I missed this when it was launched and it's very interesting to see your rationale. If you ever want a chat some time get in touch, I'm working on https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/

My ulterior motive is to ask you to add open data feeds for basic group and event listing information to your site - a free and open API and standard formats like ICAL (Just listings information about the next event, not private info like members names). I would never encourage event organisers to use a platform that didn't do this, as then their data is essentially being held hostage and it's hard for them to spread their information around to other places.

You mention rsync which can be fine. But there are tons of other solutions, many that will have snapshot features. I use borg backup, for instance. https://www.borgbackup.org/

Also, look into scriping your server setup with tools like Ansible or PyInfra. There is always the risk that bad things happen to servers, and when you want a new server it's great to be able to spin things up in a matter of minutes. Tools like these are profesional best practices these days.

In fact, if you have a scripted server setup and a server that doesn't collect data itself you may not even need backups. What is there to backup? Just spin up a new server with your scripts and carry on.

"Ask TechPosts.eu: Is there an EU Cloudflare alternative? I'm interested in CDN, DDoS mitigation and basic web security." Links to https://techposts.eu/post/153

"3 comments" below it links to https://techposts.eu/post/154

It looks like the latter is correct.

I would have sent feedback direct, but I can't see an about page or anything.

Open Tech Calendar, listing virtual tech events that include community participation: https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/

A listings site for virtually attending FOSDEM. The live streaming is great but the official site only lists sessions in the local Brussels time zone. You can choose your time zone here: https://virtuallyattend.teacaketech.scot/fosdem/2026/

So I've gone to FOSDEM once in person before COVID started and a few times virtually since.

They go to great efforts to provide good live streams, it's really appreciated.

So it's always seemed to me like an omission that their website only lets you browse events in the local Brussels timezone.

So I created this listings website that lets you browse in any timezone you want. Also, make and share lists.

It's a static website, all the work happens in Javascript. Thanks Luxon! https://moment.github.io/luxon/#/

All lists stored in local storage for privacy.

Feedback welcome!

James

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46430963

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

I'm James based in Scotland. For 7 years I ran Open Tech Calendar listing mainly in-person tech events.

After a pause I'm now relaunching Open Tech Calendar to list virtual events - this shift in focus is due to personal life changes that mean that virtual events is what I'm interested in, and looking at other sites that are now doing a great job listing in person events in Scotland. I know virtual events aren't as popular, but when I talked about this on social media, people suggested many reasons that virtual events may be preferred - public health, child care and other caring duties, people in rural areas.

I am specially going for events that include community participation - I'm keen to avoid "this virtual tech event could have been a video" and instead encourage events that people can get involved in.

We are also provide Open Data exports and are keen to encourage events to provide Open Data we (and others) can just import and reuse. Happy to help with options for that.

Brief word on the tech: I'm collecting data in a GitHub repository, then building that into a SQLite database with an Open Source library, then it's a Django site to provide all the filter options and open data feeds I wanted to provide. It's hosted on one virtual machine with Apache caching content.

So:

Constructive feedback on the project and site welcome!

If you know any good virtual tech events, do add them! You don't have to be the organiser. There are details how on the site, or just comment here with details.

Thanks, James

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46399892

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

But if you are I wouldn't recommend it.

PR's won't be able to show diff's. Worse, as soon as multiple people send a PR at once you'll have a really painful merge to resolve, and GitHub's tools won't help you at all. And you can't edit the files in GitHub's web UI.

I recommend one file per record, JSON, YAML, whatever non-binary format you want. But then you get:

* PR's with diff's that show you what's being changed

* Files that technical people can edit directly in GitHub's web editor

* If 2 people make PR's on different records at once it's an easy merge with no conflicts

* If 2 people make PR's on the same record at once ... ok, you might now have a merge conflict to resolve but it's in an easy text file and GitHub UI will let you see what it is.

You can of course then compile these data files into a SQLite file that can be served in a static website nicely - in fact if you see my other comments on this post I have a tool that does this. And on that note, sorry, I've done a few projects in this space so I have views :-)

But that's different from how you collect the data in a git repository in the first place - or are you suggesting just putting a Sqlite file in a git repository? If so I can think of one big reason against that.

However a lot of the "data in git repositories" projects I see don't have any such need, and then ...

> Why not just have a post-commit hook render the current HEAD to static files, into something like GitHub Pages?

... is a good plan. Usually they make a nice static website with the data that's easy for humans to read though.

Personally my view is that the main problem when they do this is that it gets much harder for non-technical people to contribute. At least that doesn't apply to package managers, where it's all technical people contributing.

There are a few other small problems - but it's interesting to see that so many other projects do this.

I ended up working on an open source software library to help in these cases: https://www.datatig.com/

Here's a write up of an introduction talk about it: https://www.datatig.com/2024/12/24/talk.html I'll add the scale point to future versions of this talk with a link to this post.

I took a Django app that's behind an Apache server and added cache-control and vary headers using Django view decorators, and added Header directives to some static files that Apache was serving. This had 2 effects:

* Meant I could add mod_cache to the Apache server and have common pages cached and served directly from Apache instead of going back to Django. Load testing with vegeta ( https://github.com/tsenart/vegeta ) shows the server can now handle multiples more simultaneous traffic than it could before.

* Meant users browsers now cache all the CSS/JS. As users move between HTML pages, there is now often only 1 request the browser makes. Good for snappier page loads with less server load.

But yeah, updating especially the sections on public vs private caches with regards to HTTPS would be good.

It seemed like this was a big elephant in the room - what's the point in spending ages putting API's carefully on your website if all the AI bots just ignore them anyway? There are times when you want your open data to be accessible to AI but they never really got into a discussion about good ways to actually do that.

Of course, scrapers should identify themselves and then respect robots.txt.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44391535

(I'm not affiliated with it)