I just refurnished The Embedded Kitchen, both on the outside as well on the inside, or I should say, on the front-end and hosting levels; it is still powered by WordPress. I was contemplating moving the site to static pages using Jekyll or Nikola, but WordPress (with Jetpack) now also supports Markdown-based content authoring so the biggest reason for migration to a static system is no longer there so this decision may be deferred indefinitely.
The site is now powered by OpenShift by RedHat PaaS (hover over the word for the definition).
Phase 1 – I just want a Sandbox
I had come across OpenShift some time before and (almost immediately) signed up for the free tier of the service – which gives me 3 “gears” to experiment with whatever I like – PHP, Node.JS, MySQL, MongoDB … . Since I had been contemplating installing a new theme on the website and didn’t want to fiddle with the old site too much so I exported all my data in the WordPress XML format, and created a test site on OpenShift and used it as a sandbox to try out various themes. I settled on Nirvana first (too many choices, I was overwhelmed) and then stumbled across the Freelancer child theme based on the GeneratePress theme framework and liked it more. So that’s the current theme on the website.
After checking my site with PingDom I thought it might be a good idea to migrate the site to OpenShift.
And so wp-embeddedkitchen.rhcloud.com was born.
Phase 2 – blog.theembdeddedkitchen.net
I decided to give the OpenShift version of my blog a proper subdomain blog.theembdeddedkitchen.net (does not exist as of now). This was simple, just one CNAME record to add to my DNS Zone settings, and tell OpenShift and WordPress (admin panel) about it, and boom. Checkpoint 2 crossed.
Now the acid test – getting theeembeddedkitchen.net to point to my blog. I had read enough about CNAME at the root DNS level (since the IP address of RedHat’s service could change without notice, so I cannot just use an A record of the current IP) to be wary of this.
In my excitement, I updated my new blog address in the WordPress admin panel from blog.theembeddedkitchen.net to theembeddedkitchen.net at the point where the DNS hadn’t moved. Yikes! The transition is going to happen faster than it should have.
I added a “Moving” sticky post to the old blog just in case someone might view the site in the transition phase.
Phase 3 – Enter CloudFlare
Of all the alternatives out there, CloudFlare (at least) looked to me the safest. As a side effect, its CDN infrastructure should accelerate my website and help Akismet further in deterring spammers (In over 7 months I guess I had tens and thousands of spam comments)
Configuring CloudFlare was as easy as advertised, just a quick DNS Server change and I was on board CloudFlare. I then added CNAME records and configured OpenShift to catch theembeddedkitchen.net and www.theembeddedkitchen.net for my application. I waited for the DNS changes to take effect and opened theembeddedkitchen.net . All looks well, I think I could call it a day now.
But when I opened www.theembeddedkitchen.net , the site just hung up and I get – “too many redirects”. Wait. A redirect loop! Ok, no problem – I changed my blog URL in WordPress to www.theembeddedkitchen.net and it seems that the problem is fixed. Then I open http://theembeddedkitchen.net and get the same redirect loop. It seemed like a cat-and-mouse game.
However on more digging I figured out that the missing piece of the Jigsaw puzzle to set up a redirect rule on CloudFlare to give a HTTP 301 redirect from http://www.theembeddedkitchen.net/* to http://theembeddedkitchen.net/$1. So if you are stuck in a redirect loop and using both OpenShift and CloudFlare, here’s what you have to do (assuming your-domain.com):
- In the DNS Control panel in CloudFlare settings, add a CNAME for your-domain.com to your destination (theembeddedkitchen.net => wp-embeddedkitchen.rhcloud.com).
If you do this correctly, CloudFlare will tell you that “CNAME Flattening will be applied to this record”. - Add CNAME www and point it to your-domain.com (theembeddedkitchen.net)
- Goto the Rules section and set up a redirect rule [HTTP 301] from http://www.your-domain.com/* to http://your-domain.com/$1). This is important to curtail that nasty redirect loop, so that the WordPress installation gets requests only for the non-www domain [Needless to say, the blog address in WordPress should be http://your-domain.com] and CloudFlare takes care of that even before OpenShift kicks in.
All this done the site was back online to its full glory. Now just a few finishing touches…
Phase 4 – Plugins
I installed the Jetpack plugin first so that I could get all the goodies and a site check every 24 hours which ensures that the site never “idles” (apps in the free tier are put into standby if it doesn’t receive an HTTP request in 24 hours).
Also I decided to put a Disqus comment system in place of the old comment form. This was as simple as setting up my Disqus account and installing the Disqus comments plugin.
There’s also WP Super cache that makes this (almost) a static site. Not sure if N levels of caching are going to help anyway but I think it might speed up things a bit.
I am thankful to the shared PHP hosting service provided by edaboard.com to its members which powered my website so far. The old content would still be there, albeit not really accessible for the time being.
And yes, I write this I am finalizing a panel to be sent to the board house. What the circuits are about, is in the next post.
EDIT: Panels are already sent to the board house and I’m waiting for them to arrive. Yay!