
Archiving What Git Ignores 3 min read Feb 26, 2020 | Updated: Feb 27, 2020 15:14
I love git and GitHub, and I can certainly appreciate the usefullness of .gitignore, but there are times when I’d really like to move an ENTIRE project to a new home. I have in my head a process that might play out like this… Fetch a list of all the files and directories that .gitignore is ignoring. Pass that list to a tar or gzip command (maybe two of them) with encryption to create a secure, compressed archive. Commit the archive to the project repo in GitHub, or keep it in a safe place for restoration in the future. ...
How to Create a New GitHub Repo from an Existing Branch 1 min read Feb 26, 2020
I just found a handy git/GitHub workflow in a Quora post titled “How do I create a new GitHub repository from a branch in an existing repository?”. And I used it, successfully, to create a new GitHub repo for my updated Drupal 8 rendition of the Wieting Theatre’s website. The new GitHub repo is wieting-D8-DO and it was created from the wieting branch of docker-compose-drupal. The commands I used looked something like this: cd ~/GitHub git clone https://github.com/SummittDweller/docker-compose-drupal.git cd docker-compose-drupal git checkout master git reset --hard origin/wieting git checkout wieting git remote rm origin git remote add origin https://github. ...
Migration to Lando 7 min read Feb 17, 2020 | Updated: Feb 20, 2020 22:25
I have ITS tickets, for seemingly simple DNS changes, that are now more than a month old, and because of that I’ve taken steps to try and do some ISLE staging work on one of my DigitalOcean droplets, namely summitt-services-droplet-01. In order to accommodate that I’ve moved nearly all of the sites and services from that droplet to my other, summitt-dweller-DO-docker. The site migration was a smooth process except for https://Wieting.TamaToledo.com. That Drupal 8 site has been difficult to upgrade and migrate largely because it was deployed using my old Port-Ability scripts, and about a year ago I scrapped Port-Ability in favor of Docksal, but I never got around to moving that particular site to a Docksal environment. ...
Installing ZSH in Catalina 1 min read Feb 12, 2020
These days I like to do all my terminal/command-line work in zsh, more specifically, with Oh My ZSH! and the bira theme. This previous post described the process I used on each of my Linux servers, and this post is similar, but written specifically for my Catalina (Macintosh OS X v10.15.x), workstations. This is how I installed and configured zsh, and some other goodies, on my student Mac Mini workstation, MA6879… brew update brew install nano zsh chsh -s /bin/zsh mark exit # log back in after this echo $SHELL brew install wget git hugo docker # Docker and Hugo added just for good measure wget https://github. ...