Week 11 Posting – 1 to 2 to Cloud

Building out is an expression that means taking one and becoming more physical entities to work together making one. Building up is an expression that means expanding storage, memory or cpu capabilities to make one better. Understanding both of these expressions will help understand what has happened with TekTinkers.com and what is happening in the near future.

Beginning this journey, our website started off as a simple HTML page with no CSS that was available on the LAN in my garage for my kids and their friends to go to and see things like, most commonly asked questions, links to the juke box, cache server and the SSID for the WiFi and password. This turned into a very handy tool and quickly upgraded as its potential was realized. Not knowing how to go any further it was time to sign up for school. Starting off with a Linux class and an HTML/CSS class of which both have serviced me today in all my computing endeavors and adventures! After having finished my classes the garage website saw a quick upgrade by use of a template from W3Schools.

The content didn’t change but it sure looked better and more content was put up. Not even really sure if anyone used the website but it was there and I sure used it as it came in handy for me as well. Making quick links to use and more posts about commonly asked questions turned into a little knowledge base for the people in the LAN and why I highly encourage anyone wanting to build something like the Garage LAN to have a webpage on the LAN to go with it. Ours was hosted on an old PC, which was then upgraded to a Pentium NUC. As soon as I could understand a little bit more about administration, WordPress was installed and more learning ensued. Being easier with formatting and getting images up and linked was far more simpler than writing out lines of code. This was when the building out of the webserver had to happen.

WordPress utilizes a database that when you initially install the product, can have the server setup as a LAMP with the database on the same machine. It has been published by many individuals that while that seems like an awesome way to start, if you plan on scaling or building up and out, its best to just start with a server for WordPress and a server for the Database. This is what was eventually determined to do for TekTinkers.com.

Being selfhosted and having tons of power at my fingertips, the plan is to travel around and with being in tornado alley, who knows if one day the house gets sucked up along with all the data. The solution was obviously very simple, just put TekTinkers.com in the cloud. The process of this has started out as of today. The first request for a quote has been sent out for a few things, one being to migrate to the cloud. The other two items are to add a form for individuals to submit their own GameStation through the website and have them get their own logins to be able to exit their submissions later if desired. From estimates that have already been requested with Azure, when this is all done, there will be the Webserver and Database running at a cost of just $50/month and have the ability to scale.

This is huge! The excitement for this advancement is overwhelming in that now we can put everything in the cloud, not even worry about it, have a server running that only needs to be logged into and have posts made. No worries of power outages shorting the hosting hardware in the spare room while tornadoes spin up and target the house to take out all the work put into this.

The future of TekTinkers.com has been written and if you look at past posts they would be written as “Zeemew”. Who knows, maybe the change will happen again and this will all again become Zeemew and TekTinkers will just be another submission on the page to include an author of the posts. Whatever happens, this is really exciting to see both the building out and up because were growing and moving forward!