Code

Up until recently i was using Mailtrain, a fantastic opensource newsletter manager built in Node.js. I never had any problems with it, but… it hasn’t seen an update since Sep 2018, the system requirements for the upcoming v2 release seem a little steep. The setup is a little funky to get just right, and the templating system always bothered me how cumbersome it was. Ive had mye eye on migrating away for some time, but never could find the right project to jump ship too.

So, Ive been a relatively happy user of Mailgun for all my transactional store and support emails and also for my newsletter blasts. When I say relatively happy, it was not without issue. I run my rails/node apps on subdomains. And with this setup, it was just not possible to configure Mailgun to send the transactional emails from the base domain. As an example, the licenses from my store were being sent with headers showing as coming from licensing.sweetpproductions.com, rather than sweetpproductions.com. This was causing issues with gmail putting license emails into users spam folders, as the mail server didn’t match correctly… While this was annoying to deal with, as an indie dev, its hard to argue with free emails… which is what Mailgun were offering. 10,000 free emails per month to be exact. So, I added a note to my store, to let users know they should check their spam folders for any misplaced emails from me…

So, SpamAssassin was just recently updated to v3.4.2 after a number of years of no updates. And, as I like new things - of course i would update. But after digging around in Plesk, and then also dropping down to the command line - I discovered it was not going to be a simple update. So of course I jump on DuckDuckGo to look for a solution. this is the thread I found, which was almost exactly what I needed: https://talk.plesk.com/threads/spamassassin-update-from-3-3-1-to-3-4-1.337266/.

I ran in to a minor issue the other day with my NobeBB install, and woke up to find it had crashed. Not really a big deal, as it is super easy to restart. But restarting it manually after a crash, or system reboot is not ideal - there must be a better way. And of course there is, and its super easy using systemd. There’s official docs on how to set this up. But, it took me a little trial and error to get my setup working, so i’ll post my solution.

In my quest to remove all php code from my site, it was time to get rid of Wordpress. don’t get me wrong, Wordpress is a great platform and is extremely useful for many different applications, but does feel very heavy for how I use it - as a simple blog. I use minimal plugins, and really only wanted a secure platform to share my thoughts and interests quickly.