Samat Says (Posts about Meta)

Going HTTPS

Samat K Jain — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

This blog, my landing page, wiki, and a few of my other Websites are now being served encrypted over HTTPS (see the lock icon in your address bar?), thanks to Let's Encrypt. Along with TLS, I've enabled HTTP/2.

Hackers won't find anything sensitive on my public Websites, but my private Websites (e.g. my ownCloud and Tiny Tiny RSS instances) have needed more security for a long time.

Enabling HTTP/2 was very easy, as HTTP/2 support is shipped with the 'http2' module in Apache 2.4.17 and later. While easy, it wasn't obvious; I've written a tutorial for enabling HTTP/2 on Apache. Redirecting non-HTTP connections was trickier than I thought, so I've written a tutorial for HTTPS redirects with Apache's mod_rewrite too.

I created my TLS certificates as part of Let's Encrypt's closed beta. I have an unconventional and complex Apache setup (something I'll simplify, one day…) and because of bug 1531, a problem in an upstream library, I can't use the official client the way it was meant to be used (i.e. "install" or "auth" commands). I don't think I wanted an automated script editing config files on my servers anyway.

With a lot of fiddling, I've figured out how to use the official letsencrypt client reverse proxied through Apache, which will let me update certificates regularly without headache.

First post!

Samat K Jain — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:00:00 GMT

I'm rebooting this blog. It's a long time coming.

My first "blog" was back in 2003. As was fashionable back then, I wrote my own, custom blogging software in PHP. In 2005, I ditched the custom software and started using Drupal, starting with Drupal 4.5.

I become fairly skilled with Drupal: I wrote themes, modules, launched several Websites for myself and clients, ran a Drupal-oriented consulting firm and Web hosting company, and managed scalability at a startup built on Drupal.

I, very painfully, upgraded those sites and this blog, which started with Drupal 4.5, all the way up to Drupal 7. It was not easy or fun.

I had to constantly deal with security upgrades. Upgrading to new Drupal versions required a witch hunt to find which 3rd party modules were deprecated, which new modules I should use to replace them, and in what ways those modules worked differently. And then there was all the spam—even with Acquia's Mollom service, too much spam got through, requiring constant moderation.

The thing that did Drupal in for me was SA-CORE-2014-005, fixed in Drupal 7.32. After over 10 years of following Drupal security updates, I missed one, by just a few hours—and my site was hacked. While restoring from my backups, I made a mistake and deleted the most recent one.

If I wasn't turned off to PHP Web applications before, I'm really, really turned off to them now. After using Drupal for almost 10 years, I'm switching to something else (at least for my personal stuff).

Because I didn't want to deal with upgrading or security issues, it meant using something like Ghost or Wordpress was out.

The new Samat Says is powered by Nikola, a static site generator. I looked at Jekyll, Blogofile, Pelican, but Nikola seemed the easiest for me to understand, extend, and most importantly has a vibrant, active community.

For a long time, I cared about owning my comments and not being tied to a 3rd party service. After dealing with all the spam my old Drupal site received, I now care quite a bit less. I'd like to move to a self-hosted, or better yet federated, commenting solution in the future but for the time being I'm using Disqus. I haven't figured out how I will migrate old comments yet.

Worth mentioning: you may have noticed this isn't an actual first post. I'm slowly migrating content from the old blog (probably only the popular bits) from my old Drupal installation over to this Nikola-powered one.

samat.org upgraded to Drupal 6.5

Samat K Jain — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

After over 2 years, I've finally upgraded this website from Drupal 4.7 to 6.5. It's something I've been meaning to do for a long while. Hopefully, with the new Drupal version management scheme I've developed for Rhombic Networks (article coming soon), along with the advancements in update management within Drupal itself, it will be much easier to keep current with updates.

Like I discussed my last upgrade to Drupal 4.7, there are several new features I'm excited about:

OpenID support. Instead of having to leave comments anonymously, or waste time creating an account, use your OpenID. If you have your own domain, check out Simon Willison's article how to turn your blog into an OpenID. I've noticed with an OpenID, I find myself commenting and participating on sites much more often. Hopefully I can expect the same of others with my website.
Drupal's Mollom module. The old site was getting hit with hundreds of spam comments a day. I gave up trying to filter them all, which meant it took a long time for users' comments to show up on the site. Hopefully, with Mollom, that will change, and I will be able to screen comments again instead of screening spam. I like Mollom more than I do Akismet.
Drupal's Atom module. RSS sucks. You can now aggregate this blog via an Atom feed. Like most home pages on the Internet, most surfers find content on this site via search engines, or via their feed reader.

Hopefully, I can get my development mojo going and finish porting my Drupal Sands and Sands_CSS themes to Drupal 5.x and 6.x. I'm sorry I took so long!