jarofgreen

Is this the kind of thing EKS Auto Mode helps with? (For a price, of course)

Unfortunately that has no team features, and last time I checked they were quite pushy about not adding any - which is totally fair, they know what product they want to make and are sticking to it! But BitWarden has good team features.

whispers Stirling castle is better than Edinburgh castle

Hello fellow Scot!

I missed this when it was launched and it's very interesting to see your rationale. If you ever want a chat some time get in touch, I'm working on https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/

My ulterior motive is to ask you to add open data feeds for basic group and event listing information to your site - a free and open API and standard formats like ICAL (Just listings information about the next event, not private info like members names). I would never encourage event organisers to use a platform that didn't do this, as then their data is essentially being held hostage and it's hard for them to spread their information around to other places.

Hey, sorry it was hacked.

You mention rsync which can be fine. But there are tons of other solutions, many that will have snapshot features. I use borg backup, for instance. https://www.borgbackup.org/

Also, look into scriping your server setup with tools like Ansible or PyInfra. There is always the risk that bad things happen to servers, and when you want a new server it's great to be able to spin things up in a matter of minutes. Tools like these are profesional best practices these days.

In fact, if you have a scripted server setup and a server that doesn't collect data itself you may not even need backups. What is there to backup? Just spin up a new server with your scripts and carry on.

Almost never now, and I used to go to lots. In fact I've launched https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/ to try to promote virtual tech events that include community participation instead.

Bug on home page:

"Ask TechPosts.eu: Is there an EU Cloudflare alternative? I'm interested in CDN, DDoS mitigation and basic web security." Links to https://techposts.eu/post/153

"3 comments" below it links to https://techposts.eu/post/154

It looks like the latter is correct.

I would have sent feedback direct, but I can't see an about page or anything.

2 projects around virtual tech events:

Open Tech Calendar, listing virtual tech events that include community participation: https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/

A listings site for virtually attending FOSDEM. The live streaming is great but the official site only lists sessions in the local Brussels time zone. You can choose your time zone here: https://virtuallyattend.teacaketech.scot/fosdem/2026/

Hello,

So I've gone to FOSDEM once in person before COVID started and a few times virtually since.

They go to great efforts to provide good live streams, it's really appreciated.

So it's always seemed to me like an omission that their website only lets you browse events in the local Brussels timezone.

So I created this listings website that lets you browse in any timezone you want. Also, make and share lists.

It's a static website, all the work happens in Javascript. Thanks Luxon! https://moment.github.io/luxon/#/

All lists stored in local storage for privacy.

Feedback welcome!

James

Hello,

I'm James based in Scotland. For 7 years I ran Open Tech Calendar listing mainly in-person tech events.

After a pause I'm now relaunching Open Tech Calendar to list virtual events - this shift in focus is due to personal life changes that mean that virtual events is what I'm interested in, and looking at other sites that are now doing a great job listing in person events in Scotland. I know virtual events aren't as popular, but when I talked about this on social media, people suggested many reasons that virtual events may be preferred - public health, child care and other caring duties, people in rural areas.

I am specially going for events that include community participation - I'm keen to avoid "this virtual tech event could have been a video" and instead encourage events that people can get involved in.

We are also provide Open Data exports and are keen to encourage events to provide Open Data we (and others) can just import and reuse. Happy to help with options for that.

Brief word on the tech: I'm collecting data in a GitHub repository, then building that into a SQLite database with an Open Source library, then it's a Django site to provide all the filter options and open data feeds I wanted to provide. It's hosted on one virtual machine with Apache caching content.

So:

Constructive feedback on the project and site welcome!

If you know any good virtual tech events, do add them! You don't have to be the organiser. There are details how on the site, or just comment here with details.

Thanks, James

It's not clear if you are suggesting accepting contributions to the SQLite file via PR from people (but accepting contributions is generally the point of why people put these on projects on GitHub).

But if you are I wouldn't recommend it.

PR's won't be able to show diff's. Worse, as soon as multiple people send a PR at once you'll have a really painful merge to resolve, and GitHub's tools won't help you at all. And you can't edit the files in GitHub's web UI.

I recommend one file per record, JSON, YAML, whatever non-binary format you want. But then you get:

* PR's with diff's that show you what's being changed

* Files that technical people can edit directly in GitHub's web editor

* If 2 people make PR's on different records at once it's an easy merge with no conflicts

* If 2 people make PR's on the same record at once ... ok, you might now have a merge conflict to resolve but it's in an easy text file and GitHub UI will let you see what it is.

You can of course then compile these data files into a SQLite file that can be served in a static website nicely - in fact if you see my other comments on this post I have a tool that does this. And on that note, sorry, I've done a few projects in this space so I have views :-)

This seems to be about hosting an Sqlite database on a static website like GitHub Pages - this can be a great plan, there is also Datasette in a browser now: https://github.com/simonw/datasette-lite

But that's different from how you collect the data in a git repository in the first place - or are you suggesting just putting a Sqlite file in a git repository? If so I can think of one big reason against that.

I'm not OP but I'll guess .... lock files with old versions of libs in. The latest version of a library may be v2 but if most users are locked to v1.267.34 you need all the old versions too.

However a lot of the "data in git repositories" projects I see don't have any such need, and then ...

