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Next Gen community Forum, Blog and projects news

Whoo, these last weeks were very busy and intensive. I had to do lot of things in the same time, and it’s not really my best work because you loose time switching from one point to another. But that’s it. Now, it’s done and lot of hard work is behind. You may have noticed some problems on this blog in the past few days, and here it why :

Move Virtual Machine

The 1st thing I made was to move the virtual machine that hosted this blog on Microsoft Azure to another provider. Not that I was not satisfied from MS but just I used all my credits and price for mortal people like me his just amazing for only one VM, on cloud, what cost is CPU. Neither mind, I found on OVH a simple VPS for 6€/month, 2 RAM Gig, and 2 vCPU, some disk space, just what I needed.

What I’ve done (not sure it was this order)

  1. Bust backuped all files from Azure VM
  2. Installed new VM from fresh on OVH VM (oh, now it’s jessie ;-), sure this will bring me sad effects!
  3. Installed required packages (Apache, php, mysql, wordpress, other stuff, …) on OVH VM
  4. Then copied backuped files from the Azure VM to OVH VM.
  5. unzipped the files restored all file
  6. changed public hallard.me DNS record to point to new OVH VM
  7. Test, it works 😉
  8. Well from 90%, some things were broken and I spend more time to fix 10% broken things than 90% of the migration

Adding news hosts with new domain name

I needed to create some new name (you’ll see why later) and I needed to switch some hallard.me/aname to aname.hallard.me to be fully isolated in “name view” and on web server view. I created the hosts and changed apache2 configuration, my private hallard.me/emoncms is now emoncms.hallard.me. I also needed to create the new SSL certificates for the new names.

Migrate Apache to NGInx

I will not debate on this point I needed an optimized web server with full web sockets, and Nginx is the way to go, I learned very quickly, compared to Apache. Config is so simple, whooo, I fall in love with Nginx. Well, not really, huh !!

Certificate format for SSL secure connection was not the same, I needed to do some trick, but now it works.

Next Gen Forum community is alive

This is the most important point for you, with upcoming ULPNode, I decided to change the old school forums. Seeing lot other sites (mainly new startup) on Internet using NodeBB forums, I fall in love again (well, I’m going to be in trouble ?) with this forum.

Choice was evident, so I tried it, simple, efficient, great. Then I created a new community Forum, next gen forum, it’s alive and it’s available at https://community.hallard.me, register process is so easy, you can also log in with your social network account. Don’t worry, it’s just taking your email as ID (and picture profile if any) and I WILL NEVER sell anything to anyone.

I will add link to the new forum on the blog soon and remove old one. I will not going into the pain of trying to migrate all posts and users, if you want me to manually move your account just ask in this post comment with your request, you will receive a mail to activate your new account.

Be informed, there is no link between blogs users (registered or not), and community forum, this is the bad thing. I will try to be able that blog post comments goes directly to community forum, but in the future, blog users will be disable, because just unneeded.

Next ?

In the meantime I’ve finalized the ULPNode bootloader and released the new version on github, with Arduino IDE 1.6.4. Boards Manager integration. ULPNode library is also 90% finished and working like a charm.

Beside this hard work, what I learned again, is that anyone could learn anything today, Internet is a so much exchange and learning place, that you will find anything you need. Everybody made this possible, and this blog is juts my 2 cents contribution, I hope you like it, and do not hesitate do go to the new forum community to discuss of anything.

cheers,

Charles

 

Charles

You can discuss about this article or other project using the community forum