Farm report for 8th March 2023

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Every Wednesday I run a networking event for freelancers in the digital industries in Brighton, The Farm. Last week, it was in the Battle of Trafalgar pub, which is conveniently close to the train station and some bus routes, and some parking which is free after 8pm.

I’d been working at The Skiff coworking space during the day, so was already in Brighton rather than coming over after dinner. I started the meet at 7pm, an hour earlier than usual.

These are my overview notes from the evening, I like to note down what’s talked about to use on our adverts the following week.

  • Business Intelligence and Python
  • Sorin’s sole traveller app – Yaatrees
  • School strikes
  • Working from home and coworking
  • Digital nomadism
  • Working with Shopify and themes
  • Spreading out what you do
  • SEO
  • History of the Farm group
  • Dynamite Circle – a group for digital nomads and more
  • The Post Office will pick up parcels from your house – great when running a small ecommerce store
  • Looking for SEO work, especially Ecommerce SEO
  • Have you been freelance too long to work for an employer full time?
  • “I have an allergic reaction to the word Swagger”
  • The Farm comes through for work… again!
  • Getting Brighton residents to go to places to the east and west is hard
  • Eventbrite
  • Office workers are getting less smartly dressed since the lockdowns
  • Convincing clients that what you do is worth it, or finding clients that appreciate what you do
  • Finding work through networking
  • Finding niche work through LinkedIn and Facebook groups
  • Wired Sussex membership

Ten regular members came along, and three new people – Sorin who was talking about his phone app for solo travellers, Julian who was looking to meet people who are interested in digital nomadism, and Leanna (whose name I might be misspelling) who runs an online shop and is looking for Ecommerce SEO work.

Finding work through networking in person and online

I spent a chunk of the evening talking about finding work with Leanna, including the usefulness of in person networking and which events locally might be useful to her. I truly think the Farm would be good for her business if she keeps coming as there are a lot of developers in the group who would be willing to refer SEO work her way when their clients need help. We also talked about the First Friday meet ups and whether they’ve returned since the lockdowns, and whether or not it is worth trying the BNI and Chamber of Commerce groups.

Away from in person networking, I suggested checking for LinkedIn groups covering the areas she’s interested in and maybe Facebook groups. We both have the same reaction to these – something approaching dread – but I know both have been useful to friends in the recent past so I wouldn’t rule them out. Personally, I’d start with LinkedIn as I spend slightly more time there than Facebook, which I barely use, but your mileage may vary. Ecommerce SEO is a big niche, so there are bound to be groups around it where you can be helpful and hopefully pick up some work.

Swagger

“I have an allergic reaction to the word Swagger” was a quip from someone hating the automated documentation system Swagger, I think Haze (in fine form as he’d just landed some new work thanks to another Farm member.)

The idea is you add some extra comments to your code as you are writing it, e.g. you’re writing an API and want documentation so people know how to use it. Once the special comments are in, you have Swagger installed in your system and it can create a mini-website as your documentation for you, as soon as you upload the code.

This is a fantastic idea. When I tried it a couple of years ago, I found I was banging my head against it more than using it. I then tried it with a programmer at a client who had more experience with it and it was a delight. Get your code done, put it on the site, look at the docs and they’ve updated on their own. Magic. Personally, I think Swagger (at least then) needed better docs itself to be really useful.

The person quipping had a problem with it because every API he’s tried where the documentation is in Swagger, the information has been incomplete and the job has been a real problem. Which brings us to the normal problem with documentation: if it is inaccurate (or often, non-existent) then it’s bad, no matter how it’s produced. Swagger isn’t a panacea, you still have to give it good information to work with. It is an easy way to give a little info and get a big result, not magic.

I’m pretty sure Simon Willison has talked about using AI to help write documentation, but I can’t find where at the moment. I’m sure someone is trying to force ChatGPT to do that for them right now.

Fixing a Mailgun API unknown domain error

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I’m using the Mailgun API for a couple of clients, making sure we don’t keep sending email to someone who has marked their previous message as spam.

