A friend recommended me to Easyspace (a web hosting company based in Glasgow, Scotland – part of the iomart group). Their prices looked good, they were UK based, and I could handle almost everything online…
Read the rest…
Don’t Use Easyspace!
12.01.2010Dropbox on Ubuntu Server
11.08.2009In our office, we have a small custom, headless 32-bit PC running Ubuntu Server 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). It’s ideally suited as our testing platform web server, file server, SVN server… well you get the picture.
I’ve been trying to set up a VPN through a Linksys-Cisco router we purchased (WRVS4400N), but have hit one snag after another (thanks to Cisco’s non-support of anything other than Windows).
Then it hit me: use Dropbox!
A few free Dropbox accounts is all we will need for now between us and it creates instant versioning and backups of all of our critical files – something we weren’t doing properly up until now – plus allowing us to interact with the file system locally rather than over the network.
A super idea!
Problem 1: Dropbox is not officially supported for command-line-only Linux distros. Thankfully though some nice people have put together a few handy instructions and scripts in order to make it work.
Problem 2: This installed Dropbox in a location that I didn’t want. Our server has a partitioned drive for security reasons. So all of our day-to-day files exist on one partition and the system files reside on the main partition. Dropbox was installed in the user folder I used when performing the install, which is in the system partition.
Without wanting to mess around too much trying to remove the current Dropbox install and then fiddle with Python code (which I have absolutely no experience with), I needed a quick method for getting some of our working files into the Dropbox folder in the system partition.
It turns out this is where Linux is super handy! Using standard symlinks to the folders in question was the perfect solution. Dropbox sees these as actual folders and synchronises across the link – up and down… meaning the files stay on the right partition, but now appear as part of the shared folder I wanted them in!
Win!
Free Web Site Advice
28.01.2009The web developer and design community is growing super large and because of that it has been an endless source of advice and inspiration to me. As a large thank you gesture I want to offer my professional advice and support in any areas I can.
It may not be worth much in some cases (hence why it’s going to be free), but hopefully it will help. I also want to use it to challenge myself with some new stuff that I’m just not doing enough of!
All designers and developers face challenges. I have faced plenty. I haven’t blogged about all of them yet (nor do I intend to!), but some of the things I’ve accomplished and overcome may be useful to others. I think that sharing that information is a must to the continuing evolution of software development. I also believe that it should be a free service.
So please feel free to leave comments or send me messages somehow (Twitter, email etc.) asking about anything you would like help with. I will take on almost any challenge related to software – particularly focussed on PHP, Flex, HTML, CSS, Javascript, AIR, RIAs and related topics, but don’t feel tied down to just these ones. Ask away!
