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Month: June 2016

  • Why I chose Silex for this website

    UPDATE: this is a very old post imported from my old site… I’m including it for historical purposes. deployed version and the source for it

    This is an introduction to my choice of framework in building this website.

    Several options I considered for my website:

    • Django
      • Django’s opinionated Model model with its strong database ties seemed a bit much for a relatively static site
      • It’s huge and unnecessarily complicated for a simple website
      • It would be a great learning experience in Python
    • Vanilla PHP
      • I have a lot of experience in vanilla PHP at my internship at Northern Michigan University working in the Information Services department where I develop web applications for internal use.
      • I often find myself frustrated with PHP’s quirkiness and wouldn’t learn new material if I used this for my personal website.
    • Silex
      • This is a micro-framework built using components of the much larger Symfony framework.
      • I discovered Silex in Heroku’s PHP deployment guide where I noticed that it was small enough to not draw unneeded overhead and extensible enough for my website to grow as it needed.

    I opted to go with Silex. The source code is available here for your perusal.

    I have gone through many iterations of this site. The first version was simply a clone of the homepage that I have on my university’s computer science department server. This wasn’t a very useful homepage as many of the projects that I wanted to show in a portfolio were tied to a database on that server.

    I eventually moved towards a one-page style layout (in this commit) where the links in the navbar would scroll the page to pre-defined regions. I then ditched the old multipage layout and at this point I discovered Grav. After difficulties integrating Grav within my app (read more here), I decided to roll my own blogging solution modeled after Grav’s markdown content system.

    I included a YAML Front Matter + Markdown Parser and used that to define the metadata for a blogpost.

    There is still much to do (post sort order, paging, tagging, etc), but I appreciate the experience that I have gained in building this blogging system.

  • Heroku with Grav flat-file CMS

    NOTE: this is a historical post imported from my old site.

    When I started building a website (sparked by the purchase of my first personal domain name), I started looking into many different solutions to my web development process.

    I had already decided that I would use a free dyno on Heroku for hosting.

    As I researched additional solutions, I came upon the world of the PHP CMS (Content Management System, for the uninitiated). Just the sheer number and variety of CMS is terrifying.

    The free tier for databases in Heroku felt lacking in peace of mind and ease of setup so I focused my search to the realm of the “flat-file” CMS.

    I discovered Grav purely by chance. Grav claims to be fast and extensible. I was enticed by the flashy admin interface replete with responsive UI and a gorgeous built-in Markdown editor for content creation.

    After a bit of configuration, I managed to deploy a Grav instance into a Heroku dyno (a rather annoying affair which involved deploying caches to Heroku and mod_rewrite rules in .htaccess).

    The tricky part came when I brought the Admin Plugin into the picture. Without the Admin Plugin, you need to directly change the configurations and add content from the filesystem and then deploy that to the web. You are able, however, to use PHP’s built-in development webserver (php -S localhost:9000) to test your changes.

    Once I got the Admin plugin working (don’t forget to clear your cache if you’re deploying to Heroku – or make sure that the cache directory is in your .gitignore file), I started making changes to my .yml configuration files and writing some content with the built-in Markdown editor. I was very impressed with the Admin interface. It’s very modern-feeling, while still being lightning-quick.

    Then I needed to make a change that wasn’t available from the Admin interface… After the next deploy to Heroku, every change that I had made from within the Admin interface was obliterated. This is the main flaw in hosting a Grav app on Heroku. The ephemeral file system for a dyno on Heroku works just fine, but when the dyno restarts, it is regenerated to the state at the latest build. It’s important to note that dynos go down any time you push a new build and at least once a day.

    Dynos restart when:

    • create a new release by deploying new code
    • change your config vars
    • change your add-ons
    • run heroku restart

    I then read more about the ephemeral filesystem of Heroku dynos.

    Each dyno gets its own ephemeral filesystem, with a fresh copy of the most recently deployed code. During the dyno’s lifetime its running processes can use the filesystem as a temporary scratchpad, but no files that are written are visible to processes in any other dyno and any files written will be discarded the moment the dyno is stopped or restarted. For example, this occurs any time a dyno is replaced due to application deployment and approximately once a day as part of normal dyno management.

    This is a useless setup for a Grav application where everything is a file. This may sound a bit harsh, but changes to the live app will be destroyed within a day. This just means that there are two options:

    1. Ditch the Admin plugin
    1. Use a full LAMP stack locally to make changes to the files from within the Admin interface before deploying to Heroku

    I chose to ditch the Admin plugin. Making changes to the project from within the filesystem in my text editor was totally acceptable.

    Not long after trying to integrate a Grav app within the Silex application that is my website (rather than linking to the Grav app through a subdomain of benhh.com), I gave up Grav for my blog entirely and decided to roll my own blogging solution.

  • Welcome To My Blog

    This is my first post.

    I’m Ben Harris. I study computer science at Northern Michigan University.

    I’ll be writing about some of the experiences I’ve had in software and in other areas of my life.

    Some of my hobbies include:

    • writing software
    • biking
    • traveling
    • ultimate frisbee

    Thanks for checking out my blog!