Working my way back

Photo de Florian Krumm sur Unsplash

After my little success with oh.mg earlier, I decided that I sufficiently hate myself enough to try and expand this project. When I say expand, I mean fully deep in this affair to create myself even more problems than I actually need.

Using the same principal I did with running oh.mg over to /ohmg/ from ohmg.mmn.on.ca, I used some creative edge rules on the CDN to bring in two other subdomains hosted elsewhere under the same domain, as well as slip in one of the buckets on Storj I previously served from uploads.mmn.on.ca.

Photo Gallery

The photo gallery is something I mentioned earlier that I wanted to use more, so I figured while I’m here I can give myself the excuse to do that. I split a copy on the webhost it’s currently sat at, and moved it over to a subdirectory of the domain mmn.ca on that side. Keep in mind that mmn.ca isn’t hosted fully on that host, but I’ll talk about that part in a bit.

It took me a while to fully get it working between some of the settings in the app to recognise that it’s being fed the visitors real IP through a header from the CDN, as well as the .htaccess file, plus some weird ass shit happening when logging in that randomly pings me to /photos/photos instead of just /photos/ but that is only happening right at that point only. I might try and fix that, but I’m the only one who gets it so probably not.

Taste of Poverty

Taste of Poverty was pretty simple to do after the things I learned from oh.mg, this is also on the same host as the Photo Gallery. A bit of wp-config fixes, updates to Wordfence, and ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom. The only problem was Jetpack being a pile of shit, but you know what, that’s fine. I’m fully done with Jetpack, never installing it again, Shattomatic sold me on literally everything but their shit product that can quite frankly fuck off on a samattical with it’s shitty CEO.

OH.MG S3 Bucket

Normally I keep my images on S3 because this shit builds quickly, moving a hollow husk of a web app is easier when there isn’t, say, 19GB of photo media to go with it. Up until now, it was serving from a subdomain upload, but I wanted to see if I could get the edge rules to run it a bit more like the rest.

This one was a bitch, and only because of how my Media Plugin doesn’t give you finite control over “from now this is the new structure and CDN domain” as well as it not possible to rename folders on Storj because they don’t exist.

There is some funky I’m working through and to get oh.mg to serve right I had to use some creative Apache2 redirect rules on top of the edge rules. If my internet goes down again, my old media will decidedly become a problem to serve because of that bottle neck.

I’m not doing it for the photos or tasteofpoverty media because fuck doing that again, but I proved to myself I could.

Serving Data Realness

To give you an idea how things are run, I’ll give you a little drawing.

Both mmn.on.ca and mmn.ca are either fully or partially within the infra of the CDN for DNS and / or just serving through them, this means that I don’t really need be too limited in what I can do. The root of the domain and every other directory goes through to my server at home on my ADSL connection.

I have a VPS running Yunohost in Toronto that houses a few small things as well as the email for the mmn.ca domain, this server also is where oh.mg is on.

Then we have the traditional webhost where I was running oh.mg on previously, but also currently hosts the Photo Gallery and Taste of Poverty. Rather than going through the process of dumping that on the little VPS, I’ve left those on the web host and used them on subdomains on mmn.on.ca.

Underneath things at the CDN level I can set rules to change the origin server to change based on the URL, which is what I’ve done for this project here.

In reality not much really changes, just the endpoint, aesthetically, it’s a bit different. Kind of a roll back in time where you could host a website under one domain without a need for different apps and shit. Plus now that I have the goldstar version of the domain I’ve had forever, it seems like a good enough time to go ahead and just re-jiggle things on how I want them to look.

That’s pretty much the boring ass shit I did all day today on a whim which absolutely nobody is likely to realise the kind of effort it took to look so vaguely simple. And yes, I mean I could just host things in one place, but don’t tell me how to live.