Harry Jackson

I partially published this post from Obsidian using the WordPress plugin. It was actually easier to setup than I expected with the main hurdle being Basic Authentication. There are still a lot of missing things from the integration that require a fair amount of manual work.

Beware

If you’re site is not using TLS i.e it doesn’t start with https as follows https://[example.com] then using basic authentication is about as secure as Pampers Splashers, you might get away with using it for a while but eventually something really nasty is going to happen and you’ll wish you’d secured your application using TLS.

Problems

The steps where as follows.

1. Install the miniorange WordPress REST plugin and enable Basic Auth.
2. Install the Obsidian wordpress plugin and test the connection. 
3. Enable the wordpress icon on the left menu in Obsidian.
4. Write this post.

The only problem I had was the following error

{“status”:”error”,”error”:”MISSING_AUTHORIZATION_HEADER”,”code”:”401″,”error_description”:”Authorization header not received. Either authorization header was not sent or it was removed by your server due to security reasons.”}%

This was fixed by add the following snippet to my apache.conf

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} ^(.)
RewriteRule ^(.) – [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%1]
SetEnvIf Authorization “(.*)” HTTP_AUTHORIZATION=$1

Conclusion

I think the WordPress obsidian plugin has a lot of potential but it needs a some polish. It could be good at pushing a body of text up quickly and convert it manually to a finished post but it’s still a fair amount of effort.

If you are getting this error when trying to get miniorange basic authentication to work.

Authorization header not received. Either authorization header was not sent or it was removed by your server due to security reasons.

Try using the following in your apache2.conf file. Note RewriteEngine On needs to be enabled before these settings.

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} ^(.) 
RewriteRule ^(.) - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%1]
SetEnvIf Authorization "(.*)" HTTP_AUTHORIZATION=$1

I just installed New Relic to play around with it a bit and I noticed that the default installer will try and install a bunch of crap that will, at least in my case fail. HAProxy and MySQL are two that fail miserably because in one case the HAProxy is not setup the way New Relic expects and MySQL us in a Docker container that New Relic is also not expected. In order to get around this you need to install specific parts of new relic. See docs here https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/infrastructure/host-integrations/installation/new-relic-guided-install-overview/

I’m trying to bite the bullet and move from bash to zsh in order to avoid further pain in the future as Apple are phasing out Bash on the mac.

A major feature that I use a lot on bash is search completion in .inputrc. Zsh broke this for me and using command line is like pulling teeth without it ie in bash you woul dadd the following to .inputrc

“\e[A”: history-search-backward
“\e[B”: history-search-forward
“\e[C”: forward-char
“\e[D”: backward-char

In zsh this not longer works as expected. To get normal behavior back I had to add the following to .zsh

bindkey “^R” history-incremental-search-backward
bindkey “\e[A” history-beginning-search-backward
bindkey “\e[B” history-beginning-search-forward

Absolutely brilliant piece of music. Cannot believe I’ve not heard this earlier.

I just heard that Oath have released the Vespa Search Engine open source. When I was in Yahoo! it was used for everything. I predict that a company will exist in a few months selling it as a service.

I think Vespa was one of the best written pieces of infrastructure at Yahoo! that I worked on. It was well documented for an internal app and it was blazingly fast. The guys working on it were also super smart. It will be interesting to see where it goes but I think it will be a contender in the search space