It should be quite simple to use as the docs are very clear, but I kept getting an ‘unknown domain’ error in the returned message when I used the API with one of my client’s domains rather than the sandbox domain the Mailgun provides.

The fix was to use the EU address for the API: api.eu.mailgun.net rather than the standard api.mailgun.net. As my clients are in the UK, they are put into the EU servers, rather than the American ones.

I didn’t find a simple suggestion to do that, so I’m writing this so I find it next time this trips me up.

Fixing minor issues moving code from Railo to Lucee ColdFusion

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I have a couple of personal projects at a host that offers the ColdFusion web programming language. I have a soft spot for ColdFusion as its my first programming language and I still find it very easy to put together sites in it as it comes with easy to use functionality the other server side language I use a lot, PHP, only gets through frameworks where they’ve been added by others.

Adobe, current owners of the official ColdFusion engine, charge rather a lot for licenses and that has a knock on effect on the price of hosting. So, I use Viviotech, who offer the open source engines that run the ColdFusion language. The popular one of those was Railo and is now Lucee. Viviotech recently shifted my sites onto Lucee, which I’d been meaning to try as Railo is old and now discontinued.

I hit a couple of problems:

Gotcha 1: No CGI.PATH_INFO

In the project, I redirect all requests through a single routing file. Within that file, I was using CGI.PATH_INFO to get the path of the page being requested. That stopped working, which turns out to be because the host is using Nginx and that doesn’t have PATH_INFO turned on by default. There are ways of making it work, but I didn’t want to be doing support requests to do that and it may not have been accepted for my cheap-as-chips hosting package.

Instead, I make the redirect in the .htaccess file send the path through for me.

My redirect went from this:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ ./routing.cfm/$1 [L]
To this:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /routing.cfm?path=$1 [NC,L,QSA]
Which gives me the URL of the page being requested in URL.path (apart from the / that is normally at the start, which I needed in part of my URL detection, so I added it on.)

I re-wrote my code to use the new URL.path (with added /) instead of CGI.PATH_INFO and that got it working again.

Gotcha 2: Saving files needs permissions set

In one of the sites, I get an image from an API that makes screenshots, and save it locally so I don’t have to use the API over and over. That means getting the image using CFHTTP, then saving it using CFFILE.

That worked, but I couldn’t open the files. The fix was to use MODE=”644″ within CFFILE. This set the file permissions so the image file can be read by the world, and show up on a web page.

<cffile
action = "write"
file = "<path><filename>"
output = "#cfhttp.fileContent#"
mode="644">

Improvement: Can read SSL protected RSS feeds

Railo couldn’t read RSS feeds that were protected by Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates and some of the other cheap/free SSL providers. Lucee can.

That’s great, as I made a very basic proxy (not really worthy of the word) to go request the SSL protected RSS feed through a PHP script I had on some other hosting, which would then send it through without SSL. Not great for security (although these are all public posts it is reading.) So the update to Lucee let me remove the ‘proxy’, which has simplified my code and maintenance.

Now I have my sites working again, I’m looking forward to delving into Lucee some more.

Fixing Vagrant VMs after a VirtualBox upgrade

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I use virtual machines to split up my web development projects. This lets me have a small Linux server run inside my Mac, allowing me to match the operating system with what the code will run in on a public service, without going all the way to running Linux all the time. As I want an easy life when it comes to setting these up, I use Vagrant to make and manage the virtual machines within VirtualBox, which runs them for me.

Recently I set up an extra Vagrant virtual machine (VM) to hold two projects for a client and keep them separate from some of my own projects, as they needed particular settings within Linux and a different database server to run them than the settings and database for my own projects.

I used a Homestead VM, as I knew the settings were good. Homestead is made for Laravel PHP sites, but is perfectly valid for lots of other PHP projects. My client uses various versions of the Symfony framework, and they work fine within Homestead built boxes.

The new VM worked fine but the existing VM stopped working. I could start it, I could SSH into it, but I couldn’t get any websites from it to show in the browser. Which is a big problem, as that’s all it is there for.

