Some site fiddles

I have been consistently niggled by the poor kerning of the font I initially used on the front-page, and inspection of the outlines shows it was of very poor quality indeed. Some Googling turned up the font (Caslon Initials) on various sites, posted by various users and mostly described as ‘public domain’. This makes me suspicious, but I went ahead and found the best-quality version I could and rat over it with fontforge, correcting its errors and tweaking its metrics. You can grab it if you are really interested from the page, but I will eventually dump the glyphs into a swash table in the Latin Modern font.

All in all, a tiny fix to just the sort of error that irks me.

I did have the development version of this site on the SRCF over the summer, while my main machine was sitting disconnected in my room. Now I have transferred the site back to my own desktop, I needed a better way of syncing it the distant server. An aggravating battle ensued as all the options seemed not to work ideally.

The first attempt was to upload the site over FTP. That is slow and unreliable (I gave up after uncovering bugs with Unicode filenames over SFTP in various popular scripts). SFTP is just not very reliable.

The next idea was to set up something with cgi-bin to add some git to the server, but there was too much black magic.

The really cunning idea was thinking of efficient ways to use sshfs. You install it (in all distros), mount the remote server like any normal removable drive, and modify the files like a local filesystem, totally seamlessly. At this point, the lack of git on the server is irrelevant, as the local copy of git just does all the work.

So, what work do we set it? There are various things I tried, unfortunately starting with the least efficient. I tried making a repository on the server and pushing to it, but reading and writing to the .git folder over SSH is a mistake. The obvious optimization is to copy the .git folder to my machine and symlink it into the right place; after all, it is only the working copy I want to have on the other end. That is easy, and much quicker. How to get the push to work though is still not obvious. I tried pushing to an unchecked-out branch, and merging through a post-receive hook, but the merge is slow as the mtimes of the entire working directory need to fetched from the remote server so the local git can do its merge. Next, we try running a checkout, but it simply re-uploads the entire working directory. Not as slow, but it takes many minutes. The same result holds when doing a hard reset. I tried a few more things, with all the clever options I could think of, but the approach is fundamentally broken as git will basically always traverse the entire working directory when doing something on it.

In the end, the answer is embarrassingly simple. I cooked up a bash one-liner, expanded it a little, and produce here my own perfectly adequate solution. Selecting a particular branch to diff from and push to would be a trivial addition.

if [ ! -e /home/www/mounts/nicholaswilson.me.uk/XIV ]
then
    sshfs -oworkaround=rename <user@shared hosting IP>:public_html/nicholaswilson.me.uk \
    -p <port> /home/www/mounts/nicholaswilson.me.uk/
fi

cd /home/www/XIV
git diff --no-prefix `cat /home/www/mounts/nicholaswilson.me.uk/XIV/REVISION` HEAD \
    | patch -p0 -d /home/www/mounts/nicholaswilson.me.uk/XIV/
cp .git/refs/heads/master \
    /home/www/mounts/nicholaswilson.me.uk/XIV/REVISION

So, patch does all the fiddly stuff for me that FTP scripts have to mess around with, and the output is highly satisfactory. It is a bit of a pity that this method did not turn up on any of my Googling.

As always, this gives me a couple of little tweaks to make when I next have a spare half hour to format any notes. The hottest things on my list are now styling the file listing above to use a modal pop-up; I will re-use it to display image thumbnail expansions too.

I will also rationalise my feeds in an easier-to-use format so that I can add more links to Reader without feeling guilty about spamming.