Site Runner Blog

Category: Uncategorized

  • Cross Posting WordPress to Social Media

    Cross Posting WordPress to Social Media

    As we work towards a Publish Once Propagate Widely strategy it is nice (essential?) if on publish the post is pushed out to the required social platforms automatically.

    Goals:

    • The post is propagated with it’s featured or first image
    • -> ActivityPub (Mastodon)
    • -> Facebook
    • -> Instagram

    Solutions:

    • WordPress ActivityPub Plugin (Facebook usage is shrinking and open protocol social is what is replacing it)
    • A solid OpenGraph Tag plugin to pop the rich links (we are testing a few Opengraph is the best so far and VERY simple)
    • IFTTT WordPress Post to Facebook Page* (requires a WordPress login and Facebook permissions for the page)
    • Auto post to Instagram from Facebook

    * There are WP plugin options Jetpack works ok but is an annoying thing to have installed and keeps dropping the Facebook API connection, others do not seem well maintained. Can also do RSS triggered integrations but they do not catch the Featured image

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  • Wānaka WordPress Course

    Wānaka WordPress Course

    It is hard for small organisations, especially non-for-profits to not succumb to skipping to different technology instead of investing in learning and supporting existing.

    We have seen this with WordPress, a organisation has a site built with it, decides change is necessary and is wooed away by a designer who is more at home in SquareSpace or Wix. Often they realise the move results in more expense and even more investment in learning a whole new system, especially when the next designer requires yet another move.

    WordPress is not ideal, but it is a whole lot better than people think once you get to know it. It is also often cheaper and is definitely more aligned ethically and geographically if hosted locally with small organisation s who “Just want a web presence”.

    To help locally we are going to run a course on how to build a basic site and grow skills in WP, the Block Editor is now good enough IMHO that it is worth the learning curve.

    Here is our proposed course outline:

    • How websites and domain names are related
    • Where websites live and how basic costs
    • What is WordPress and why it is cool
    • Create a site and what is in the main toolbar
    • Creating your first page!
    • Different content types and why they exist
    • Create your first Post!
    • Themes and strategy around how to manage them
    • How a website can drive your social media while retaining your control and content ownership (publish once, propagate widely)
    • Plugins and extending from the basics

  • Off Grid Energy Storage Using Recycled Electric Car Batteries

    Off Grid Energy Storage Using Recycled Electric Car Batteries

    We would really like to one day run our backup servers, and maybe even some of our principle services from our location in #Wānaka, .

    In order to make this feasible we will need a reasonable amount of off grid storage to ensure we can keep everything up in a power cut.

    Gwilym’s 2016 Nissan Leaf blew a cell (or at least looking at that appears to be what happened) a few months ago. This has lead to a roller coaster ride of What Ifs and Why Nots.

    The current thinking is this:

    1. The is a great car, awesome heat pump, nice to drive, rugged, with the only thing being wrong with it the battery. Replacing the battery makes sense if it’s less expensive than buying a more modern car to replace it.
    2. There are now 50 kwh/350km cell kits available for the Leaf, by purchasing one we solve our car problem and also contribute to Repair over Replace which we like.
    3. We will have close to 20kwh of spare old cells left over from the Leaf.
    4. It’s time we put some solar panels on our house anyway (Lloyd has them and I am jealous).

    So the plan right now is to see if we can use the old Leaf battery cells to provide interim power in a new solar setup.

    Questions we’re researching are:

    1. If we get a modern Solar Controller/Inverter like the SigenStor with V2L functionality could we use that to establish a standardized interface between the Solar system and the Battery.
    2. #Vivne, the company that sells the Leaf battery replacement kits, also offers a Kit to put the old cells into a battery configuration. Details are a bit scarce but it is a great idea, we could just use the chassis container that the Leaf has but a vertical configuration on wheels would be easier.
    3. There are some really clever people, The Infinite Monkey Lab, in of all places who are building interfaces for end of use car batteries so they can deploy them at grid scale. Maybe their interfaces are usable in this context?

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  • And Pureflow becomes Pure Web Hosting

    This all started because we wanted a .nz domain name. Ten years ago when we started Pureflow.io we thought .io was all trendy. Only to realise down the track that we’d rather be seen as the local dogooders that we are, rather than a ‘Company From Elsewhere’.

    Our updated logo

    It was going to take a few weeks, but now, a few months later, we are stoked to have our new platform up and running:

    • Lloyd moved the back end infrastructure to Kubenetes to manage our mini-cloud and wrote a bunch of cool API’s to control everything.
    • Gwilym made a Next.js/Prisma/tRPC client app so people can see their sites, add more sites, see DNS in realtime and manage billing.
    • We exported over the data from our old client app and are restarting with subscription payment through Stripe (or bank transfers if that is preferred).
    • Moved the whole lot to NZ based servers with redundancy.
    • Lloyd re-built the backup model.
    • Gwilym updated the logo and lost some time in Monotype Font Land.

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  • Sending events to your Matrix Room (webhook styles)

    Sending events to your Matrix Room (webhook styles)

    A great usage of Slack, and then Discord was being able to have Events coming from your business into a feed alongside other conversations going, it keeps the beating heart front of mind.

    In our case it’s servers advising when they are being rebuilt, code errors and customers signing up and adding new sites.

    Now we’re using Matrix we needed to get these events streaming in. The way we’ve done it is:

    • Created a new Matrix user, ‘pureflowbot’ specifically to broker the Events through
    • Invited this user to our ActivityStream Room
    • Created a persistent token for pureflowbot using Curl commands to the Matrix server (session tokens taken from the client are not persistent)
    • Sending Events from our Node back end and other services via Curl
    • There are libraries available which would be handy and we might use in the future, we’ll update this if/when we do.The beauty of what we have now is it’s a very minimal code base


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  • Matrix & Digital Sovereignty

    Things have been changing fast on the internet. Especially for people outside of the bubble that is the USA.

    A couple of years it was laughable to think having your business relying on Google, Facebook and Slack was a problem, now it’s not uncommon to hear people talking about it as a potential business risk.

    It all comes down to Digital Sovereignty, the idea that the more you own of your digital footprint, and the closer that is to you geographically, the simpler looking after it will be in times of crisis.

    To that end we use as many open source and open standard tools as possible. Thunderbird for email, Firefox and Vivaldi for web browsing, Ubuntu and Kubuntu as work station operating systems and from yesterday Matrix and Element to replace Discord/Slack.
    What is Matrix

    Slack pioneered the use of chat channels within a single workspace. The idea being that separating concerns was better than having a single company wide chat. It really works.

    Matrix is an opensource project that recreates the idea but lets organisations run their own code, the messages are also end to end encrypted. It’s Ad free and doesn’t try to get you to buy virtual gems or rubies or whatever (Grrr Discord)!

    What we’re using Matrix for:

    • Team communications
    • Catching events and errors into an Activity Feed so we can all see what is going on within our servers (using a purpose created Matrix user and Curl it’s surprisingly easy to setup)
    • Customer support room – most of our customers don’t seem to need much support but it is there if they need it 🙂

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  • Hello world!

    We believe in eating your own dog food, so naturally our blog runs on WordPress and uses the default (2025 at time of writing) theme.

    The logo was produced with Inkscape, refined from our old Pureflow one. I gotta say, Inkscape has really come a long way in the last couple of years.

    We’re up and running! More good things to come soon 🙂