Entries posted in November 2012

The following companies are amongst those showing Christmas Adverts on television before the start of December:

• Tesco
• Homebase.
• M&S
• Waitrose.
• John Lewis.

I will boycott these companies until next year.

In happier news I've spent the past week or two replacing the monitoring system that we use at work.

Our previous monitoring system had been struggling to keep up with the sheer number of tests it was being asked to process. This was partly because we carry out many ping-tests, ssh-tests, http-tests, dns-tests, etc. The other reason was that our monitoring system was a behemoth of threaded-ruby, which all ran upon a single host. This made adding another monitoring host a complex undertaking.

The new solution uses a work-queue:

• Tests to apply are parsed and inserted into a single, global, beanstalkd queue.
• Workers continuously poll the queue for tests to execute. They then execute them, and alert on failures as appropriate.

The code is open-source, written in Ruby, and available here:

• https://projects.bytemark.co.uk/projects/custodian/wiki

I've completed the process of tidying up the code to the extent I'm happy with it, and I believe I've also abstracted away the work-specific pieces of the code.

That said I'd not be surprised if it needs a few minor tweaks before it it useful for other people.

Tags: bytemark, christmas, custodian | 2 comments

I host a number of websites which are mostly static in nature, these are often hand-crafted, but three of them us a slightly hacked up creation of my own.

Given a master "template" the file foo.skx gets massaged into foo.html.

Sadly I added features randomly, and now I have three template-driven sites which are handled slightly differently. This put me in the position of having to choose between two options:

• Unify my template-handling.
• Use something else.

Simplifying my life is good. So I examined a list of static site generators, and a few more found by searching github.

Other than doing clever things by knowing which page is "current" I needed to do only minimal magic:

• Conditionally include files.
• Setup per-page CSS files.
  • e.g. This page and this page differ by the stylesheet used. (And the text content too, clearly!)
• Setup per-page templates.

Webgen looked like a good fit, but I couldn't get per-page templates to work out. Either they would work, or I would get weird errors about blocks not being known.

Webby worked, but I didn't like it.

Poole was the next one that I got far down the road with, but it allowed only a single site-wide template. Shame because otherwise I loved its flexibility enought to tolerate writing "macros" in Python.

I've still got to test more out, but it is a fun process. I fully intend to adopt an existing tool, and not keep working on my own.

Tonight I'm going to look at a few more.

Tags: poole, static, template | 12 comments