Our first attempt used an early cloud hosting provider, ServPath. This was before virtualization was well established, so this provider rented physical hardware that they managed. Our host was named “zak”, and was the beginning of all of our personal online presences. We all did email for ourselves and had web pages, all hosted on this server.

The pandemic and the subsequent work-from-home stance made this general fear less of an issue, at least in the sense that I wasn’t leaving the garage door open while I wasn’t at home, because I was always at home. Prior to the pandemic, however, I had solved this problem by getting my first smart garage door controller: a Chamberlain “MyQ” device. The primary advantage of the MyQ is that it would alert me if the garage door was left open over a configurable amount of time. While working from home, this turned out to be a surprisingly common issue.

1. I started this blog using wordpress in 2004.
2. In 2011, I decided that a local wordpress installation was too insecure, and switched to octopress.
3. In 2015, I figured out how to post with octopress again.

Fast forward to 2019. The host that I serve this blog on was seriously old at this point (it had a Celeron!) The colo facility that we had this box in was looking at it with increasing suspicion. So we (finally) replaced it with newer hardware and a recent operating system with essentially a clean build. At this point, I decided that while I wasn’t really posting to this blog, I’d still like to keep it on the Internet. I went about getting Octopress working again. At this point I discovered:

I enjoyed this talk both because it is always fun to hear about other’s development experiences, and because he was basically describing challenges that I’d gone through myself, albeit 15 years earlier. In particular, on slide ten Brian says “NSEC3 was harder; Ironically it cleaned up our NSEC implementation.” This might have been surprising (or non-committal) to most of the audience, but it resonated with me. That is because, when working on defining NSEC3, I realized that NSEC3 was really the same algorithm as NSEC, but with all the steps becoming explicit. (I said basically this 12 years ago too.)

A few things have changed since the last time I tried this. At the moment, I’m somewhat inspired to write this because I’ve upgraded my venerable 6 year old iMac to a fancy 5k iMac, and working on this screen is very nice.

First answer: No. Second answer: Maybe.

Marked is a markdown previewer. Instead of being the editor, it watches the file you are working on, and updates whenever it changes. Presumably this is quite nice if you are using an editor which auto-saves. It claims that the easiest way to get your document into Marked is to drag the icon from the toolbar. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with Emacs, as there is nothing to drag.

• Xcode on your mac has probably updated 4 times and wiped out the command line tools (e.g., the command line compiler and build environment). Making this a bit harder is that installing the command line tools changed to something entirely non-obvious in Xcode 5. (Hint: from the command line, run ‘xcode-select –install’). So we spent a bit of time wondering why /usr/include is no longer present.
• Ruby has utterly changed on your mac (what? ruby-1.9.2 isn’t current anymore?) , and you have to struggle to get anything to work as now all of your previously installed gems are gone.
• You don’t work with ruby projects enough, so you struggle to get bundler to install an ancient version of some ruby gem which doesn’t realize that Mac OS X 10.9 is a perfectly valid OS release. Deleting the Gemfile.lock file and trying again is much more successful.
• Octopress itself has changed a lot. After pulling the changes from upstream, dealing with the merge conflicts, and running ‘rake preview’, you are greeting with a now totally broken blog with now zero posts. This is because you have to actually upgrade the source and style.

Now that I’ve beaten my blog software back into shape, I’ll have to actually thing of something to write about…

So. What are your options?

Let’s back up a little. Why do you need to host git repositories at all? What sorts of things should a hosting solution give you? First of all, if you want to actually work with other people, and those other people use, um, different computers, it is quite convenient to have a central repository around to use as a conduit. Also, if you want to be able to push changes anywhere, a central hosted git repository is a not-very-confusing place to do so.