{"@attributes":{"version":"2.0"},"channel":{"title":"Tombuntu","link":"https:\/\/tombuntu.com\/","description":"Recent content on Tombuntu","language":"en-us","copyright":"2007-2025 Tombuntu","lastBuildDate":"Sun, 10 May 2020 23:15:39 -0700","item":[{"title":"Migrating Tombuntu from WordPress to Hugo","link":"https:\/\/tombuntu.com\/index.php\/2020\/05\/10\/migrating-tombuntu-from-wordpress-to-hugo\/","pubDate":"Sun, 10 May 2020 23:15:39 -0700","guid":"https:\/\/tombuntu.com\/index.php\/2020\/05\/10\/migrating-tombuntu-from-wordpress-to-hugo\/","description":"\n\n

Back in 2018, I silently upgraded this site to “Tombuntu 3.” To reduce\nhosting costs and maintenance, I migrated from WordPress<\/a> to Hugo<\/a>, a static\nsite generator. Here’s a (belated) overview of the process.<\/p>\n\n

Exporting posts<\/h2>\n\n

I had almost five hundred old posts that needed to be migrated from an exported\nWordPress XML file to Markdown files. There are off-the-shelf solutions for\nthis, but I knew there would be complications. I ended up doing the migration\nmyself, with a Python<\/a> script.<\/p>\n\n

WordPress’s XML file contains HTML, but lacking paragraph tags. I used this\nimplementation of WordPress’s autop function<\/a> to add them in.<\/p>\n\n

I wrote my old posts in WordPress’ visual editor. It produced HTML that looked\nfine at the time, but wasn’t semantic<\/a>. For example, I often created headings\nwith a bold single-line paragraph. To fix these issues, I came up with simple\nheuristics to find them, and implemented regular expression substitutions to\nfix the HTML.<\/p>\n\n

Finally, I used Pandoc<\/a>, a document converter tool, to convert the\nHTML into Markdown files suitable for Hugo. These files also include important\nmetadata such as each post’s original URL and RSS GUID from WordPress.<\/p>\n\n

Exporting comments<\/h2>\n\n

Tombuntu no longer accepts comments. I preserved historical comments by\nappending them to the content of each post in a special “archived comments”\nsection. Feel free to send me your comments via email using the button at the\nend of each post.<\/p>\n\n

Deploying<\/h2>\n\n

I work on Tombuntu from a Git repository on my workstation. To deploy the site\nto its web server, I wrote an Ansible playbook<\/a> that uses the synchronize\nmodule<\/a> to efficiently upload changes. I also use Ansible to configure the\nserver.<\/p>\n\n

Results<\/h2>\n\n

Tombuntu 3 runs with room to space on a cheap virtual server and has been easy\nto maintain so far. Hugo works well, although I had to work around a bug<\/a> in\nits “shortcodes” feature. This month I also upgraded the server to Ubuntu 20.04\nand added HTTPS support using a free Let’s Encrypt<\/a> certificate.<\/p>\n\n

I’m still using Ubuntu at home and work every day. Maybe I’ll find something to\nwrite about other than this site itself sometime!<\/p>\n"},{"title":"Upgrading Tombuntu in 2013","link":"https:\/\/tombuntu.com\/index.php\/2013\/12\/18\/upgrading-tombuntu-in-2013\/","pubDate":"Wed, 18 Dec 2013 23:23:24 +0000","guid":"http:\/\/tombuntu.com\/?p=2154","description":"

Last week Tombuntu’s server received a much-needed upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04.\nTombuntu launched in 2007 hosted on my home server running Ubuntu. In 2008, I\nmoved it to a Linode VPS running Ubuntu\n8.04<\/a>.\nSupport for Ubuntu 8.04 ended back in April, so it was definitely time for an\nupgrade.<\/p>\n\n

Other than some security\nissues<\/a>, I haven’t\nhad any problems with Linode, so I re-provisioned by existing server with a new\nUbuntu 12.04 install. Here’s a brief overview of the setup process I went\nthough:<\/p>\n\n

    \n
  1. Linode’s Ubuntu image requires some extra configuration that you would\nnormally do during an Ubuntu install. Follow Linode’s\ndocumentation<\/a> to set the\nhostname, set the timezone, and create a user.<\/li>\n
  2. Configure the SSH server to use a non-standard port (to reduce brute-force\nattempts), disable root login, and disable password authentication.<\/li>\n
  3. Create a directory for document roots. I’m the only person who needs to log\ninto the server, so I just create directories like \/srv\/www\/tombuntu.com<\/code>\nfor each domain that are owned by my user.<\/li>\n
  4. Install Nginx and add configuration for each domain in\n\/etc\/nginx\/sites-available<\/code>.<\/li>\n
  5. Install php5-fpm<\/code>.<\/li>\n
  6. Install MySQL, run mysql_secure_installation<\/code>, and create users and\ndatabases for each application.<\/li>\n
  7. Install Postfix with no relay\nhost<\/a> so the server\ncan send notifications.<\/li>\n
  8. Write a cron job on my home desktop to create database dumps and back\neverything up using rdiff-backup.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n

