Posts
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How this all works
I’ve not done a how-it-all-works post on here before. Truth be told, quite often I’d probably have struggled to tell you how it worked. Some nice ideas, often half-implemented, a distraction or two, and somehow there it was. Until it wasn’t… I’d regularly forget to sort out SSL certs, because I’d never got round to automating it. And writing a new post was surprisingly hard. Where did I have to put the files? What makes it build? And suddenly I’ve lost the will to work on it and gone off to do something else.
But no more! No. For I have re-organised, redesigned and reimplemented this site from top to bottom. So here’s a whistlestop tour through the web-stack.
September 2023 update: Yikes! This post is already outdated. I’ve started moving to automatically triggered AWS builds which seems like an exciting step!
Site code
The content of the site is essentially a bunch of text files. They’re plain text, with formatting done in Markdown. This makes them very simple to write. To make them look a little better than plain text though, and sort out all the pesky HTML we lean on Jekyll. There are heaps of static site generators out there. I first discovered Jekyll years ago so have largely stuck with it because its what I know.
When moving the site around I did toy with jumping to Hugo - it looks like a more modern sibling to Jekyll with a lot less code in ruby - but in the end I couldn’t really justify the work to learn a new framework. Most of the tangible benefits seemed to be in the build times. I do believe it is faster. But my site builds in Jekyll in
0.53 seconds. Build time is just not a problem I need to fix right now. Having run Jekyll, all of my text files are transformed into lovely HTML. I check my new post looks like it should and then its time to push the files up to the webserver. And here’s where the next big changes come in…
Containerise everything!
My webserver is a cheapish VPS. It’s not particularly well resourced but its sufficient for this site. Previously all the config for serving up my site was sat around on the VPS in a bunch of different files. This caused a few problems:
- Testing anything was basically impossible, there was no dev server at all.
- Migrating between VPS setups was an absolute pain. You could all but guarantee nothing would work.
So once we had the problems, how to solve them? Containers. I’ve now migrated the entire setup (this and a couple of other sites) into a handful of Docker containers, all held together by Docker Compose. It’s neat. It’s so neat I wish I’d done it years ago.
SSL Termination
One of the first good steps I took was to split out SSL termination. This means I’ve got one container, the one that’s exposed to the outside world and its whole job is to serve up SSL certificates for all three sites, and then just pass on requests to the relevant site’s container. Currently, this is running NGINX but I’ve got half an eye on replacing it with HAProxy.
The real joy of splitting out the SSL functionality is that I can run the actual sites themselves entirely without certificates. This makes testing changes much easier. I don’t need separate dev or localhost configs to run dev versions of these sites now - I simply start the container up anywhere and it just works exactly the same as the real site.
The rest
The other containers are largely very simple. The one that serves up this site is another very simple NGINX image with the HTML files from earlier injected as a volume. Sorted.
Version controlled config
And it’s all under git. Finally, I can test changes on a dev setup, commit them to the repo and then just run a pill, build and relaunch command to deploy my site changes. And be confident that they work.
A cloudy future?
Earlier on I mentioned the difficulty of migrating this setup. I’m now relatively confident that this is a solved problem - the whole site is now just a bunch of config and static files, all version controlled and easy to check out. This should make moving to any other VPS an absolute breeze. The exciting alternative though is to explore some of the ‘serverless’ options out there - AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. I’m not very experience with any of them but given that the basic modus operandi is spinning up Docker containers with the server-layer abstracted away, I’d say the site was primed ready to make the switch. Exciting times.
And lastly, here’s a bonus picture of “the internet illustrated in the style of The Matrix”, for no better reason than I really like it. You’re welcome.
All images generated with Midjourney
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Why the internet is broken
The internet is garbage
The internet is garbage. Nearly all of it is awful. There are still pockets of good all over the place but the overwhelming trend towards big tech platforms, trapping you in walled gardens and exerting monopolistic power is incredibly depressing. What started out as a utopian dream now seems much more like a dystopian vision. Black Mirror episodes that once seemed outlandish are now basically history lessons.
It’s money. The relentless desire to monetise everything has pushed us down this road. For a good portion of Web 1.0 the internet was weirdly blasé about money. Services were generally free. People made stuff for the sake of it, out of interest or curiosity.
SEO has broken everything
Nowadays it’s all plastered with ads. They’re everywhere. And the places that aren’t actively ramming autoplaying video ads down your throat are busy collecting data about what you’re interested in so they can sell it to someone else to force feed you ads.
