Whoops Goes the Hosting

My host provider Webfaction forced a server upgrade on me which sounds like it would be good. Except one of my design principles for Macdrifter is to have very few dependencies so I didn’t really need a new server. Or a new OS. Or a new version of Python. So some things happened that shouldn’t and some other things should have happened that didn’t.

Here’s a brief list:

All SSH keys changed. Wheeeeee!

My “upgrade” came with a newer version of a PHP server that apparently didn’t like the old htaccess file. Apparently now we must explicitly prefix options with “+” instead of just assuming. I’m now fully compliant with whatever the new htaccess Overlords are requiring. This required an update to the static files for Pelican which are stored under the “extra” directory along with the robots.txt file.

My system Python changed which shouldn’t have been a problem. Except in my haste to create my first virtual environment, I failed to install python. It’s either that or the upgrade magically removed the Python 2.7 installation in my virtual environment, which not even I believe. The solution was simple enough. I created a new virtual environment with Python 2.7.

:::bash
virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.7/python2.7

Then I activated the virtual environment.

:::bash
cd python2.7/
source bin/activate

Then I installed some stuff.

:::bash
pip install typogrify
pip install markdown

Then I installed the exact version of Pelican this site was designed to run on.

:::bash
pip install pelican==3.2

Next, I copied my old Pelican config file over to this new location and updated all of the hard coded paths. Finally, I copied my Pelican theme files and templates over to the new installation. The site was rebuilt by running my build command, which provided a couple of surprises. Apparently posts I wrote last week never got published because of the previously mentioned upgrade. I also had a draft from 2012 that published with yesterday’s date. Those were good times back in 2012 when Pythonista was new and we thought a scriptable iOS was right around the corner. Good times indeed.

All of this was done with Coda and Transmit from Panic. These apps are some of my favorite tools on iOS and the Mac. While I love using them, I hate when I have a reason to.