Why not just have a post-commit hook render the current HEAD to static files, into something like GitHub Pages?

... is a good plan. Usually they make a nice static website with the data that's easy for humans to read though.

It's not just package manager who do this - a lot of smaller projects crowd source data in git repositories. Most of these don't reach the scale where the technical limitations become a problem.

Personally my view is that the main problem when they do this is that it gets much harder for non-technical people to contribute. At least that doesn't apply to package managers, where it's all technical people contributing.

There are a few other small problems - but it's interesting to see that so many other projects do this.

I ended up working on an open source software library to help in these cases: https://www.datatig.com/

Here's a write up of an introduction talk about it: https://www.datatig.com/2024/12/24/talk.html I'll add the scale point to future versions of this talk with a link to this post.

Some of it is different, but the basics are still the same and still relevant. Just today I've been working with some of this.

I took a Django app that's behind an Apache server and added cache-control and vary headers using Django view decorators, and added Header directives to some static files that Apache was serving. This had 2 effects:

* Meant I could add mod_cache to the Apache server and have common pages cached and served directly from Apache instead of going back to Django. Load testing with vegeta ( https://github.com/tsenart/vegeta ) shows the server can now handle multiples more simultaneous traffic than it could before.

* Meant users browsers now cache all the CSS/JS. As users move between HTML pages, there is now often only 1 request the browser makes. Good for snappier page loads with less server load.

But yeah, updating especially the sections on public vs private caches with regards to HTTPS would be good.

User agents not IPs, but: https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt

I was at an event about open data and AI recently and they were going on about making your data "ready for AI".

It seemed like this was a big elephant in the room - what's the point in spending ages putting API's carefully on your website if all the AI bots just ignore them anyway? There are times when you want your open data to be accessible to AI but they never really got into a discussion about good ways to actually do that.

so it is better to find a way to cache your website's HTML so you're not bombarded

Of course, scrapers should identify themselves and then respect robots.txt.

I'm just surprised we haven't seem some app that can act like a wordpress admin page but generating a static output you can host for free or very cheap somewhere.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44391535

(I'm not affiliated with it)

load blog posts from a db

Can you explain a bit more about your requirement and how many blog posts you are talking about?

I'm curious to hear more for my future work as I have an extendable static site builder it would be easy to add this too. I don't want to be going all marketing on someone else's post (and it's early days so you'd probably find other features lacking) so I'll just say my email is in my profile if you want.

Only for SEO - they don't help at all with aggressive AI scraper bots.

Also to consider: bot traffic and SEO.

Depending on which mechanism you use to construct your state URLs they will see them as different pages, so you may end up with a lot of extra traffic and/or odd SEO side effects. For SEO at least there are clear directives you can set that help.

Not saying you shouldn't do this - just things to consider.

There have been reports from iPhone or Samsung users facing a similar problem, and that's despite their significantly higher user base.

Is there a "no" missing?

I'm still not unsure if I should include it as part of my answer when asked if I contributed to open source projects

I woud say yes, as long as you make sure you indicate the level clearly.

It's not landing a great new feature, but it shows you understand how Open Source works, you understand the value of the non-code parts of these projects, you can use the tools (I assume Git PR's), you can communicate well and work with others.

I think we need to separate meetup discovery from event management - an event-platform-agnostic registry/search that works across Guild, Eventbrite, Facebook Events, whatever. Hmm... might have just found our next Svelte meetup hackathon project.

Welcome, I've seen a lot of projects in this space (and done a few)!

If I can make a suggestion, the first thing to look at is public API's and existing formats like iCal (for the listings information that can be public - obviously some information like attendee details should be private).

Making sure whatever platform you use to host your events has open data feeds is a great first step, and preferably in iCal. Before you even start working on a search site, your regular atendees can import your feed straight into their personal calendars (and I know from previous projects some people will).

ps. Hey OP, please add open data feeds to your project!

Seen https://mobilizon.org/ ?

That doesn't help with the "Who's listening?" problem. In an office kitchen you know exactly who is listening and can tailor your comments appropriately. In an online chat, it's not clear who is lurking or who will log on in 5 minutes and read back. (Welcome to the site btw!)

SEO is built in since search engines can crawl every state combination.

This isn't always a plus - bots can find a very large number of pages to crawl and swamp your server with traffic. Maybe they would get stuck on all the combinations of listing page filters and miss the important pages.

Not saying the conclusion is wrong - just something to consider.

I just turned off /notebooks in robots.txt

That doesn't actually stop pages being indexed.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

Hey OP,

1)

You consider this about the Linkedin site but don't stop to think about other social networks. This is true about basically all of them. You may not post on Facebook, Bluesky, etc, but other people may like your links and post them there.

I recently ran into this as it turns out the Facebook entries in https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt also block the crawler FB uses for link previews.

2)

From your first post,

But what about being closer to the top of the Google search results - you might ask? One, search engines crawling websites directly is only one variable in getting a higher search engine ranking. References from other websites will also factor into that.

Kinda .... it's technically true that you can rank in Google if you block them in robots.txt but it's going to take a lot more work. Also your listing will look worse (last time I saw this there was no site description, but that was a few years back). If you care about Google SEO traffic you maybe want to let them on your site.