I’ve been learning a lot about Webrecorder and specifically Browsertrix Crawler recently as part of a Web Archiving script that I am working on. The goal is to have a tool you could run on Reclaim Cloud (or your local computer using Docker) that you simply give a URL, and it would make a web archive file using Browsertrix Crawler, and a flattened HTML copy of the site using HTTrack.
At the end of the day today I streamed a little bit of me playing around with Kasm Worskpaces on Reclaim Cloud:
The tool seems interesting and it has been on my list of things to look into for a little while. It’s basically a self-hostable Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), like Citrix or Amazon Appstream, but for Linux Desktops and applications. Also, it has a free version!
Under the hood it all runs on Docker, which is how I found out about it.
A very, very, common thing that I find myself doing while working with web stuff is copying a long URL, but only needing the domain name part to paste into a terminal or elsewhere. It’s annoying to carefully select just part of the URL, and even more annoying to manually delete the parts I don’t need:
Your browser does not support the video tag. I love automating and making little shortcuts to simplify repetitive tasks like this!
I use SSH to access different environment in Reclaim Cloud a lot, but one thing that I like to do is use a native terminal app (I use iTerm2 on macOS) instead of the Web SSH functionality built in to Jelastic. Web SSH is amazingly convenient, but web-based terminals like this frequently lack some of the features I am used to using in desktop-based terminals like customizable keyboard shortcuts, organization features like tabs and panes1, etc.
I’ve had this post sitting incomplete in my drafts for a long time!
Foundry Virtual Tabletop is an excellent, self-hostable virtual tabletop tool. You use it to play tabletop RPGs with other folks over the internet, (check the link above out if you are curious). It is a paid, NodeJS application that you can run on your own computer or on a server.
This won’t be a comprehensive tutorial on foundry itself after install, but I want to cover the basics and the Reclaim Cloud specific things that you will need if you don’t want to have to worry about manually starting the foundry application every time you restart a container (foundry’s own install guide doesn’t really cover this).
PeerTube is a really nice self-hostable YouTube alternative that Jim has been using for a bit and introduced me to. I wanted to spin up my own install at video.jadin.me and theme it a bit to fit in with this blog site.
The first thing I did was install the dark theme, which I thought would more closely match my blog site as a starting point. You can do this from Administration > Plugins/Themes.
Blogging this before I forget it!
I needed to add a warning to a form in Gravity Forms in case someone started filling out a form but forgot to click the submit button before closing the page. I’ve seen plenty of pages do this before, and figured there might be away to easily do something like this in Gravity Forms.
There isn’t a built-in feature in Gravity Forms for this, but it turns out that using jQuery you can easily check if someone has clicked on any of the form inputs, and if they try to close the page throw up a warning.
On February 9th1 we had our second Community Chat at Reclaim Hosting, this one called State of Reclaim!
It was a breakdown of what each group at Reclaim has been busy with, as well as what they are looking ahead towards. We also had Tim talk about early work on the Domains API.
Here’s the recording:
Also, here are some of the links for follow up that were mentioned in that recording:
Yesterday, Reclaim Hosting had its first “Community Chat” and I got to host it. The chat was focused around a site template I put together that is intended to help Domains admins showcase the work students, staff, and faculty are doing on their campus. The idea of making tools to build community around domains is not new at all, but I was hoping to make something that schools that were new to DoOO could get started with and would be simple and flexible enough to grow with their needs over time.
I haven’t revisited it in a while, but one of my favorite little projects I dug into at the beginning of the pandemic was making my own little radio station using Azuracast. I need to get back to that, but one of the things on my checklist was to make a small improvement to the landing page for it, radio.jadin.me.
The look of the landing page I was already pretty satisfied with, it’s just an HTML5UP template that I customized and slapped the embedded player from azuracast on, but I wanted the page to automatically show that the stream was offline when I have Azurcast stopped in Reclaim Cloud to save money.
