[BALUG-Talk] [ONLY POST TO THE LIST(S) ONE IS SUBSCRIBED TO] Re: 0xcabba9e5 (@0x1f1f) will be in SF between 3 Jan - 12 Jan and can meet/sign key (for inner Debian love) :)

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

[The 'SF Bay Area Open Source/Linux Events calendar':]

> Bill Ward created that Google Calendar for I-have-no-clear-idea reasons.
> Some group of Google users all have edit access, but I'm not sure who
> they are.  (/me belatedly sees Michael Paoli's comment, waves.)

Casting my mind back, I _think_ Bill the ability to have numerous people
have access for adding / deleting / changing events and groups.  I did
not agree with this concerning BALE (http://linuxmafia.com/bale/),
because it's _my_ calendar, that I created and maintain using my
criteria for my own purposes.[1]  However, I was delighted to offer
Bill, instead, absolutely everything he needed to run another instance
of BALE's codebase ('autobale') anywhere _else_ he wanted.

As in, it's open source, dude.  If you don't like the way I run it on
linuxmafia.com, you're welcome to run one of your own somewhere else.
All you need is a throwaway cruddy Web server and a static IP.

For some reason, Bill didn't want to use open source on
community-owned-and-operated Linux servers:  Instead, he decided to
sharecrop for Google on its proprietary SaaS servers.  

And that, to this day, is what the 'SF Bay Area Open Source/Linux Events
calendar'[2] is.  


Anyway, autobale's available for anyone, and should run just about
anywhere.  /usr/bin/php5 is used to generate the index.html file
(via automake), but any HTTPd is fine, and the HTTPd doesn't need PHP
support.  A Python script, run via crontab on the first of each month,
populates a new months' events (in MySQL) from a eventtemplate table,
therfore Python and MySQL are required.

MySQL is actually overkill.  There's no reason it shouldn't be fine on
Drizzle, and of course also MariaDB.

Personally, I think running a calendar of open source / Linux events on
some corporation's outsourced proprietary hosted software is excessive
irony and more than a bit pathetic, suggesting a lack of faith in open
source.  But you be the judge.

(And, oh, it's trivial to permit numerous people edit access to an
autobale instance.  Just use something like Adminer, 
https://www.adminer.org -- or, if you have terrible taste in software,
its inferior competitor phpmyadmin.)


[1] Back around 1997, Bay Area LUG Web sites were so badly maintained
and so uniformly furnished only with obsolete 'upcoming meeting'
contents that, out of exasperation, I hand-crafted in vi a calendar Web
page of upcoming Bay Area Linux and similar events in date order, solely
so *I* would know when the next [whatever] meeting would be.  I thus
originally created the page solely for an audience of one, me.

I didn't bother to mention it to anyone, but within about a month was
astonished to hear that Linux users all over the Bay Area were relying
on it instead of on LUG Web sites.  Three years later with my wife's
help on the Python and MySQL details, I converted it to a templated and
semi-automated design instead of maintaining it in vi.


[2] For the first couple of years, Bill used a name that was
troublesomely similar to that of Bay Area Linux Events, creating
considerable confusion.  I thus asked him to please rename it, and to my
lasting gratitude he did so.
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