After much faff and investigation, I discovered the problem is a bug in the current version of VirtualBox. I had updated it while setting up the new VM, but unlike previous upgrades, this caused a problem. VirtualBox needs VMs to use IP addresses within the 192.168.56.0/21 range or the “bridge” between MacOS and the virtual machine doesn’t work, so no web pages show.

The IP of the old Homestead box my own projects were in was 192.168.10.10, which was the default when I installed it. That used to work, but now does not. The new VM uses 192.168.56.4, which is within the allowed range, so it worked fine.

To fix the old VM:

I had to edit the Homestead.yaml file. At the top where it says:

ip: "192.168.10.10"

I changed it to:

ip: "192.168.56.10"

I then ran:

vagrant reload --provision

To get vagrant to reconfigure the existing Homestead box to use this changed IP address, without deleting anything inside the VM.

And finally I edited the entries in my hosts file (which is in /etc for me in MacOS) for the websites in the VM, changing their IP from 192.168.10.10 to 192.168.56.10

Once all that was done, the websites in the VM started working again.

This was a very, very frustrating problem. I spent a long time investigating what was happening inside the VM as I presumed that’s where the problem was, eventually stumbling on the solution after searching for wider and wider versions of the problem. Thanks to Tom Westrick whose post on Github got me to the solution.

Keeping on top of spam in a smallish sub-Reddit

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I moderate a small part of Reddit for UK freelancers. As we grow in size, more spam and other rule breaking posts get submitted to the group. Spam is annoying in general, but I particularly didn’t want it hanging around in the sub-Reddit as spam breeds more spam as others realise their posts will stick around, and I didn’t want people checking the group, seeing the spam and deciding either it’s dead or we just don’t care about it. If a spam post is flagged as spam by members, it will disappear if enough different people flag it, but as a small group there aren’t enough people being that diligent and as the person running the group it falls to me to remove the posts and potentially ban the person who sent it in from posting to the group again.

I had been checking the group once a day, but sometimes forgot, or if I was unlucky, a spam post would be hanging around for almost a day until I caught it. I wanted to keep on top of the problem, and wanted a warning when a new post was added so I could catch it if it was spam, or help out if it was legitimate and something I could answer.

Each sub-Reddit has an RSS feed of the new posts that come in, for /r/freelanceuk it is https://www.reddit.com/r/freelanceuk/.rss so I knew I could have something read that and send me a warning of new posts. It would be easy to get an email when a new post happens, I already have code that can read a feed and copy it into an email. But, I tend to avoid my email outside of work hours to let my brain relax and not think about work. So, a notification to my phone would be a better alternative.

I tried a phone app (name forgotten, sorry) which said it could do this – read a feed and notify when it changed, but I never received any notifications. So being a programmer, I looked at writing my own, using a service like Truepath to do the notifying part. While I got notifications working briefly, I couldn’t get it working longer term, maybe because it was set up to trigger to a browser and I wasn’t opening that enough to keep it active? Anyway, I was back to square one.

Having asked on the Farm mailing list whether anyone knew of a phone app for Android which would do what I wanted, Julian suggested I use an RSS reader like Feedly to do it, and Mike that I use IFTTT, which he uses to do other things with RSS feeds but supports notifications too.

I’ve used IFTTT in the past and found it a bit awkward and hit and miss, and was getting fed up of thinking about this problem by now and just wished Reddit would let a moderator get a notification on new posts within their sub-Reddit natively. So, I tried a couple of RSS readers instead, looking for small and light ones that didn’t require subscriptions.

RSS Reader listing several stories from freelanceUK sub-RedditThe one that has worked well is the bluntly titled RSS Reader, previously “Simple RSS Reader.” I have it set to check for updates every half an hour and it has worked great. Now, soon after a post is made I get a notification on my phone that one is waiting, pressing that opens RSS Reader and from there I can press through to the website, or just open BaconReader, my preferred app for reading Reddit, and go to that section as normal.

I’ve got the notification vibration turned off, as I don’t want to be disturbed when I’m concentrating on work, but I still check my phone often enough that I’m catching any spam pretty quickly. Also, I’m helping people more quickly too as I’m seeing their posts while they’re still fresh.

So, thumbs up to RSS Reader and it’s creator, Svyatoslav Vasilev!