I had recently discovered that my old copy of Filemaker Pro 12 wouldn’t run on my main computer (Macbook Pro OSX 10.14 Mojave) since my latest round of upgrades and it kept crashing on my old Mac Mini server (10.13 High Sierra). I don’t use Filemaker for much anymore but I do have two databases that get used  about once a year: a boating log and a Blackboard quiz maker. The quiz maker wasn’t important but I had all my sailing resume stored in that Filemaker database. So it looked like I had a bit of a problem.

But every problem is just a new opportunity. I decided to break down and actually learn how to use Mysql and php. I’ve dabbled. This website (and most of my other sites) is run on WordPress and that is based on Mysql/php—so any modifications I’ve done to them have definitely danced around the edges.

Mysql is an open source database related to the professional standard SQL database. Sort of a linux to unix relationship, although not really. Php is a scripting language for web development. Since mysql has no interface, php is used to bridge the gap and provided a web-based GUI to access the database. My Mac Mini has a testing version of mysql/php I use for  my own wordpress work so that was set. All I had to download was a gui to help me see what it was doing. I settled on Mysql Workbench which is the “official” mysql gui.

I started here: tutorialrepublic.com/php-tutorial. Eventually I got to the section about CRUDs (an acronym for Create, Read, Update, and Delete) and then dumped all my work to date to make my own crud and use it to develop the Blackboard quiz as a test project. Then it was a week of learning, trial and error and discovery. I even had to delve into javascript which was a whole other learning curve.

At the end of the day I got it 90% there. There are still some issues with error checking and security. It really isn’t ready for use in the wild, but then again I doubt any of my Filemaker DBs ever were either. But it works and we are setting up for a live test to see if it’s actually practical for L to use.

Features

Some things I managed to add to the crud tutorial:

• changing the placeholder text in a field based on the question-type dropdown menu
• changing input types (box, radio buttons etc.) with defaults based on question type
• export to tab delimited file, with ability to choose file name
• javascript loops through variable names so I didn’t have to repeat the same code for all 12 possible answers
• ability to delete all records with error checking
• and a few other tweaks

I also learned about Bootstrap. Which was so cool. Wikipedia says:

Bootstrap is a free and open-source CSS framework directed at responsive, mobile-first front-end web development. It contains CSS- and (optionally) JavaScript-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, navigation and other interface components.

…

Bootstrap, originally named Twitter Blueprint, was developed by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton at Twitter as a framework to encourage consistency across internal tools. Before Bootstrap, various libraries were used for interface development, which led to inconsistencies and a high maintenance burden. 

…

It was renamed from Twitter Blueprint to Bootstrap, and released as an open source project on August 19, 2011.

I certainly appreciate the way it makes for a beautiful looking website without much effort. And it’s something more to learn…

What’s Next

As a result of all this I am going to attempt to recreate my much more complex Boating Log DB. And the realization that I need some “official” training rather than just the hit and miss, trial and error, flavoured with random googling method that characterizes so much of my computer work. So the next step is to find some courses…

…The stupid amount of websites I have

Over the years I have, for no particular reason, managed to accumulate a collection of websites that I manage. And don’t get me started on the number of email addresses I have (at last count it was 7 active ones give or take). My hosting package doesn’t put a limit on how many sites I host, so I have never been reluctant to add another…none of them get much traffic in the big scheme of things anyway so why not.

So I thought I would collect all the websites I currently host/manage here and add a brief raison d’être. Chronologically I think. Why? For no particular reason…

moreblaze.blogspot.com

It is hard to remember which came site actually first. But the first post on this Blogger website was November 29, 2002 at 4:21 so I guess it must be the winner.

