With my switching to using Jekyll and wanting to still have a comment system on my posts. I set out looking at my options. There were many options out there and some were better in ways than my final choice. Such as Disqus. My friend and ex-coworker uses it on his blog. While it offers a nice little interface and allows for logins from popular services, it just did not feel right for me to use. Most of the ones I found all controlled the data, aka I would not host it.

So my constant need/want to find the perfect means to managing my website has driven me from WordPress over to Jeykll. Why am I doing this jump? There are a few reasons that I am doing this.

This is a follow up to my “Docker and cloudflared” post. I wanted to take it a step further. I wanted for the cloudflared to come up via docker-compose or as a stack in the swarm. Turns out it is not that hard to do so. Just need a bit more lifting to get there with a couple more steps. Read more to see how to.

I have been continuing to play with Cloudflare tunnels and teams and wanted to put cockpit on a tunnel. I found out it is not as straightforward as one would think. I found a small web of things to do and an undocumented disability/bug in Cloudflare tunnels. It is not as simple as throwing it into the configuration and expecting it to work. No, you have to configure cockpit, tweak the tunnel and have a URL of a certain (loose) format. I am not certain I needed to get a LetsEncrypt cert for it so I am skipping that in this write-up. If anyone does find that it is needed, drop me a message and I will add it at a later date. For quick and dirty setup read after the break.

So I got tired of looking at the theme that I had on this site, one of the wordpress out of the box from a few years ago. Out of curiosity I started browsing themes and I came across this one. It is called “Blogstream” by Alexander Agnarson. I spent a little time tweaking the settings from the GUI but knew in a short time I would need to dig into the code for it to add some code for what I call “Reference URLs”. These are pages that I consulted about what I may have written. I just want to make sure they get the credit for part of my writing so I made it a custom field. I liked how the tags look so I was hoping I could steal its CSS rather clumsily and have each URL be a little bubble. I also only wanted it to show on a full page of a post only. With those restrictions in mind after the break is the code to make it happen.

Just a little while ago I checked my kuma status page and noted that several checks were failing. In troubleshooting, I found that at least the ping command had a problem.

Some time ago Cloudflare opened up tunneling traffic from origin servers to theirs negating the need for nat punches or breaking out the credit card. This is great for say home use or someone behind a cg-nat that wants to self-host. Not so good for solving gaming issues. I found that you can run their software fairly easily on most systems but I have had one nagging thing that I wanted to try. I finally sat down and figured some of it out. I wanted to run the docker container of cloudflared. My problem has been that there has been kinda poor documentation on the how to get it going. Not saying it does not exist, it’s just not obvious on the steps. Today I will demystify some of this below: