Feeling Like A (Real) Programmer

I’ve spent most of tonight writing an XQuery script that reads stuff from a linkbase I’m using to keep track of resources in eXist. It’s not much yet, just a couple of queries to get resource URIs based on various conditions, but it strikes me that doing an extended XLink implementation in eXist really shouldn’t be that hard. Even by a non-programmer such as yours truly.

Updating an eXist-DB System

We’re doing a major overhaul on an eXist-DB system we built for the Swedish Federation of Farmers. There’s a bit of everything in this one. There’s XProc running nightly conversions and on-demand publishing with FO, an oXygen editing environment based on DocBook, and XForms and XQuery for various administrative tasks. It’s a pretty cool system already, and now we’re making it better.

Looking forward to this one.

Harder Than I Thought

Getting rid of this ftp problem (see my previous post about updating WordPress) was harder than I thought. The answer was right in front of me, though. IF I had bothered to read the readme file rather than abusing Google, that is.

  1. Make sure that your wp-content folder and its contents use www-data:www-data for <user>:<group>.
  2. Copy the actual plugins and themes from /usr/share/wordpress/wpcontents to your wp-content rather than using the symlinks.
  3. Add this to your WP config file in /etc/wordpress:
    define( ‘FS_METHOD’, ‘direct’ );

This is a LOT better than using ftp or uploading plugins and themes manually.

My New Site

Yesterday I got myself a shiny new low-end VPS at VPSDime to host my sgmlguru.org site. For now, I’ve installed WordPress (to which I am considering moving the blog you’re reading now, if it all pans out) and maybe some other stuff. We’ll see.

Hello world!

I used to host sgmlguru.org in my basement, using an old Debian box and a dynamic DNS feature in my VDSL router. The site would go down at regular intervals, sometimes because I got a new IP address and the DynDNS service didn’t follow, and sometimes because that box runs Debian Unstable and I’m an apt-get junkie, updating the system at least a couple of times a week.

This was rather unreliable and didn’t reflect on my internet presence very favourably, so yesterday I finally had enough and bought myself a $7/month VPS at VPSDime. Nothing fancy, just Debian 7 with 6GB RAM running on OpenVZ. While I’m not a expert by any means, I do have some command line experience on Debian, so setting up a basic server with WordPress and some other stuff via SSH was extremely easy.

I have to say I’m really, really pleased.

XML Prague 2015

I finally got an approval from my boss to attend XML Prague 2015 and registered for it the other day. I’m not presenting this time around, just listening and learning, and looking very much forward to it.