Hi 
Welcome to the Blog… 
Hopefully this will house the daily diaries of (B)ruce (L)eslie (A)nd (Z)ak’s (E)lectronic (BLAZE) lives. Come back and visit whenever…

I used it for a few months and then abandoned it. Something about trusting a third party to house all my info didn’t sit right. And given the number of web services that have come and gone I think I was right. Blogspot fortunately was purchased by Google and remains a viable service to this day. Abandoned by me, unused by Z, it quickly became L’s home on the web and she posts to it every few months or so. About once every couple of years I come by and screw with the design or logo. It is one of two sites who’s content isn’t under my direct control.

macblaze.ca

You are here.

The first post I can find is September 1, 2005.

Geek Post

Trials of being an incompetent geek

As you can see I installed Blojsom on the server and am now hosting my own blog. Currently running a Ruby g3 iMac with OS x Server 10.3.9 and hosting this website, some mysql stuff and now the blog.

Installing the Blojsom was as easy as they say on one had and weird on the other. You are supposed to download the WAR file and install it in the Tomcat director and voila.

Easy you say, and it is if that’s all there was to it. To start with the download kept giving me a .jar file which was new to me. Fix: download on the PC and then move the WAR file over to Ruby…

As you can see from the content it wasn’t actually the first iteration of this blog, but it is all that remains. There are also a number of posts on the blog that have dates in the 90s, but that is because one day I sat down and typed in all my bad poetry from over the years and backdated the posts to when they were actually written. Be that as it may, it has been my online home for 15+ years with on again/off again attention being paid to it. 

I initially ran it on my  own home server and eventually moved on to a variety of hosting services. It has gone through a bunch of redesigns and I try to do all the coding myself to keep my hand in. At last glance it was over 3 gig to backup so it is pretty hefty these days. It will remain my online home for pretty much forever I guess.

Oh, and the name? Well as seen in the first entry,(B)ruce (L)eslie (A)nd (Z)ak’s (E)lectronic… was an early online identity. About that time I also started an email account and couldn’t get blaze as the address so decided to use macblaze instead. And it stuck. So since I was hosting this site on my mac, when I started using a dns forwarder, I snagged macblaze.hopto.org as the url. In 2009 I finally shelled out and bought macblaze.ca and moved it all to that. And here we are.

astart.ca

Eventually I found myself changing jobs and realized I had no place to showcase my professional stuff. I had been working with a few colleagues who were in the same boat and thought maybe we needed someplace where we could show off our fresh start. So I bought astart.ca.

As these things go, a home for our collaboration didn’t emerge as a necessity and so the domain lay dormant until I picked it up and started adding stuff. I think the first big push was when I applied for a design job and realized that I had no portfolio. I quickly stuffed a bunch of stuff into a wordpress template and went off to my interview.

Over time I have played around with the site, adding first stained glass and then my ebook projects, but it really is the neglected child. A complete revamp is on the to do list, but I will need to get one of those elusive ’round tuits.”

neverforever.ca

And then we went sailing. And if you have a sailboat, you have to have a blog right? As soon as we settled on a name for our new boat, I bought neverforever.ca and  started adding content. Of all my websites, it gets the most traffic (nothing major though) and I probably have spent the most effort there over the last 3 or 4 years.

I have a few committed followers and even get some unsolicited comments once in a while. I mainly set out to make a home for all our learning experiences and hope that the readers I do get learn something about noobs buying a boat, and perhaps make their boat-buying experiences easier.

theboozephiles.com

When we returned from cruising a friend of ours proposed starting up a weekly cocktail tradition and boozily working our way through the wonderful world of high-class hooch. How could we say no? So we started whipping up cocktails every week, taking some pictures and writing up our experiences. As of today there are 102 different cocktails ranging back to the 1890s, with recipes, photographs and our impressions. 

Life has gotten busier so we rarely manage to hit our weekly schedule anymore but we are still experimenting, drinking and posting as our schedules allow. Check it out if you are looking for some booze ideas. We also have an Instagram stream: @theboozephiles

readingwithapencil.com

In 2015 L wrote a book. It’s great…you should buy it! 

And when it came out we realized she need a home for her professional maundering an authorial web presence. For some reason—I can’t really remember why…maybe tax reasons?—we decided to host it on wordpress.com. It is the second website who’s content is out of my direct control, but I have all the original content so I am less paranoid about it. 

