Re: Community buy-out?

[Jamie Wilkinson]

I like this idea too, and want to thank Jonathan again for all his work in creating and running YubNub. He's already graciously put the code on GitHub:

https://github.com/JonathanAquino/yubnub

Perhaps it's worth us focusing on updating the app to e.g. run on Heroku, then people can chip in enough to pay the hosting bill and maintain commands? I love YubNub and would be happy to help out in all departments

-jamiew

http://jamiedubs.com

On Dec 29, 2012, at 11:26 AM, Ross Parker <rossjam...@gmail.com> wrote:

YubNub is down again. Jonathan has said in previous posts that he doesn't want to ask for donations to move YubNub to another server, as his problem isn't money, but a shortage of time. In my experience, I have to say that I think money can solve the lack of time problem pretty well... but I guess everyone is different.

I wonder if it might be possible to solve both problems and have a community buy-out of YubNub? This would solve the money and time problems - and I am sure there are many on here who would like to at least maintain YubNub, if not develop it further.

Is this an idea to consider?

Regards,

Ross

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[Brian Armknecht]

A while back user KTamas posted a working mirror:
http://yubnub.ktamas.com/
Also, I believe he updated some of the code for a newer version of Rails:
https://github.com/ktamas/yubnub


On Sunday, December 30, 2012 4:17:16 AM UTC-6, Xyzzy wrote:

I was thinking something similar to both of you, except my angle was that if Yubnub wasn't little-known, there would be plenty of volunteers stepping up to help out...  My little sketched-out plan/idea to tackle it:

1. Assuming they can get server access, people here with the right knowledge get the site working again for the moment.  (Alternately, someone could use the code to mirror the site under another URL so it's functional for now.)

2. Jonathan writes a brief post to the Yubnub blog/mirror explaining that it's in grave danger because he can't set aside time for it anymore, listing the kinds of tasks need to be done.  He might include a link to a similar "help wanted" post here existing specifically for potential volunteers to start organizing.

2a. Front page of the site should have a prominent warning that Yubnub needs our help, linking back to his post.  If possible, the server could also (once per machine) show a "Yubnub needs your help" page with text link that will open Jonathan's post in a new tab, then hitting OK would continue to the normal search; both the text link and/or OK would set a cookie so the alert would not repeat itself.

3. We submit the link to Slashdot, Free Software News, and anywhere else applicable, talking about how invaluable it is for both brief searches & serious research in the summary.  Sites that are selective about which submissions are posted, like Slashdot, should get submissions from as many of us as possible.

People watching those sites will then come over to the site/mirror, try it out, see how awesome it is, and then hopefully decide to pitch in with whatever time or abilities they have.

[Mathias Hellquist]

I am decent on most things web, hosting and cloud setups, but I know nothing of Rails, so can't help out too much there (unless my PHP/front-end skills all of a sudden were of use here).

One thing that would be of interest though is: how much traffic does Yubnub actually pull, both in people and server load? Knowing that would help to get a grip of what we would need to do going forward, if nothing else to avoid the service going down.

I would hate the service as such to go down, though I completely understand Jonathans situation and am grateful for to him creating it and maintaining it for this long.

I have blogged about the excellence of Yubnub at least two times, but would not mind doing a third, with submission to all the hacker news, Slashdot etc, or to promote a well written post that talks about the excellence of Yubnub. :)

/m

[Jonathan Aquino]

Hey guys,

I'm open these ideas. Let's keep discussing/thinking about it.

Jon

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[Liam K.]

I had an idea recently for a browser add-on that caches YubNub search keywords as one uses them and updates the cache on demand. However, I have no knowledge of how to code Firefox add-ons and am not sure if it's doable.

As a quick and dirty alternative, I've been setting up local Firefox keywords for my most common-used commands, which supercede the keyword.url preference. This avoids the issues when the site goes down and also saves a couple milliseconds of redirection time. However, I still have YubNub as a fallback for keywords I haven't saved.

[Michishige Kaito]

And some sort of edit/update ability. You know, without having to bother anyone with an email.

On Tue, Jan 01, 2013 at 02:02:31PM -0800, Tamas Kadar wrote:
> Ah, also, another thing. we really need some sort of community moderation
> for the commands.

>
> On Saturday, December 29, 2012 8:26:37 PM UTC+1, Ross Parker wrote:
> >
> > YubNub is down again. Jonathan has said in previous posts that he doesn't
> > want to ask for donations to move YubNub to another server, as his problem
> > isn't money, but a shortage of time. In my experience, I have to say that I
> > think money can solve the lack of time problem pretty well... but I guess
> > everyone is different.
> >
> > I wonder if it might be possible to solve both problems and have a
> > community buy-out of YubNub? This would solve the money and time problems -
> > and I am sure there are many on here who would like to at least maintain
> > YubNub, if not develop it further.
> >
> > Is this an idea to consider?
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Ross
> >
>

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[Michishige Kaito]

Hey,

I don't see the value in using Rails for something that mostly
redirects incoming requests. As you've said, the value lies in the
database. Perhaps we should consider looking at lighter
alternatives. Perhaps raw Rack?

