From August 2011 until today, this site has been running under WordPress. During this time, we have done many experiments with several other blog platforms, but none of them made it to the “import all the old stuff from this one - this is what we're looking for!” stage. As you may have already guessed, though, this is no longer the case. WordPress does what it does very well. However, the last post before this one was August… of 2014! That means that, every page served from this site, a script was run on the server that accessed a database and dynamically assembled the page. This content did not need to be dynamic - even when there is a new post, there is very little in the way of dynamic content here.

Jekyll is a static site generator; these types of applications generate static sites based on a collection of templates and content files, that can then be served with no backing data store. Now, we can utilize the blazing fast nginx web server to push these files as quick as people can request them, where the request does not even have to escape the process.

There will be more to come on Jekyll; there are at least two posts to be written, one on automating the build process and another on the migration from WordPress. Until then, though, there are redirects that ensure the RSS feeds for both the main blog and the xine RPMs require no changes, and the category pages have redirects as well. If something does not look right, let us know via either of the social media accounts linked above.

After three years on WordPress, The Bit Badger Blog has moved to BlogEngine.NET. There are several reasons for this change, some technical and some not.

• PHP's Fast CGI processor has a problem where, if all of the processes are busy, the server will simply time out. While this hasn't afflicted my server as much as others, it has caused problems; when this problem occurred, none of the PHP sites were accessible.
• Through experience with a very heavily-used site, I became less enamored of WordPress's “read from the database every time” way of doing business. I also found that various caching plug-ins for WordPress, on this particular site, did very little to ease the load.
• Since I first looked at Mono (Linux's implementation of the .NET framework), it has matured significantly. It supports most of C# 4.0 already, which was released earlier this year.
• BlogEngine.NET is a rapidly-maturing blog platform, and the project has a stated goal of 100% compatibility with Mono. This is good, because you can mention Mono problems to the team, and you're not dismissed because you're running Linux.

As part of the move, the URL has changed; the new link is https://blog.bitbadger.solutions. I have implemented redirection for each post, the category and category feed links, and the main blog feed and home page from the old URL, so you may not have even realized that you're looking at the new site. The Bit Badger Solutions Software Repository remains at https://hosted.djs-consulting.com/software/.

I'm looking forward to this new setup!

(NOTE: The next-to-last paragraph was updated with correct links as of February 2017.)

We have created a software repository, where users can browse files that may be available. The base location is https://hosted.djs-consulting.com/software. Within there, there are a few areas.

• /sled and /opensuse - These contain add-on CD images for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and openSUSE, created by Mike Petersen. These add-ons provide multimedia and gaming capabilities that don't come with SLED unless you purchase the support or compile them yourselves. These images can be added as resources in YaST.
• /xine - This contains the 64-bit RPMs for xine (the latest three), both xine-lib and xine-ui. New releases will continue to get their own posts, but that's where they will be.

Enjoy!

Sorry for the lack of new content (although I did download and build the latest release of xine). I've been working on a community-based volunteer effort in Albuquerque, New Mexico called Not So Extreme Makeover: Community Edition. I'm handling the public website, as well as a private side that the leaders can use to track lots of different things. I'm going to have some good stuff I've discovered out here once we're done (along with lots of praise to heap on PostgreSQL - I have a new “most favorite” open source database), but for the rest of March, I'll likely be incommunicado.

Happy Easter - see you in April!

Version 2.3 of WordPress, the blogging software I use to produce this blog (as well as the other blogs on my site), will be released later today. I'll be upgrading these blogs on Monday evening. There have been major pieces of WordPress that have been re-worked, and those are causing some plug-ins to not work correctly. None of my blogs are all that reliant on plug-ins - the “Share This” plug-in is the main one, and it's been verified in 2.3 already.

There's lots more information on the WordPress Development Blog - I won't go into the details here. I'm confident this will be a smooth upgrade. I just wanted to let you know in case some things look strange, I'm on it.

Welcome to The Bit Badger Blog. This blog is a place where I plan to posts tips and other information regarding technology (AKA “geek stuff”). This will allow me to keep my personal blog non-technical.

I have imported my old “My Linux Adventure” posts from 2004 here, to allow the to be indexed and searchable. I noticed, in the process, that some of the information is somewhat dated - take it for what it's worth, which is twice what you paid for it!

I hope that the information here will be beneficial to you.