    The software stack has only changed slightly: Nginx<\/a> has\nreplaced the Apache web server. I used to have problems with the number of\nApache processes and their memory usage inflating and running the server out of\nmemory. Nginx uses a event-driven architecture so one process\/thread can handle\nmultiple connections asynchronously, whereas Apache (in the most common\nconfiguration) requires one process for each connection. This makes Nginx more\nscalable and keeps memory usage consistent.<\/p>\n\n

    My favorite way to backup is still\nrdiff-backup<\/a>,\nbecause it allows remote, incremental backups, and restoring from the most\nrecent backup only requires copying files. My desktop at home initiates the\nserver backup through cron. This has the advantage that the server does not have\ndirect access to its backups (my desktop can reach the server via SSH, but not\nthe other way around).<\/p>\n\n

    Tombuntu is powered by WordPress. Between upgrading to the latest version and\nhaving to run SQL queries to delete massive amounts of spam, WordPress is pretty\nhigh-maintenance. It’s also really slow without caching pages on the server. For\nwhatever reason, WordPress doesn’t include a built-in page cache, but there are\nnumerous plugins providing this. Unfortunately, many of the popular plugins are\nnow buggy, poorly maintained, and\/or are trying to upsell you to a premium\nversion. Currently I’ve settled on Hyper\nCache<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

    Finally, I did some optimization on the site itself to improve load time. The\nFeedBurner widgets were slow and didn’t seem to work any more, so I removed\nthem. I used Google’s excellent PageSpeed\nInsights<\/a> tool to get\nsome additional suggestions for speeding things up.<\/p>\n\n\n"},{"title":"Setting up Ubuntu on an SSD","link":"https:\/\/tombuntu.com\/index.php\/2012\/04\/26\/setting-up-ubuntu-on-an-ssd\/","pubDate":"Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:44:01 +0000","guid":"http:\/\/tombuntu.com\/?p=2143","description":"\n\n

    I recently purchased a new solid state drive (SSD) to replace my current hard\ndrive (HDD). Since SSDs work so much differently than HDDs, it’s worth while to\nmake some optimizations in Ubuntu for them. SSDs are much faster than HDDs, but\nhave a limited number of writes before they wear out. This makes balancing\nperformance with the life of your SSD also a big concern for how you tune your\nsystem.<\/p>\n\n

    I’ve written a post on this topic\nbefore<\/a>\nfor the older SSD in my netbook.<\/p>\n\n

    Partitioning and bind mounts<\/h2>\n\n

    I partitioned my 60 GB SSD into a 10 GB \/<\/code> partition, and a 50 GB \/home<\/code>\npartition, both using the default ext4 filesystem. I kept my old HDD home\npartition mounted at \/media\/oldhome<\/code>.<\/p>\n\n

    I wanted to put some of my large and infrequently accessed files, like virtual\nmachines and videos, on the more spacious HDD. I also wanted to make accessing\nthese files from my home directory seamless. One way to do this would be to\nsymlink folders from the SSD to the HDD. However, I found that this wouldn’t be\nfully seamless for some applications that don’t follow symlinks.<\/p>\n\n

    Bind mounts are a better solution. They allow a directory in a filesystem to be\nmounted in additional locations, similarly to symlinks but fully transparent to\napplications. To test bind mounting my videos directory, I ran mount with the\nbind option, and specified the source directory (on the HDD), and the mount\npoint (which must already exist):<\/p>\n\n

