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Hugo: I’m receiving the message “We were unable to load Disqus.”

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When building a Hugo site you may well get  the message “I’m receiving the message “We were unable to load Disqus.” ”

It took me a while to trouble shoot on mine.

Basically Hugo them developers have a habit of setting the baseurl in the config.toml as “/”

Your site will seem to work – but Disqus javascript needs the full url

So if you get the message from Disqus on your Hugo site saying it can load – set your baseurl  to a the full domain e.g. https://example.com  and clear your browser cache and try again.

The clue to the solution is at the very end of the Disqus help page https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472007-i-m-receiving-the-message-%22we-were-unable-to-load-disqus-%22

 

Build and host a static website with Hugo and Google Cloud Storage

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WordPress is overkill for 90% of small business websites, especially if they are only every going to ask the web developer to make changes.  Static websites used to be just that, static, but now it is possible to create static websites that are simple (relatively) to update dynamically.   Hugo is a Golang project that has been built to take static websites to the next level.

It uses a ‘wiki’ style simple markup rather than html, and folder based system to enable content management and has the concept of posts, so can be used as a blog too.

see https://gohugo.io/

There is a growing collection of themes, so you don’t have to build from scratch if you don’t want to, see http://themes.gohugo.io/

Hugo has a half decent quick start tutorial here https://gohugo.io/overview/quickstart/

Editing your site is done locally on your PC using your favourite editor or IDE  – I tend now to use Atom https://atom.io/

and then it is  case of pushing it out to where ever you want to host it.  You can host it anywhere really from a shared host, you own sever or wealth of other services – two obvious ones are Amazon Web services S3  and Google Cloud Storage.

Google Cloud Storage explains how to set up a Static Site here https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/hosting-static-website

The process is essentially,  download Google Cloud SDK  (gsutil) if you haven’t got it on your PC https://cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/

CNAME you domain to c.storage.googleapis.com. at your DNS registrar

Now CNAME only works on sub domains, so you are ok for www.mydomain.com but not mydomain.com.  One solution is to set a 301 redirect at your registrar to from the naked a domain to www and cname the www. However if you don’t have that facility CloudFlare allows you to CNAME the naked domain. ( They call it CNAME flattening ), and can also use Cloudflare to redirect the www. to the naked domain, so you have a perfect solution.

So for the moment whilst this work well for a subdomain I can’t see it being viable for a full website.

Create a bucket named the same as your domain (that has been verified with Google), build and copy your site and set access to public, specify the index & 404 file

And you are done.

I guess wrap that up in a little ‘release’ script to make it easy.

Next I’ll look at hosting Hugo sites on Amazon.

Please feel free to comment.

 

Who is anticrawler.org and is it safe

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I noticed I got referred from anticrawler.org on  my Piwik analytics.

Obviously suspicions were immediately raised, but required some further investigation.

The site, anticrawler.org  just has a simple request for you to add some javascript to your website.

See screen shot of anticrawler.org

who is anticrawler.org

 

There is no further information, so trust level has to be zero.

So I looked up their domain, and not surprisingly the identity is hidden.

anticrawler.org is a scam

 

They want you to run a program that is totally hidden ( anticrawler.php runs server side) so you have no idea what it is really doing, so adding this code could do anything.

I would guess it is actually going to ping lots of bad bots to start attacking your site or giving you fake traffic or serving you ads or something not good.

My advice is not to add this code, unless you are an expert and really going to investigate and monitor the impact and what happens, in which case, please leave mea comment and let me know.

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Is AOL e-mail unreliable

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I keep getting

[code]retry time not reached for any host after a long failure period[/code]

or

[code]retry timeout exceeded[/code]

when e-mailing  aol.com.

I have done some research and it seems that aol e-mail has been pretty shakey in the past, but I am concerned it might be something to do with my server set-up.

But looking at forums, it seems this might be a pretty common issue that just appears and goes away!

What is your experience of sending to aol? Could it be my servers or is it just AOL?

GoDaddy service fails millions of websites.

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Today, Monday 10th Sepetember, Godday has crashed.   TheMain site Godaddy.com is accessible but technical problems means that millions of sites have been offline.

Even sites that are not hosted on godaddy have been impacted, as any forwarding of sites via DNS A records seem to be impacted too.

In the case of ‘badlywired’, even though we run on our own servers unfortunately the Nameservers are doamins are on Godaddy, and that makes our sites unreachable to anyone that hasn’t got our IP  addresses cached.

So there is a lesson about putting all your eggs in on basket isn’t there. So now I’m thinking how best to diversify Nameservers.