Infomaniak

Ghost looks clean and elegant compared to WordPress but with one serious hurdle, price. Hosting solutions for Ghost range from 13-16 USD per month, which is huge compared to “free” for wordpress, but also in regards to the volume of traffic our blogs get. Is it worth spending 15 CHF per month for a blog that no one reads?

Full Ghost Clone of This Blog

Two days ago I was playing with Ghost locally. I tried to export my blog to ghost via the full export tool, failed, and then tried again via the JSON tool and this time I had success. I then instantiated an instance on the laptop I’m blogging from, before importing the json file.

One of the many iOS flaws is that if you download photos and videos it defaults to throwing them into your photo album, whether they’re yours, and that’s why it’s good to tidy up. For the tidying up effort today I used ffprobe, find and the kDrive desktop drive, as well as terminal and a secure shell.

The premise is that as you’re living your life, activity friends, family and apps like TikTok all post files, that you might or might not download intentionally. I’d recommend downloading them intentionally. We’ll cover this shortly.

As I write this my consolidated photo album is being uploaded to kDrive, to serve as an offsite backup but the journey to this point took about two weeks, due in part to experimentation and learning to use various tools.

Tools I used

• rsync
• Google Takeout
• Flickr Export
• jdupe
• Gemini
• Euria
• Le Chat, by Mistral

Work Flow

The first step is to request your data from Google Photos via the Google Takeout Tool, the Flickr Export tool for flickr, and to download all your photos locally from Apple Photos before disconnecting the local library from iCloud. Disconnecting Photos from iCloud gives you 30 days to realise you made a terrible mistake and fix it.

Yesterday I turned off iCloud Photo synching, and then I wiped my photos from iCloud Photos but before that I took several precautions.

Triple Backup to Apple Devices with Enough Storage

The first precaution I took was to ensure that the Photos app on a mac was downloading all the original photos locally. While this task was taking place I also got an iPhone 8+ and an older iPad to backup my photos locally to their hard drives.

For weeks I haven’t updated Google Photos because I ran out of storage on the 200 gigabyte tier and I avoid using more than 200 gigabytes of storage with Apple iCloud. If either of them had a 500 GB tier, then I’d consider them. As they do not offer this option I chose to phase them out with Immich and Kdrive.

Immich As Photo Gallery

Immich replaces Google Photos, and iCloud among other apps. it allows me to take photos from a phone and have it backed up on a Raspberry Pi at “home”. I have backed up all the photos that I had on my phones to Immich, so, when iCloud says “storage full” I just delete them from my phone and they are automatically removed from iPhoto. It allows me to have my photo gallery locally.

Yesterday I went to Geneva early. In the process I dropped into the GoSocial Co-working event at Ruby Hotel, before then walking towards the Orthodox church in Geneva. The doors were open so I visited the building. It smelled of incense and someone was cleaning.

Co-working

There is a GoSocial group on Whatsapp that often meets once to twice per week to do some co-working with other people, rather than in solitude. A few weeks ago I drove to Geneva to meet the group but my introversion got the better of me so I got equipment for hiking instead.

Yesterday I configured PhotoPrism to work with my iPhone photo album that was being synced to Infomaniak’s Kdrive, before then being synced to a drive that I could access via the Photoprism docker-compose config file. I then used No-ip to make that PhotoPrism instance available to the world wide web.

For several years I have had an Infomaniak Kdrive account but did not use it much, until I noticed that what costs 100 CHF with Google Drive costs 67 CHF with Kdrive. That’s a 34 CHF franc saving.

Last night I came across the Infomaniak Mail App and began to play with it. It’s a simple app that allows you to read infomaniak mails from their own mail app rather than others. The one thing that I miss is swiping right or left to go to the next or previous messages, but aside from that it work like I would expect an app to work.

The app can be blue or pink, according to your preference. I tried both, and I’m fine with either. It allows you to have a compact, normal or large thread density, to see e-mails more efficiently, or more clearly.

KDrive peaks my interest because instead of cost over 100 dollars per year it costs around 64 if you buy directly from their website rather than The Apple App Store, but also because once you send your photos up to the cloud, you can get them down more easily.

With Google One you can store all of your images to the cloud quite easily but because apps like Picasa and others no longer exist, you cannot get them back without spending hours downloading them manually. iCloud is not quite as bad but they are still not ideal. You can upload images to their service, but if you do so, your image gallery must be on a drive with enough storage to take the gallery offline. On mobile phones and laptops this is complicated. In effect your images are stuck until you buy a higher capacity laptop or phone. I know an HD would also work but the issue is that when your image gallery is on another drive you have to keep it plugged in, or sync regularly for it to be efficient.

Today I tried Switching from MySQL to MariaDB with Infomaniak as a webhost. This morning they sent an e-mail to say that we could switch from MySQL to MariaDB automatically so I tried. For the test I:

• downloaded a new install of wordpress to my local machine and put it in the MAMP htdocs folder under mariadb.
• I installed MariaDB on port 3310.
• Using the command line I created a wordpress database.
• I configured WordPress. Within seconds the website was up and running.
• When I saw that the interface was that the same and that I had to make no changes I went ahead with Infomaniak.
• Of course I backed up the MySQL server data, just in case.

Within a matter of minutes of telling Infomaniak to switch from MySQL to MariaDB the migration was finished and the website was up and running again. It was quick and painless. If something did go wrong I could easily step back but I also ensured that the user interface for MariaDB and MySQL were the same. When you’re coding websites from scratch some databases require different lines of code to function. That was my concern, and that’s why I decided to experiment with a small scale trial on my own machine.