And yes, she does read with a pencil (and a pen).

The site hosts L’s bio, links to the book, some of her writings and a whole passel of YA and children’s book reviews. Looking for a good book for your kids? Check it out… And she’s got another book under contract so eventually that one will be added to the site as well. And it is sadly overdue for a complete redesign as well. You can follow Reading with a Pencil on Facebook too!

Speaking of neglected children

beakerwood.ca

I made this site one day after spending the Xmas holidays with the family. My brother has been making and selling woodwork under the Beakerwood brand for a decade. But he had no web presence. So as a gift, I bought the domain and whipped up a site for him. 

It was a bit more content-rich at one point but has fallen into disrepair. I went through and cleaned it up last year and it remains now as not much more than a splash page and contact info. He has gotten a few sales off it but not much. A project for the future…

littlefirecreative.ca

This is a friend’s site. Again, we were looking to create a more active business with an online presence but reality (and work) got in the way. Still it remains as a contact page for any freelance work that might come up. Looking for an editor? Art director? I can highly recommend you start here.

reluctantlyyours.com

This last one is currently not much more than a domain name and a placeholder image. I threw it up after a friend said they had  purchased the domain with a unique idea in mind. It turned out it was an idea who’s time has not yet come—but it will… oh yes, it will!

 

I realize my poor site has been neglected as of late. I’m not sure if anyone ever comes here anymore. Most of my writing time has been over at neverforever.ca but even there it’s been pretty sparse. On this, my home site, it’s been a couple of years since I posted regularly, instead just letting my Twitter and Instagram aggregators fill the pages. And the look was pretty sad as well. I realize I was trying to keep it hand-coded, but really…there are limits.

I’ve been working on ebook production lately (more about that later) and it has necessitated me refamiliarizing myself with css. So it occurred to me I really ought to do something with the site.

underscores

I started with a a starter theme called underscores and started modifying. I wanted something clean and simple and found a few examples online to  base it on. Then it was just a matter of digging in and starting to code. most of the work was done in the header.php file and the style.css. I’ve got a lot more I want to do but there’s the start.

I got rid of the sidebar and had to redo the menu as a result. I also wanted to add in some customization for the social-media icons. I based my code off of Patrick Garmen’s post on using Customizer with underscores. This meant I had to do some hit and miss php programming as well. Most of the code is available on the link but what Patrick failed to post was the code for inserting the links into the header. So here it is:

<?php
$test1 = get_theme_mod('youtube');
if ($test1<>'')
echo '<a href="'.$test1.'"><i class="fab fa-youtube-square fa-lg"></i></a>';
?>

You repeat this for each social media option you added in the Customizer.

Fonts & Icons

The icons come from Font Awesome and they have a great system for adding icons etc. to your page.  I also grabbed two fonts from Google Fonts: Open Sans Condensed and Quicksand. I might go back and rethink that later, but for now they work pretty good.

To Do

• I want to revisit the code for posting the Instagram updates. It’s still pretty ugly and I think I can do better.
• I am not sure about the background colour yet. Too blue?
• I want to continue to work on the header to make it work better on smaller screens.
• Go through page by page and fix the tiny issues.
• And probably delete some of the pages that are out of date.

It also occurs to me I haven’t upgraded to WordPress 5 (Gutenberg) here on my main site. That might also throw some wrenches in the works…maybe even monkeys…

 

I started this post back in August 2016 when I set my old Mac mini up as a media server and webserver for testing purposes. I never finished it or got back to it, which is a bit of a bummer since it is all just so much gobbledygook to me now. Still, it documents the process I used this time to set up Apache, php and ftp. And, since one of the first purposes of this site was to store and have available various computer processes I had engaged in I guess I will post it for posterity despite its incompleteness.