The inherent competition in selling ads (there’s only so much time anyone spends looking at the internet) means the push to be top of the search page heap and trample all your competitors is all consuming. SEO is a nightmare. Search engines are broken. Google is objectively much less useful for finding information on than it was a decade ago. Is this what progress looks like?
Communities are harder to find
One of the real paradoxes of how the internet has changed over the last 15 years is how much harder social media has made it to find real communities. The relentless drive to make every platform bigger and to suck in more and more users has torn apart the many weird little communities that spent years just doing their own thing. I spent years on forums: music, film, food, books - niche little worlds where people chattered away. Reddit, twitter and Facebook are a poor alternative. All 3 are clearly ailing and beginning to fall apart but it’s not at all clear what replaces them.
AI is the next wave of awful
As if all this wasn’t enough, here comes GPT. Why wade through tonnes of lazily churned out SEO optimised copy when you could instead drown in gigatonnes of AI generated SEO optimised copy? This is the future and it doesn’t look like the search engines are ready for it. If you thought that finding information was hard now, just wait till 90% of it is AI
hallucinationslies.
Human voices
Unsurprisingly, I don’t have the answers to any of these problems. I’ve no idea how this is going to pan out. However it goes, though, I feel like the need for human voices, for recommendations, for curation, for selection, is only going to become more important. The AI generated playlists on Spotify are boring. The Netflix recommendation algorithm is terrible. And who’s going to trust an AI to review a restaurant?
As we drown in a sea of algorithmically generated junk, it feels inevitable that we’re going to long for human voices. But will it be too late?
All images generated with Midjourney (because of course they are!)
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The Hyde Park Picture House is back!
Back in 2019…
It’s been too long. Back in 2019, as Friends of the Picture House I remember going to an open event, full of models of the cinema and architects renders of what it might look like one day. As exciting as it was, at that point losing our favourite cinema for a whole year seemed incredibly sad. How would we have felt if we’d known it would be 3?
The best laid plans go awry and 2020 obviously tore apart everyone’s plans everywhere. I don’t think we went to the cinema all year, so the loss of the Picture House was just a small part of the overall sadness (the short notice lockdown of Leeds specifically that killed off the 2020 film festival sticks out as a crushing disappointment). But in 2021 cinemas were back, the film festival was back, and The Hyde park remained closed. And for 2022 as well.
Seats with our names on
Even the most optimistic of film fans might have started to doubt it’d ever open at this point. Any fears were staved off by the fact you could physically see the work happening. On nice days we’d add a detour to outside wanders just to go see the massive hole in the ground next to the picture house. Concrete was torn up, foundations went in, all sorts of activity was going on.
Eventually things were starting to look up. The cinema introduced a number of crowd funding programs - from sponsoring lights to tiles to seats. We leapt at the chance for a seat. Or two. And now we have our names on little brass plaques on the backs of the best seats in the house (in my opinion, at least).
Good memories
It wasn’t a hard choice to sponsor the cinema. It’s been such a source of joy over the 15 or so years I’ve been in Leeds. I still can’t quite work out what the first film I saw there was, but it might have been a student trip to see Aliens, accompanied by a free slice of pizza.
Subsequent happy times have been many and varied. I worked the film festival Night of the Dead a couple of times, emerging bleary eyed into Sunday sunshine after wall to wall splatter horror, and have fond memories of seeing all sorts of stuff there, from indie funded Iron Sky to a whole bunch of Greek weird wave and the adorable animation of A Town Called Panic.
HPPH into the future
I’m so pleased it’s back open again and really looking forward to seeing what they make of the space now. With a second screen, a bar area, accessible entrances, it feels like it has a lot of exciting times ahead.
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LIFF2021
Here we go! The 35th Leeds International Film Festival launches its programme this week, ahead of the first screening in November. I think its fair to say I’m a bit excited.
Last year’s last-minute scrapping of the whole festival was such a cruel blow. Mid-October we had a 3 tier system of lockdown (remember that?) and, as the film festival proudly announced, every one of the tiers allowed in-person cinema screenings, the festival was safe! Of course, at the very end of October the government announced Leeds would move into the (previously non-existent) tier 4. And all the screenings had to be scrapped. (And then actually they put the whole country on lockdown just as few days later).
They made the best of it, and we watched a lot of stuff on the online player but it wasn’t really the same. So this year it’s so exciting to be heading back into the cinema for it. Opening film is Spencer, which I’d struggle to care less about, but much like a music festival is never really about the headline acts, the film festival is all about the hidden gems. Fingers crossed for a good year.
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Fleece
Beans and peas sown last week, but the ground has been so cold and frosty! We’re hoping they’re helped out with a little bit of fleece. Hopefully it’ll keep the pigeons off too.
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