Niels’ Homepage

Suppose you have a website using NanoBlogger and you want to upload the changes to your provider. Then you can use something like rsync. But if that functionality is not supported by your provider you can either:

• Upload the changes manually
• Upload the entire site again, which can be costly and time consuming once your site gets large
• Write something to keep track of the differences and uploads only those differences to the host

I choose the latter and the prototype seems to be working fairly well for me. It keeps track of the MD5 sums and the names of the current directories in the
website’s local directory. If any changes are made the the new files’ MD5 checksums and directory structure are compared to the stored one. A list of changes to the remote site will then be made in commands understood by sftp. These commands are executed and presto: an updated site!

Its usage is very simple:

sl [OPTION] source destination

In the example below only the script only performs a dry-run so you can see the possible changes without affecting your website.

sl -t websitedir user@remoteserver.domain.com

The script can be downloaded here.

If there are any suggestions or comments feel free to contact me.

If you are reading this: Welcome!

A lot has happened the last week. First the domain heirbaut.nl is now hosted by BHosted.nl. They offer a very complete hosting package for a very reasonable price.

I also moved away from Blosxom as my CMS. NanoBlogger fits my needs better. To me it is easier to use, setup and maintain. So instead of tinkering I can finally get some blogging done. To make my life even easier I decided to use Markdown, which even takes away the hassle of inserting HTML code in my weblog entries.

The site will be maturing (again :) ) the coming weeks. A small project, that sprang into existence because of this site, will become available very soon.
And I am hoping to be able to publish some documentation on the long term personal project that I am working on.

Time to go now, have fun and if you want to contact me, the address is on the left in the navigation section.