 

Set up Server

https://mallinson.ca/osx-web-development/

Enable Root user
Directory Utility
Edit–>Enable Root User

MySQL : http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/

Apache

sudo apachectl start
sudo apachectl restart
/private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

PHP

117 LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

220
221 AllowOverride none
222 Require all denied
223

160 LoadModule vhost_alias_module libexec/apache2/mod_vhost_alias.so
477 Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

httpd-vhosts.conf file in the /private/etc/apache2/extra/
ServerAdmin info@macblaze.ca
DocumentRoot “/www/home/”
ServerName 192.168.1.10
ErrorLog “/private/var/log/apache2/home.macblaze.ca-error_log”
CustomLog “/private/var/log/apache2/home.macblaze.ca-access_log” common

IP to LocalHost
sudo nano /etc/hosts

Add the Domain and ‘www‘ alias to resolve to the localhost address

127.0.0.1 apple.com www.apple.com

sudo apachectl restart

Text Wrangler

http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.html
Command Line tools

Set up A record for subdomain

FTP Server

sudo -s launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ftp.plist
sudo -s launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ftp.plist

Open up router to forward port 80 to localhost

 

Install wordpress

 

Modify wp-config

/** sets up ‘direct method for wordpress auto-update without install in ftp **/

define(‘FS_METHOD’,’direct’);

 

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/auto-upgradeupdate-on-mac-os-x

$ cd /<wherever>/Sites/<thesite>
$ sudo chown -R _www wordpress

Here’s a simple option that gives you full (read+write) access, lets the webserver read the files, and locks everyone else out of the web folder

$ sudo chown -R “username”:_www /www/home/wp-content

$ chmod -R u=rwX,g=rX,o= /www/home/wp-content

 

I am trying to problem solve an issue with photos syncing to my phone and every time I have to test it it backs up the full 50 gig of data making this process extraordinarily long and tedious. But it seems you can disable that feature using terminal. I record it here for posterity …

If you are synchronizing to a Mac:

1. Close iTunes on your Mac.

2. Launch Terminal.

3. Type

defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

and press Enter.

4. If you want to re-enable automatic backups, type

defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool false

and press Enter.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6083556?tstart=0

Composing WordPress posts offline is pretty simple: there are lots of tools available including WordPress’s own apps for both iOS and desktop. Unfortunately they all seem to demand you upload media before inserting it into your post. Which means if you are offline you can’t work on adding pictures until you once again have reliable internet.

I searched and found quite few option but 99% of them (including Microsoft Word) seem to be applicable to old versions of the software and haven’t been updated in a number of years. I guess reliable internet is just assumed these days.

MarsEdit 3

The only exception was Red Sweater’s MarsEdit 3. For $39.95 use it apparently allows you to compose and size images and then post them all at once; a much better solution for when we are away from the internet for days at a time. So I downloaded the 30 day demo and am giving it a try with this post.

Here’s a snap of my brother at a recent curling tourney. It’s set to be centered and 800 x 600 pixels.

Some Quick Notes

The <img> tag uses style=”float:left;” instead of class=”alignleft” which WordPress prefers. But you can edit the macro to ad the appropriate class.

The images are also sized to one size; none of WordPress’s fancy multi-size uploads. So if you get it wrong on the initial upload you are out of luck.

You can also upload images separately using the Upload Utility. Not sure why you would want to but nice to have if it becomes necessary.

Testing out a Block Quote

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

—Helen Keller

The interface (adding tags etc.) is menu driven with very few shortcuts or buttons which is a bit antiquated and a bit of a pain, but everything seems to work as promised.

Oh and I just discovered the Rich Text Editor screws up tables. Since I shouldn’t be using tables anyway and the HTML leaves them alone, it’s not a stopper. But again, just a little regressive given the start of online editors these days.

In Conclusion

It’ll work. Kind of like being in a time machine back to the late 90s but it will work. Now I just need to decided if it is worth $50.

Random Text

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Random Head

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Contrary to popular belief, * Lorem Ipsum * is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in section 1.10.32.

The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.