I just learned about a web-based version of VS Code built in to github. If you have a repository named https://github.com/userName/repositoryName, use the URL https://github.
dev/userName/repositoryName to open the repository in the browser based version of VS Code. You might find this handy to edit files in a repo from an iPad or a computer on which the repository is not cloned.
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- Digital Ocean App Platform provides free static web server hosting that automatically sets up HTTPS, so it is a perfect way to host the Drummer template files for full Drummer blog access via HTTPs. Several weeks ago I used pagePark to test out App Platform and I ran into problems accessing sites generated from OPML because Chrome blocked mixed content with the generated HTML. #
- One deploys applications to App Platform by associating it to a Github repository, and after you set it up changes to the repository automatically trigger a redeployment. I found that App Platform actually builds a Docker container to "host" the deployed application. #
- To test App Platform I forked a copy of the pagePark repo to my Github account and added a package.json to it that was created from another installation of pagePark I had on a computer on my home network, because it is required for the App Platform deployment. I then cloned the forked repo to my home computer, and from that point all of the changes to the web site(s) served by pagePark originated from my home computer.#
- You can look at the domains sub-directory of my pagePark repo to get an idea of how I got it to work. At the time I did not know, or understand, the s3.amazonaws.com versions of the link and script tags in the html so my resolution to the browser mixed content issue was to curl copies of all the associated files and put them in a code subdirectory of the domain. Here is how the opml template text file looked after I made the changes.#
- I realized later that I could host all the "shared" script source files in a free static site deployed via App Platform, which I built and then edited the opml template text file to point to the associated URL that is still available. The site is based on a repo, is still up, and serving files. In my opinion Digital Ocean provides a very easy to use way to share source files for HTML link and script tags that a manager can maintain via github. #
- The problem with what I did above is that by making a copy of Dave's code and hosting it in my own github repo I disconnected that code from any changes Dave may make to them in the future. I now know there is a better way to do this by editing the template files so that they use the s3.amazonaws.com versions of the links that supports HTTPS, but which point to the actual source files that Dave maintains so any changes he makes will be pulled in. #
- The purpose of my testing at the time was more about trying out App Platform than setting up my own pagePark server, and I deleted that implementation rather than continue paying $5 per month. I think App Platform is a nice way for one to deploy their own instance of Nodejs applications because it removes the server OS maintenance (no Ubuntu patches to worry about), the web server software and SSL certificate maintenace (no need to learn nginx or Caddy), and the Nodejs run time maintenance. The imagine you might want more control over which version of Nodejs is used and I expect there is a way to control that in App Platform but I did not take the time to figure that out. #