A good start for October
2021-10-01 // 3 min read // #music
Somehow, we’re now into the final quarter of the year. Here’s a few things that interest me, and may interest you!
Hi there, I'm Nicholas!
I’m a developer with a passion for cloud platforms, web development and automation!
I use this blog to write about my interests. They’re usually tech-related, but there’s also the odd music and gaming piece too.
A suspicious email from Cloudflare
2021-09-23 // 2 min read
I received an email from Cloudflare today about an account that had been created with my email address. Going by the details and the headers, it certainly seemed to have originated from Cloudflare. It looked like someone else had signed up with my details.
Backing up and restoring a self-hosted Plausible instance
2021-08-14 // 3 min read // #docker
I’ve been using Plausible Analytics on this website for a few months now and I’m a fan for three key reasons.
- They’re open source
- They explicitly detail how they track web traffic in a privacy-preserving manner
- Customers can self-host their own Plausible instances
Being able to self-host Plausible gives me ownership of the data it collects, but it also makes me responsible for storing this data and backing it up. I manage backups for my instance with several Ansible playbooks, but the same can be done with plain shell commands.
Exporting iCloud reminders to Fastmail
2021-07-24 // 2 min read // #ios-shortcuts
If you’ve snooped the MX records for this site recently, you might have noticed that I’ve moved to Fastmail. In addition to email hosting, Fastmail also offers CalDAV accounts for users, so I’m trying it out for my calendar and reminders.
A close call with Nginx and the alias directive
2021-07-15 // 3 min read // #nginx
When Nginx is serving this website, it’s usually serving static files from the local machine. One method to accomplish this is with the alias directive, which substitutes the request location for a filepath. I use it to map requests to nicholas.cloud/files/ to a directory for public file-sharing.