Category: Rants and General Complaints

I wanted to post a part 2 for my last post, about how I got the tileserver working. I was going to talk about coastlines. In fact, my tileserver IS working, but it feels a bit useless without the other half: the so-called Rails Port.

So I have become obsessed with trying to get the Rails Port running. And I keep running into problems. The fundamental problem is that I have never used Ruby (and/or “Ruby on Rails”) before. I don’t really understand it. It’s not a development environment I have any comfort with at all. I don’t really even get the overall model.

I can get a local version of the generic “openstreetmap-website” code running on port 3000 on my desktop. And I can get a similar “development” version running on my server. But I don’t know all the places I need to edit to get the Rails Port to “look at” my tile server and not the default OSM tileservers. And I don’t know what other files I need to customize to control e.g. users, site security, name presentation, etc.

I think I’m going to have to take a timeout on trying to set this up, and spend some time learning how to deploy a much simpler Ruby app on my server.

One bit that seems like it should be utterly trivial is how to get the application to present on port 80 (standard webpage) instead of port 3000 (Ruby’s default development port, I guess). I have installed Passenger for Apache and that’s how I can present the application on port 3000, but I guess Rails doesn’t cohabit well with other applications on Apache – e.g. the wiki, this blog, etc. So somehow… it has to get “wrapped” or “proxied” but the details of how to configure this are beyond my expertise.

I’m frustrated, so I’m going to take a break from this server stuff.

Music to map by: 박경애 – 곡예사의 첫사랑

A few weeks ago, I decided to just go ahead and try to replicate the “OpenGeofiction Stack” by building my own server.

So I shelled out ₩25000 KRW ($20 USD) a month for a low-end Linux server from one of the many companies that rent out cheap servers. It’s running Ubuntu 16.04.

I happened to have already bought, some years ago, the domain name ‘geofictician.net’, so I attached this name to my server, and I created some subdomains. I applied my moribund artistic skills and sketched up a little logo for the website, too. That’s also on this blog (at upper left). It’s a freehand drawing, but imitating some other images I looked at.

First I loaded the standard LAMP stack (MySQL and Apache), and I then installed mediawiki and configured. I made a kind of “clone” of the OGF wiki. I even uploaded some of the articles I’d deleted from the main site. I managed to get the MultiMaps extension fork that Thilo built running, so I can point those wiki articles at OGF.

The one thing I’m frustrated with, in the wiki, is that the email user utility was impossible to configure to work with my postfix install on the server. Hence, for now, I’ve got the wiki using my gmail account to send emails, which I think isn’t an ideal solution. Then again, it doesn’t really matter, for now, because it’s just me, using the wiki alone.

Anyway, I think I’ll use this wiki to write all the overwikification I’ve felt compelled to refrain from writing on the OGF wiki. Maybe I’ll build a bot and make stubs for ALL of my locales on the map (8000 stubs! Now that’s overwikification).

Next, I started building a tile server. This was pretty complicated, and I don’t consider the task complete. I did manage to upload an OSM file of a planet I started building using JOSM a few years back and that hasn’t ever been “rendered” before, though I’ve been drawing paper maps of parts of this planet since I was in middle school.

Finally, a few days ago, I was able to test the success of the tile render by connecting to the tileserver using JOSM from desktop. It was quite exciting to see my long-languishing planet, Rahet, rendered in JOSM, if only in the most skeletal of forms:

Earlier today, I installed this blog, using the standard wordpress package, and it went quite smoothly. Good-bye, bliki.

I’m currently working on getting the OSM “Rails Port” up and running. I just ran a test and got some errors, so I’ll have to troubleshoot those. But I feel like the end is in sight.

Music to map by: 마마무, “1cm의 자존심.”