danielbachhuber » WebFaction

Easiest way to add Git to your WebFaction account

Daniel Bachhuber — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 02:00:27 +0000

wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.7.2.3.tar.gz tar -xvf git-1.7.2.3.tar.gz cd git-1.7.2.3 ./configure --prefix=$HOME make make install

If you’re reading this in the future, you may want to use the most recent version of Git. Instructions via the always helpful WebFaction support team

Back on WebFaction

Daniel Bachhuber — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 14:49:20 +0000

After just a few months of administering my own Slicehost machine, I decided yesterday to move all of the personal sites I manage back to WebFaction. For personal stuff, I decided I need to focus more on publishing and less on figuring out why my memory usage is so high. Or, in the case of yesterday, why there were approximately 124,000 more rows in the posts table than there should be. Culprit: Core Control plugin for WordPress.

WebFaction is also significantly cheaper than Slicehost. Their basic plan starts at $9.50/month; I’ve been paying $32.50 for a 384 MB slice I hardly used.

For now, I look forward to having a super fast publishing platform where I can focus on the words and images instead of the technology.

Using Google Apps with StatusNet for email notifications

Daniel Bachhuber — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:12:58 +0000

For the sake of saving an hour of guessing, here are the proper settings for using Google Apps, or Gmail, with StatusNet, formally known as Laconica:

$config['mail']['backend'] = 'smtp'; $config['mail']['params'] = array( 'host' => 'smtp.gmail.com', 'port' => 587, 'auth' => true, 'username' => 'username@domain.com', 'password' => 'your_secret_password' );

Adding these settings to your config.php file will allow your StatusNet instance to send email notifications over SMTP when your web host doesn’t support sending mail from the server (ahem, WebFaction). The trick is to use the proper port, 587 instead of 25, and to enable authentication.

I’m still trying to configure Google Apps as the XMPP provider for StatusNet too; I’ll put together another post if I can figure that out.