This post is really a message to myself in the future for the next time I try to upgrade Ghost. Dave. You just tried to upgrade Ghost again and it’s not working, right? Dude, what is your problem? Let’s go through the checklist: Did you clear out the existing core directory before you copied the new one over? You know, like the upgrade instructions said you should? No? Well, try that one and redeploy.…
Over at Vinyl Deals, I use CloudFlare to handle some caching and firewall issues. Like any good server admin, I check my logs to make sure the app is running smoothly so people can find those sweet record deals. But sometimes I notice a strange uptick in traffic on the back-end that doesn’t show up in the front-end analytics. Usually, this means it’s just a bot. Often it’s Googlebot, which I’m totally fine with.…
I just wanted to upgrade my blog from the ancient version 0.4.2 of Ghost to the brand spankin’ new 0.7 release. I followed the Ghost upgrade guidance, adjusting it to fit my build which deploys from GitHub to Azure Web Sites. But after the deployment, neither the blog nor the admin console showed up. Just a blank, white screen. The favicon still showed up, so at least I had that going for me.…
Microsoft released the ability to create custom APIs with Azure Mobile Services in June 2013 and released the JavaScript client for Azure Mobile Services (AMS) even earlier in March 2013. The JavaScript client is excellent and easy to use, but it doesn’t play well with AngularJS. Actually, that’s not true. It plays just fine with AngularJS but it requires you to use $scope.$apply() when you’re working with the data retrieved.…
It surprised me to find that uploading an image to Azure Storage using the REST API with Xamarin iOS wasn’t straightforward. After a lot of research and by combining a couple techniques, we can easily upload a UIImage to blob storage using the Azure Storage REST API. Here’s what you’ll need: Azure Mobile Services (and client library) HttpClient I’m not going over how to create a storage location and container nor an Azure Mobile Service.…
Last week, my company published the public preview of MomCharts.com, our baby tracking software in the cloud. One of the design goals for the software was make sure it was cross-platform, cross-device, and as maintenance free as possible. My company (Heavy Code) is a member of the BizSpark program by Microsoft so we’ve got access to top tier tools and, most importantly, Windows Azure, at no cost to us. Pieces of Azure In Use There are a number of Azure services MomCharts runs.…
Azure Web Sites includes a way to easily install a number of web apps such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Orchard, and DotNetNuke. By itself, that’s a great offering. But Azure has built in a way to continuously deploy updates to your web site through TFS or Git. I’m running my blog on Azure Web Sites using WordPress and GitHub publishing and this is a walk-through of how I set that up.…
I Need One of Those For My Office Kicking off TechEd 2012 was a DJ on stage manipulating a SmithsonMartin Emulator DJ Touch machine. This translucent large panel multitouch display runs only on Windows and filled the big room with soothing grooves to get the show off to a nice start. We won’t take too much mention of the fact that he was using his iTunes library to supply the tracks.…
Update: If all you want to do with WordPress on Azure is host a blog, I do not recommend this method. Since this post was published Microsoft released Azure Web Sites with a super easy way to get WordPress up and running. I’ve written a post on how to set it up along with GitHub publishing. So check that out. So you want to try installing WordPress on Windows Azure? You want to store your media files in Azure Storage?…