My domains just got a little more life in them. As in, an A rating from ssllabs, at least for the moment!

ssl_A

Highlights:

  • Problem: Time Warner has a monopoly on broadband here; they gouge you if you want a static IP; and they do thorough reporting of all IP ranges as dynamic to spamhaus, so no email servers from home folks
  • Problem: 1and1 has a horrible interface to maintain even a handful of domains, as you have to use a useless separate “packages” layer to get enough subdomains; they charge for email
  • Solution: Switched all domains to Google Registrar, which has a much better UI, supports subdomains, and allows domain name email forwarding for free
  • Solution: Once you have control over your domain email, StartSSL provides amazing easy free SSL certs; they have the BEST completely automated service and the best docs; my Apache site configs are now better organized, SNI-based, and the sites are getting great scores on ssllabs, thanks to using Mozilla’s “modern” recommendations
  • Solution: phabricator needs to run on its own domain, and with this new level of control, I can easily get that going; although curl and arcanist are picky about the CA store – I could NOT get them to work with the agile.bitpost.com subdomain, at all, and I really tried – so I went with https://abettersoftware.org

A brave new world.  I love it when a plan comes together.

I’ve documented my Phabricator workflow on the wiki.  It’s working great.  The very-configurable workboard column configuration can make querying difficult. But epriestley works hard to keep the whole thing driving forward without it spinning into chaos.  I just did a [git pull] and got the new features I was looking for that allowed me to save sort defaults for my workboards, just perfect.  I’m still waiting for one more feature, but I have workarounds described on the wiki to keep my flow pretty damned tight.

Note to self: get into this phabricator command line fu.

Testing my chatter toggle, I decided to make my blog work again.

I’m writing trading software called A better Trader.  For the web UI, I started using some basic JQuery and JQuery UI, with a mind to kick the tires on Bootstrap.  I dug in and after looking at a  bazillion frameworks and libraries (some fading, some up and coming, NONE really owning it)… K.I.S.S. is ruling the day.  I’m finding myself happy with the following:

  • HTML5 with support for multimedia, flexboxes, dragon droppings, etc.
  • JQuery && (JQuery UI || bootstrap)
  • D3 for all things visual… so good…
  • iframes!  Yep!  API calls typically return SVG-based graphic components in iframes, and API parent pages combine them into application-like views.

On the back end, I’m doing RESTful services with boost ASIO.  It’s a light clean set of tools.  I will probably stand up bootstrap on the front end, and node.js on the back end, for comparison.  We’ll see how it goes.