On Tue, Jan 01, 2013 at 01:56:50PM -0800, Tamas Kadar wrote:
> Yeah and it's still running, although someone reported to me that unicode
> commands (i.e. commands that are russian characters) are not working. I
> have yet to look into those. But yeah, YubNub is upgraded to Rails 2.3.14
> (the latest 2.x version) and mostly working.
>
> Jamie Wilkinson emailed me about the database -- I am discussing that with
> him and Jon right now. He also started working on a version that can run on
> Heroku.
>
> There are a couple of things to do if we want to bring Yubnub into 2012,
> err, 2013:
> - Upgrade it to rails 3.2 (that's a big task. Upgrading Yubnub from rails
> 0.14 to 2.3 took me a few hours, but from there to rails 3+ it needs a lot
> of changes.
> - In my opinion, the value of Yubnub is not the app but the database;
> therefore Yubnub would benefit from a rewrite that uses the existing db
> structure, or extends it, or transforms it, whatever, just migrates the
> commands over. The rewrite can happen in rails or something smaller i.e.
> sinatra or even in another language-platform i.e. javascript/node.js)
> - A handful of yubnub commands depend on external php scripts. I haven't
> had the time (and motivation) to comb through all of them, and see how much
> work does it take to make them run somewhere else; they still run on the
> original host somewhere.
>
> I think I can provide hosting for whatever we end up with -- Heroku is nice
> but for a hobby project it gets really expensive really fast.

>
> On Sunday, December 30, 2012 5:33:34 PM UTC+1, Brian Armknecht wrote:
> >

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[Brian Armknecht]

Many of the external scripts you mention are hosted by Jonathan:

http://yubnub.org/kernel/ls?args=jonathanaquino.com

(He graciously hosted a bunch of scripts that were originally at Ning.com before Ning changed business models)

 

And the invaluable "scrape" and other commands are at efridge.net:

http://yubnub.org/kernel/ls?args=efridge.net

 

If YubNub were to be rebuilt, it would be good to have some of the more powerful commands (like %) integrated.

 

On Tuesday, January 1, 2013 3:56:50 PM UTC-6, Tamas Kadar wrote:

Yeah and it's still running, although someone reported to me that unicode commands (i.e. commands that are russian characters) are not working. I have yet to look into those. But yeah, YubNub is upgraded to Rails 2.3.14 (the latest 2.x version) and mostly working. 

Jamie Wilkinson emailed me about the database -- I am discussing that with him and Jon right now. He also started working on a version that can run on Heroku.

There are a couple of things to do if we want to bring Yubnub into 2012, err, 2013:

- Upgrade it to rails 3.2 (that's a big task. Upgrading Yubnub from rails 0.14 to 2.3 took me a few hours, but from there to rails 3+ it needs a lot of changes. 

- In my opinion, the value of Yubnub is not the app but the database; therefore Yubnub would benefit from a rewrite that uses the existing db structure, or extends it, or transforms it, whatever, just migrates the commands over. The rewrite can happen in rails or something smaller i.e. sinatra or even in another language-platform i.e. javascript/node.js)

- A handful of yubnub commands depend on external php scripts. I haven't had the time (and motivation) to comb through all of them, and see how much work does it take to make them run somewhere else; they still run on the original host somewhere.

I think I can provide hosting for whatever we end up with -- Heroku is nice but for a hobby project it gets really expensive really fast.

On Sunday, December 30, 2012 5:33:34 PM UTC+1, Brian Armknecht wrote:

[Brian Armknecht]

Are there other websites that would good models for how community moderation would work?  It would need to balance the ability to keep commands updated with the need to meet users' expectations that commands won't change functionality over time.

[Jonathan Aquino]

Anyone have recommendations for reliable web hosting that supports Ruby on Rails and PHP? Is Site5 good?

Jon

On Sunday, January 27, 2013, Brock Tice wrote:

I just want to add that I would be happy to volunteer time, money, or hosting to get YubNub reliable again. I feel like I'm working with one hand behind my back lately. I'd have posted sooner, but every time I went to look up how to contact someone, yubnub wouldn't load for me. I'm an experienced Linux HPC sysadmin with some HA experience as well.

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[Brock Tice]

On 01/28/2013 08:53 AM, Jonathan Aquino wrote:
> Anyone have recommendations for reliable web hosting that supports Ruby
> on Rails and PHP? Is Site5 good?

Linode should be pretty good. What kind of load does it generate?

--Brock

[Jonathan Aquino]

Thanks for the recommendation, Brock. I haven't measured the load. I would guess it's not huge.

Jonathan

[Brock Tice]

On 01/28/2013 07:29 PM, Jonathan Aquino wrote:
> Thanks for the recommendation, Brock. I haven't measured the load. I
> would guess it's not huge.

A small Linode should do it then. Other options are a Tiny Amazon EC2
instance, which will be free for one year with a new account to test it
out, or I can create a virtual server on my own server as well.

--Brock

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[Michishige Kaito]

My misinformed opinion is that the main problem concerning load would be the massive monolith that is rails.

Take it out and you can probably host yubnub on a free heroku server.

Sent from my phone

Jonathan Aquino <jonatha...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the recommendation, Brock. I haven't measured the load. I would guess it's not huge.

Jonathan

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 3:11 PM, Brock Tice <br...@brocktice.com> wrote:

On 01/28/2013 08:53 AM, Jonathan Aquino wrote:
> Anyone have recommendations for reliable web hosting that supports Ruby
> on Rails and PHP? Is Site5 good?

Linode should be pretty good. What kind of load does it generate?

--Brock

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[Justin Love]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 12:24 AM, Michishige Kaito <m...@mkaito.com> wrote:
> My misinformed opinion is that the main problem concerning load would be the
> massive monolith that is rails.
>
> Take it out and you can probably host yubnub on a free heroku server.

That might improve speed, but Heroku shrunk their databases a little
while ago, and you'd be in for at least $9/month. (I loaded a copy on
Heroku for kicks, and had to truncate the least used commands) Might
be possible to refactor to one of the other data stores with a free
plan, but that is probably more effort than it's worth.

--
Justin Love -- http://JustinLove.name/

[Jamie Wilkinson]

Related, I have a fork of YubNub that I've gotten work with Heroku, including a postgresql version of Jonathan's database:

http://github.com/jamiew/yubnub