Year: 2018

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Using Gastby.js as a front end for Drupal… And other CMS’s

Gatsby is a really fast React-based static site generator. You can use it to create a static site, with content pulled from Drupal and other content management systems.

Source: Decoupling Drupal with Gatsby | Evolving Web

While it seem odd to think about using a static website generator like Gatsby as a front end to a dynamic content system like Drupal, it does make sense to give this a try if your CMS is driving a basic brochure-ware site or you need to spin up a mini site for an event, product, or service. This step-by-step article walks you through getting this going on Drupal 8. With some creative thinking this could work for Drupal 7 and WordPress too.

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Just a little hiccup in upgrading from Debian 8 to 9

How about a little tale of upgrades for a Friday?
On my dev machine here at the house I was running Debian 8. A few weeks ago, hoping to get more coherent support for things I needed like MySQL 5.7 and PHP 7, I did an in place upgrade to Debian 9. The upgrade proceeded without any issues even, through a couple of reboots and some tests. Finally, with a flourish, there was a final reboot that should have brought the machine back online as a Debian 9 PC.
It crashed.
I was watching a console full of errors of all sorts scroll by. All I could get was an emergency failure prompt. That means something had gone horribly wrong during the boot process. I was quickly able to determine that the issue was in the RAID1 array. I was able to manually mount the RAID volumes and see that the data was still intact. But, something was wrong. I shut it down and let it sitting there.
Since Comcast was up and down today I figured this was a good time to get it that box back up and running. With root access from the emergency prompt I was able to comment out the broken mounts for the RAID volumes. This allowed me to get it to boot but it was unhappy about missing the /var and /home mounts from the RAID.
I quickly discovered the I could use mdadm /dev/md1 -manage to get the RAID device up and then I was able to do the mounts for /var and /home. Using Webmin I checked the status of the RAID noted that both RAID volumes were flagged as degraded and each one only showed a single physical device attached. I readded the necessary physical disks to the RAID and waited for it to resync. Then I put the mounts back in fstab and rebooted. It fired right up and all is well with the world.
It appears that during the upgrade process from Debian 8 to 9 the system chose to only recognize one partition on each physical drive as part of the RAID1 setup. That broke the RAID and disrupted the boot process. I doubt I’ll ever see this sort of thing again.

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What is Gatsby.js? Good Question. Here’s a Quick Answer.

Gatsby is a React-based, GraphQL powered, static site generator. What does that even mean?  Well, it weaves together the best parts of React, webpack, react-router, GraphQL, and other front-end tools in to one very enjoyable developer experience. Don’t get hung up on the moniker ‘static site generator’.  That term has been around for a while, but Gatsby is far more like a modern front-end framework than a static site generator of old.

You code and develop your site, Gatsby transforms it into a directory with a single HTML file and your static assets. This folder is uploaded to your favorite hosting provider, and voila.
Overall think, part Jekyll, part create-react-app.

Source: What is Gatsby.js | Mediacurrent

Looks like I need to take a peek at Gatsby.js and see what’s going on there. Most intriguing are features to leverage APIs on existing CMS’s to pull the content and display it with a new more modern front-end.

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Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Coding Site GitHub – Bloomberg

Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Coding Site GitHub – Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-03/microsoft-is-said-to-have-agreed-to-acquire-coding-site-github

If this is true, and we’ll know soon enough, it changes the landscape for open source software development. The acquisition may be behind the GNOME project’s decision to move to GitLab, an open source alternative to Gitub.

It’s worth mention that git and GitHub are not the same thing. There will almost certainly be stories floating around that MSFT is buying git, but that isn’t the case. GitHub is just the must popular of several web based front ends to git.