port old CC technical blog posts - change md blog posts to new format

Author: makkoncept

content/tech-blog-archives/how-creativecommons-dot-org-is-built/contents.lr

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+title: How creativecommons.org is built
+---
+categories: infrastructure
+---
+author: Matt Lee
+---
+body:
+
+On Tuesday, December 9th 2014 you may have noticed a bit of downtime on creativecommons.org.
+
+This is both an outage report, but also a little insight into how the Creative Commons website is built. I was happily assisted in this work by former technical lead at Creative Commons, Christopher Allen Webber who you may know as one of the developers of GNU MediaGoblin, where he drew me [as a time-travelling goblin](http://mediagoblin.com/u/cwebber/m/machalus-duke-of-time/).
+
+In short, CC's website was down for two reasons:
+
+* An outdated dependency on RDQL, not SPARQL.
+* An update to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installed a version of a Zope library we use.
+
+The Creative Commons website is a mixture of WordPress and several
+Python applications. In the near future, we plan to replace the
+WordPress portion with Jekyll.
+
+The Python applications are vast, well engineered and easy to find
+your way around, even if you're not the best Python programmer (like
+me) -- they are: cc.engine, cc.license, i18n and license.rdf.
+
+**cc.engine**
+
+This is the code that handles the license chooser and the display of
+licenses on the site. As such, it's pretty important. Chris was able
+to see that the program loaded at all by accessing its hidden start-up
+message "This is the root" -- [you'll see that here in the views.py file](https://github.com/creativecommons/creativecommons.org/blob/master/python_env/src/cc.engine/cc/engine/views.py).
+
+**cc.license**
+
+This is the code that takes the RDF description of the license (from
+license.rdf) and returns it to the chooser or to the license
+display. Here's where the code was updated to reflect a change from
+RDQL to SPARQL, which are both RDF query
+languages. [As noted in the pull request](https://github.com/creativecommons/cc.license/pull/1)
+-- "one obscure query language is enough" -- as
+[you can see from the source code file](https://github.com/creativecommons/cc.license/blob/master/cc/license/_lib/functions.py),
+SPARQL was already in use.
+
+### Future goals
+
+One goal is to make the CC website very easy to people to hack on and make improvements to it. And yes, we're a little way off on that today, but thanks to Chris, I have a better understanding of the site myself now, and I hope to pass that knowledge along with future updates to the site, especially once we move to Jekyll in the new year.
+
+You can check out the [CC website code][cc] for more info on how to recreate the CC website locally. Please help us out by filing any/all bugs/feature requests at [the GitHub repo][cc-gh]. If you have questions, you can ask them on [our dedicated development IRC channel][cc-help].
+
+[cc]:      http://github.com/creativecommons.org
+[cc-gh]:   http://github.com/creativecommons.org/issues
+[cc-help]: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/IRC
+---
+pub_date: 2014-12-10

content/tech-blog-archives/weekend-hacks/contents.lr

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+title: Weekend hacks #1
+---
+categories: weekend-hacks
+---
+author: Matt Lee
+---
+body:
+
+As mentioned elsewhere, this is the first is in a recurring series of
+general fun posts with some ideas for interesting hacks.
+
+In building [The List app](http://github.com/creativecommons/list), I
+have picked up a bunch of cheap Android phones from Amazon. This,
+coupled with my natural hoarding abilities has left me with a desk
+covered in phones (thanks to Rob Myers and all the other people who
+gave me their old G1 phones in the past) but sadly, the severe lack of
+USB ports on most modern laptops (my ThinkPad has three, and my
+external keyboard and mouse use two of them) left me with the job of
+finding an interesting solution to the problem.
+
+At Mozfest in London, I saw a demo by Dave Green and Dave Page of
+their [CheapSynth project](http://cheapsynth.com), which takes an old
+USB or Bluetooth video game controller (the kind used in games like
+Rock Band) and uses it with some Python to make music on a Raspberry
+Pi. While I haven't got to the point of really using it much yet (the
+Pi has made it to my desk, at least, but it's trapped under some
+phones) I did immediately plug in the supplied Bluetooth dongle, as it
+gives me an extra USB port to play with.
+
+Now I just need to see if the second USB hub I've ordered really will
+let me have the 12 extra USB ports I so desperately need to feed my
+phone habit.
+---
+pub_date: 2014-12-12