Sunday, 05-Jun-16 21:20:00 CEST

Porting my blog for the second time, deployment part 1

This is post #53 of my series about how I port this blog from Blogengine.NET 2.5 ASPX on a Windows Server 2003 to a Linux Ubuntu server, Apache2, MySQL and PHP. A so called LAMP. The introduction to this project can be found in this blog post https://www.malmgren.nl/post/Porting-my-blog-for-the-second-time-Project-can-start.aspx.

It is time for deployment. I decided to stop hosting the blog at home on my own server. It is time for a server running in a proper server room. Actually I made the calculation that if I bought my own server and hosted it myself that would probably be around 2000 euro. Then that is the equivalent of eleven years worth of virtual private server. There are several options for this but I decided to make use of the same company I use for my domain names  Argeweb bv. Logging in and ordering the vps was done in under a minute.

I ordered the following VPS:

• Ubunto 14.04
• 2 Gb internal memory
• 150 Gb of diskspace
• 2 cores processor
• 1 snapshot
• 15 Euro per month. Discount the first month.

At 9:36 PM came the order confirmation. At 9:49 PM came the login information. That is 13 minutes later!

Immediately I tucked all the logon information in my digital vault.

So I got all information but the IP number of my new server. Where can I find the IP number?

"IP-adres: Deze vindt u in Mijn Argeweb"

Where?

A few seconds later I got a new menu item in my administration panel.

To log into my new system I launch PuTTY and directs it to the IP address of my new server. Here is my first login ever:

Ehh, what should I do now?

At this point it is a very clean computer. Suppose I start with making one snapshot? But should the server be turned off when making snapshots? Hmm... There was nothing in the documentation saying it had to be turned off first so I just went ahead and made it!

Looks nice with that mixed English and Dutch.

Then I try to log into my new server with WinSCP and that also works as I got used to. Flawlessly. So now when I am done with the oh and the ah I figured that the plan from here is to figure out all steps needed to make the server operational and make proper notes of what I did and in what order.

Here below are all steps I took to bring my new vps up to a level where I could start publishing the blog. I wrote this as if someone should be able to make these steps to create such a server. It is very likely that the only person who wants to read this is myself but you never know? So here are all steps for installing the PHP, MySql, Apache on this Ubuntu. The more likely future of this is that I make some kind of install script of this so that if someone wanted a clean empty JensBlog server they could just install it from a script. But perhaps I will never do that. For now I write it for myself. For this list I created a zip archive (for myself) with the necessary files from the development server.

When I was done with this I started using my temporary server and at first I noticed nothing but as I went editing pages they got destroyed. This was really annoying. Long story short html tags would get zapped upon opening a post for editing and it was settings in the CkEditor causing this behavior. Rather the greater than and less than symbols in pairs would get zapped.

So I studied this and it has taken me a lot of research to find out what this is about. The CKEditor makers wants to make a WYSIWYG editor. People writing about html code are "out of luck" when using the CKEditor. Well, no there are solutions but I don't get them to work. I am clearly not clever enough. I gave up on that.

So I made my own solution for this little issue. This solution is based on these two wonderful characters:

I found them here at this site: https://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref

Here I am going to tell you how I solved this but it is a little bit like talking about Voldemort (the one that you must not mention in the Harry Potter books) while you are next to him. But please enjoy!

So suppose we have a character that looks like less-than and greater-than but they aren't? In my routine loading data from the database I made sure that all text within pre start and end tags are changed into the prec and succ characters. The text is loaded in CKEditor and it survives the WYSIWYG zapping tag routine.

So when that worked I could get literal less-than and greater-than characters within pre tags to survive the zapping. This was the first step. I was delighted. Then what happened if I pasted html sourcecode into the CKEditor? These would come escaped as ampersand+lt+semicolon and ampersand+gt+semicolon so they would be safe when reloaded into the editor. NO! So when I made also these codes into prec and succ characters then pasted html source code would survive as well.

So are we done then? No, when people would browse my site they would see something that looks like html source code but it would not work if it was copied and pasted into an editor. So for this issue the line numbering routine was changed so that if it was seeing the prec and succ it would turn them into real greater-than and less-than characters.

Then it worked!

Now it is time for a little issue. Do you remember that my old blog could not edit any more categories and that I could not add for example 2016. Well now I can do that but it is a little tedious to go and do it manually for all posts published this year. So there is a remedy for that! A sql query obviously.

mysql≻ use jensblog
Database changed
mysql≻ start transaction;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql≻ insert PostCategory (PostID, CategoryID) select Post.ID, 47 from Post where PublishedOn ≻ '2016-01-01';
Query OK, 14 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 14  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql≻ select * from PostCategory where CategoryID = 47;
+--------+------------+
| PostID | CategoryID |
+--------+------------+
|     41 |         47 |
|     47 |         47 |
|    126 |         47 |
|    133 |         47 |
|    155 |         47 |
|    176 |         47 |
|    191 |         47 |
|    258 |         47 |
|    276 |         47 |
|    437 |         47 |
|    440 |         47 |
|    459 |         47 |
|    464 |         47 |
|    466 |         47 |
+--------+------------+
14 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql≻ commit;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql≻

Wonderful. Now I am ready to go on to the next challenge of the deployment, redirections.

But that is for the next time.