a view from afar

I now have an account on the github beta - and it's pretty cool. Since I've only done one thing with it I can only comment on one feature: forking. It's pretty effortless, and only took me a few minutes to get my Mailtrap LogParser extension up there. Best thing - assuming they are telling the truth :) - it's easy for the maintainer of the parent repo to merge the changes back in.

I suspect github will eventually change the nature of open source collaboration. But where is darcshub?

Since Google bought FeedBurner, their MyBrand feature has been free. This means you can access FeedBurner feeds via "feeds.yourdomain.com". All it takes is a CNAME record in DNS to point feeds.yourdomain.com to feeds.feedburner.com, then you can access FeedBurned feeds via a URL you own. It's pretty generous of Google seeing as it means you can switch feed tracker with a simple DNS change...

Here is my Apache config (with added line breaks) to send the Mephisto-generated URLs to the FeedBurner ones:

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
    RewriteRule ^/feed/atom.xml \
                http://feeds.aviewfromafar.net/aviewfromafar-home \
                [R=301]

Actually the feeds.feedburner.com addresses haven't moved, so if you are subscribed to this blog via the Atom feed you will still get updates. But the correct address is here:

http://feeds.aviewfromafar.net/aviewfromafar-home

...and geeks like being correct, right? :D

I got my first two text messages today - one for this blog and one for www.patchspace.co.uk. I've got the polling resolution set to five minutes and to alert after 30 minutes' downtime, so I was pretty confident it was a power cut (and I was right). It's the second we've had lately, the last was in the middle of the night, before I subscribed to Pingdom.

I guess I was wrong in my last post - the real weak spot in my setup is being on a residential power grid. But then, it's not like I'm not hosting paid-for clients' sites from my home server, so the worst it does it make me look like a fool when nobody can access my blog.

Next step: buy a UPS. (A generator seems a bit excessive.)