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Working Copy of Your Radio Weblog

Technology: 19 Feb 2005, 16:24

When all you have are lemons, then make some lemonade

While I'd like for Radio Userland to provide an sftp upstream driver, its lack has turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Because I've been using the fileSystem upstream driver to render my weblog to a local folder and rsync to copy any changes up to TextDrive. Which means I have a live copy of my weblog right here on my laptop, courtesy of Apache Virtual Hosts.

I got started by reading mezzoblue's virtual hosts for dummies. The condensed version goes like this:

  1. Configure the OS to map an arbitrary host name to an IP address. For my system, I map the name ideoplex.dev to the 127.0.0.1 loopback address.
  2. Configure Apache to map the ideoplex.dev domain name to my Radio Userland local folder location. I added this sequence to my httpd.conf. 
    <VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
        ServerName ideoplex.dev
        DocumentRoot "/MyApps/Radio Userland/Site"
</VirtualHost>

With this in place, I can bring http://ideoplex.dev/blog/ up in a browser to preview my Weblog. There are a few things to be aware of:

  1. The Calendar links are all relative links and are the best means of navigating the preview site.
  2. Most entry links are absolute addresses pointing to your real weblog.
  3. Navigation links generated via #navigatorLinks.xml may also point to your real weblog.
  4. If you're not using the fileSystem driver, then use the keep local backup? preference.

21 Feb: Steve Kirks suggests the use of http://127.0.0.1:8080/ instead - close, but no cigar. That version is rendered on the fly. The virtual host method provides access to an exact copy of what [was/will be] mirrored up to the server.