Self-Hosting Workshop

I am leading a Self-Hosting workshop at FOSSY 2024 this morning! It starts at 10:45am PDT.

I hope you enjoy the workshop. Please buy my book, tell your friends about it, and give me a review. If you can think of a place I should be talking about the book, please suggest it and, if you can, recommend me to the organizers of that group/conference.

Pandoc vs. Asciidoctor for print

I’m writing a small book. ~160 pages at 6″ x 9″. I want great-looking print editions so PDF output is critical.

I started writing in Markdown, using a few scripts to pre-process for each output format (EPUB ebook, screen PDF, print PDF, HTML) and invoke Pandoc. It worked well at first, but after a year of work my scripts had grown to be complex and annoying. I was running into the edge of what Pandoc is good at. I had issues with table formatting (text mixed up with cell borders), variable handling (had to do my own replacements), special characters (had to strip some of these or the PDF backend would croak), index generation and cross-references (both require confusing extensions). The Pandoc that came with my OS was outdated and I wound up needing several versions. I was starting down a path of customizing outputs with TeX directives and Lua extensions.

I looked around for better typesetting toolchains and came across the source code for the book Pro Git 2. Scott and Ben used Asciidoctor to convert Asciidoc source text to various formatted outputs. Their outputs looked great and there wasn’t much code needed to build them.

To give it a shot, I used Pandoc to convert my Markdown book source to Asciidoc then used the (tiny) Pro Git 2 build system. Asciidoctor created more and better-looking outputs for my book. I switched to Asciidoc/Asciidoctor. I no longer needed my pre-processing scripts, Asciidoctor did well at everything I mentioned above with mostly default settings. Customization was easy, even in the case where I had to add custom Ruby code. The Asciidoctor community seems healthy and strong.

Pandoc remains awesome for many reasons. I still love it for converting between common formats. I’ve be using it for a long time for Markdown and HTML and I hope that continues. Perhaps it is not the best at generating print-ready PDFs (nor ebooks), though.

Blue? Green? Signal.

I rolled my eyes far beyond acceptable limits when I first learned the meaning of the phrase green bubble shame. Still, I was curious, so I asked a handful of high school students about it. I rolled my eyes back into place (as they rolled theirs at my questions) and learned it is in fact real and common. Text message bubble color divides kids along lines of financial disparity and technological choice.

It starts when someone with an Android phone sends a direct text message or joins a chat. iPhone user messages appear to each other enclosed in beautiful blue bubbles. Android messages are othered in annoying green bubbles. It’s a subtle and meaningful cue. Green equates to hassle (group chats are impacted), bad quality (images/videos look worse), and worse security (not guaranteed to be encrypted). If the Android users are then socially excluded, we are in “green bubble shame” territory.

Don’t wait for Apple or Google to solve this problem. Encourage your kids to use Signal instead. This quick fix will reap rewards far beyond the next several phones they and their friends are able to afford.

Tips & Tricks

If you do decide to try Signal:

  • Disable Stories (these don’t add value).
  • Disable the notification sent when a contact joins Signal in Settings → Notifications (these are unnecessary).
  • Note how Signal forgets by design (because privacy and security), so look into saving messages if you want that.
  • Consider donating to the nonprofit that keeps Signal alive.

Further reading

Self-Hosting talks in Seattle at SeaGL this weekend

Folks in the Seattle area Friday and Saturday this week (or wishing to join remotely online): there are at least 3 relevant self-hosting talks at the SeaGL conference.

  1. Steadfast Self-Hosting: this is a preview of my book, with background and context. Demonstrates Ubuntu server, ZFS, docker-compose, Traefik reverse proxy.
  2. Lessons learned from growing a Home Lab: Guilherme Carvalho Trindade covers self-hosting of private chat, social media, and game servers.
  3. Simple Site Hosting with Lightweight Kubernetes: James Pannacciulli walks through MicroK8s fundamentals.

I’m a SeaGL co-founder. SeaGL is free to attend. I’m promoting my own book in my talk, and the book itself will be liberally licensed to encourage sharing and remixing. It will include code, all of which is FOSS.

FOSSY 2023

I am honored to be giving a talk at FOSSY 2023. The title is Steadfast Self-Hosting: Rapid-Rise Personal Cloud.

Event details

Description

Your data are essential to your life, your agency, and your future. Come learn how to save, serve, and safely share your data at home with a smorgasbord of FOSS. I’ll cover rapid setup and basic use of tools such as Traefik, Nextcloud, Wallabag, Jellyfin, and more. With these powerful and private services at your disposal you can collaboratively edit documents in realtime online, stream music and video, and future-proof your digital assets.

This talk pairs well with a soon-to-be released book of the same topic and title. Both the book and talk are about self-hosting FOSS, were created with FOSS, and are FOSS themselves (open source, free to copy, free to modify and redistribute).