    mount --bind \/media\/oldhome\/tom\/Videos \/home\/tom\/Videos\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\n
    To make my bind mounts permanent, I added them to my \/etc\/fstab<\/code> file in this\nformat:<\/p>\n\n
    \/media\/oldhome\/tom\/Videos \/home\/tom\/Videos none bind 0 0\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\n
    If you need to add a path with a space in it, replace the space with \\040<\/code> to\nescape it. If you make a mistake and one of the bind mounts fails, Ubuntu will\nallow you to skip it and continue booting. So far the bind mount approach seems\nto work perfectly.<\/p>\n\n
    Mount options for SSDs<\/h2>\n\n
    Any recent SSD should have the TRIM<\/a> command\navailable, which prevents performance degradation by allowing the OS to notify\nthe SSD of which blocks are unused. The ext4 filesystem uses TRIM when the\ndiscard<\/code> option is set.<\/p>\n\n
    The noatime<\/code> option reduces writes to the SSD by not writing access time\nupdates whenever a file is read. This improves performance and increases the\nlife of the SSD.<\/p>\n\n
    I set these two mount options though \/etc\/fstab<\/code> for both my SSD partitions by\nadding discard<\/code> and noatime<\/code> to the list of options for \/<\/code> and \/home<\/code> like\nthis:<\/p>\n\n
    UUID=193af662-d7a0-47fb-b3f7-141ae3d19227 \/ ext4 errors=remount-ro,noatime,discard 0 1\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\n
    Disk head scheduler for SSDs<\/h2>\n\n
    A disk scheduler optimizes the order of disk requests by considering the\nposition of the hard drive’s read\/write head. An SSD needs no such optimization,\nso it’s best to use the noop (no-operation) scheduler.<\/p>\n\n
    I switched to the noop scheduler for my SSD by adding the to following line to\n\/etc\/rc.local<\/code> (replace sdb<\/code> with your own SSD’s device node name):<\/p>\n\n
    echo noop > \/sys\/block\/sdb\/queue\/scheduler\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\n
    Swap and swappiness<\/h2>\n\n
    I kept my swap partition on the old HDD. Swap on the SSD would be faster, but\nwould also shorten the SSD’s life.<\/p>\n\n
    My system has plenty of memory, so I also reduced the swappiness\nvalue<\/a>\nto 0 to tell Ubuntu to only swap when absolutely necessary. I did this by adding\nthe line vm.swappiness=0<\/code> to \/etc\/sysctl.conf<\/code>.<\/p>\n\n
    Even more<\/h2>\n\n
    There are many more ways to tune Ubuntu for SSDs. A few things I haven’t done\nare: partition alignment (Ubuntu’s partitioner now seems to take care of this\nautomatically), disabling journalling (I’d prefer reliability over slightly\nreduced SSD life), and mounting \/tmp<\/code> or browser cache in memory (I’d prefer to\nsave the memory). The Arch Linux Wiki has a comprehensive page on\nSSDs<\/a>, and here’s\nanother\narticle<\/a>\nthat goes more in-depth in some of the things I mentioned here.<\/p>\n\n\n"},{"title":"GNOME 3.2 and GNOME Shell Extensions","link":"https:\/\/tombuntu.com\/index.php\/2011\/12\/05\/gnome-3-2-and-gnome-shell-extensions\/","pubDate":"Tue, 06 Dec 2011 03:14:32 +0000","guid":"http:\/\/tombuntu.com\/?p=2132","description":"
    GNOME has launched an alpha of the GNOME Shell Extensions\nwebsite<\/a>. Like Firefox, GNOME Shell allows\nextensions to modify and extend the user interface. The site allows you to\nbrowse and install extensions written by third parties, but reviewed by GNOME\nbefore being made available. There are already many extensions to bring back\nelements of GNOME 2.<\/p>\n\n
    To try GNOME Shell Extensions, you’ll need to be running GNOME 3.2. Ubuntu 11.10\nonly has GNOME 3.0, but the GNOME3 Team\nPPA<\/a> provides packages to\nupdate it. I added this PPA on my netbook to updatemy existing GNOME Shell\ninstallation<\/a> in\nUbuntu 11.10.<\/p>\n\n
    Extensions are installed using a plugin, included with GNOME, that currently\nonly works with Firefox. When it’s working, an extension’s page has a large\nswitch to enable and disable the extension. Flip the switch, select Install<\/code> in\nthe confirmation dialog, and the extension almost immediately activates.\nDisabling an extension is just as easy. Here’s the Applications\nMenu<\/a> extension in\naction:<\/p>\n\n
    \"GNOME<\/p>\n\n
    I’d like to see an extension that maximizes screen space on my netbook by hiding\nthe title bar of maximized windows like Unity does.<\/p>\n\n
    Could GNOME Shell extensions become a killer feature for GNOME 3?<\/p>\n\n\n"},{"title":"Even More Graphical Git Clients","link":"https:\/\/tombuntu.com\/index.php\/2011\/12\/02\/even-more-graphical-git-clients\/","pubDate":"Sat, 03 Dec 2011 01:21:06 +0000","guid":"http:\/\/tombuntu.com\/?p=2122","description":"
    Since my last post about finding a graphical Git client for\nUbuntu<\/a>, I’ve been\nusing the excellent gitg<\/a>. But here’s four more\nthat I’ve come across since then, most recommended by comments on the previous\npost:<\/p>\n\n