Funkwhale is an open source grooveshark clone that anyone can self host. Since it offers a docker installation, spinning up an intance shouldn’t be too difficult, and the modest hardware requirements mean hosting should’nt cost much more than a couple dollars a month.

Wordpress is everybody’s favourite blogging platform. It’s simple, and you can be up and running within minutes. There’s a few caveats, though: your site isn’t as customizable as a self-hosted installation of wordpress can be and that can be a little more complicated to set up. Then once it’s setup you’ll end up with a slow-as-mud website and no upward scalability. What if in the future you wanted to add a rails application to your website and move the blog to a subdomain? Can’t do that here.

Simplicity is the name of the game. With Jekyll your content is the first thing you start creating, then you have Jekyll build your site and you’re left with a completely static website that you can host almost anywhere. The advantages to this are great: since the site is static and doesn’t require a database, hosting it is a cynch. You might even be able to host it for free! Since there’s no database there’s nothing a naughty user can mess with to damage your site. Finally since there’s no database calls to be made your site becomes incredibly fast. I think the pros far outweight the cons. If you don’t mind your site’s code being public then you can host it completely for free on github pages, too. Then it’s just a matter of pointing your domain there, setting up your cname file (a painless and simple setup) and you’re done!

Jekyll isn’t for everything, though. It’s not going to replace Ruby on Rails and you’re not about to build a large scale web application with it. The best fit for a Jekyll site is, I think, most often the one that needs it most: users that want to build a website, but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg to just get a simple message out there. Even if programming isn’t your thing setting Jekyll up is a breeze, and I can help you out with that.

Wordpress on Heroku is great, but difficult to setup. You will need to sign up for Amazon Web Services and Heroku. You’ll need to install the Heroku toolbelt on your machine using “wget -qO- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/install-ubuntu.sh | sh”. I’ll assume you’re running Linux for this, but I’ll see about a Windows tutorial as well later on. Setting up AWS is also not going to be covered right now in this tutorial.

\n\t
1. The first thing to do is setup LAMP on your Linux machine.
\n\t
2. Next get the latest version of Wordpress. Download it and unzip the file into your \"/var/www/html/\" folder.
\n\t
3. Download Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront.
\n\t
4. Unzip both of Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront into the wp-content/plugins folder.
\n\t
5. You should have been given access keys for your AWS user. Add them to your wp-config.php file like this:\n \t

   // AWS Access Keys //
   \n \tdefine( 'AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID', 'your_aws_access_key_id_here' );
   \n \tdefine( 'AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', 'your_aws_secret_access_key_here' );

   \n
\n\t
6. Go here and add your Unique Keys and Salts to your wp-config.php file like below:\n \t

   define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('NONCE_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('NONCE_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');

   \n
\n\t
7. Go to localhost/wordpress/ and run through the installation using the MySQL credentials you setup while setting up your LAMP stack. Check here if you're not sure what to do.
\n\t
8. Go to your dashboard, and click on the plugins tab.
\n\t
9. Activate both the Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront plugins. There should now be another tab at the bottom that says \"AWS\". If your AWS User is setup correctly then they should both work immediately and allow you to connect to a bucket.
\n\t
10. Go into your wordpress folder and open a terminal session there.
\n\t
11. In your terminal type $ git init That'll initialize the whole thing as a git repository.
\n\t
12. In your terminal type git add . to get all the WP files ready to be committed. This will take a second or two.
\n\t
13. Now type git commit -m 'Add your own commit message here' Wait for the wall of text to stop running.
\n\t
14. Now type heroku create That'll create a new Heroku app from that directory.
\n\t
15. Type heroku addons:add cleardb If all goes well then you're almost ready to push your installation to Heroku.
\n\t
16. Copy the code below with the Unique Keys and Salts you got earlier:\n \t

    heroku config:set AUTH_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tSECURE_AUTH_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tLOGGED_IN_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tNONCE_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tAUTH_SALT='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tSECURE_AUTH_SALT='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tLOGGED_IN_SALT='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tNONCE_SALT='put your unique phrase here'

    \n
\n\t
17. Again in the terminal type git checkout -b production You'll store your production environment variables here.
\n\t
18. Add this line to your wp-config.php file:\n\t

    $db = parse_url($_ENV[\"CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL\"]);

    \n
\n\t
19. Change your database information in wp-config.php to the code below:\n \t

    define('DB_NAME', trim($db[\"path\"],\"/\"));
    \n \tdefine('DB_USER', $db[\"user\"]);
    \n \tdefine('DB_PASSWORD', $db[\"pass\"]);
    \n \tdefine('DB_HOST', $db[\"host\"]);

    \n
\n\t
20. Change your Unthentication Unique Keys and Salts to the below:\n \t

    define('AUTH_KEY', getenv('AUTH_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', getenv('SECURE_AUTH_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_KEY', getenv('LOGGED_IN_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('NONCE_KEY', getenv('NONCE_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('AUTH_SALT', getenv('AUTH_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', getenv('SECURE_AUTH_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_SALT', getenv('LOGGED_IN_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('NONCE_SALT', getenv('NONCE_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID', getenv('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'));
    \n \tdefine('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', getenv('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'));

    \n
\n\t
21. Now you're all set. Type git push heroku production:master and let it finish. When that's done you can go to \"http://yourwordpressapp.heroku.com\" and complete your remote installation.\n
    \n\t
    1. In order to check out your remote installation simply switch back to the master branch with git checkout master
    \n
    \n
\n

Updating Wordpress

If you need to update Wordpress (mine updated twice while I was working on this) you’ll need to take a few steps:

\n\t
1. In a terminal in the html folder run sudo chown -R www-data:www-data wordpress/ That'll let you update wordpress locally through the app.
\n\t
2. Make sure you're on the master branch and update WP via the dashboard.
\n\t
3. Once Wordpress is finished updating run sudo chown -R your_user:your_user wordpress/ Now you'll be able to edit the folder yourself again.
\n\t
4. Commit the changes made by the update.
\n\t
5. Switch to the production branch and merge with master by running git merge master This shouldn't create any conflicts (it didn't with me).
\n\t
6. The wp-config file should be untouched, but check it just in case. If it doesn't have your production settings, simply edit the file again, and commit changes.
\n\t
7. Now run git push heroku production:master again, wait and your remote installation will be updated.\n
   \n\t
   • Remember to switch back to the master branch to get your local installation working again.
   \n
   \n
\n

Adding/updating themes and plugins

Adding/updating themes and plugins is easy.

\n\t
1. Download the theme or plugin.
\n\t
2. Make sure you're in your master branch. Unzip the theme/folder into it's respective folder.
\n\t
3. In your local installation active the theme or plugin.
\n\t
4. Commit the changes, then switch to production.
\n\t
5. Run git merge master This should not create any conflicts if the plugin/theme is new.\n
   \n\t
   • If you're updating a conflict might be caused. If so, then in the terminal type git reset --hard
   \n\t
   • Delete the older plugin/theme and replace with the new one, then merge again.
   \n
   \n
\n\t
6. The wp-config file should be untouched, but check it just in case. If it doesn't have your production settings, simply edit the file again, and commit changes.
\n\t
7. Now run git push heroku production:master again, wait and your remote installation should now have the plugin/theme.\n
   \n\t
   • Go to \"http://yourwordpressapp.heroku.com/wp-admin\" and Wordpress might ask you to update the database. Simply go ahead and everything should work fine.
   \n
   \n
\n

Wordpress on Heroku is great, but difficult to setup. You will need to sign up for Amazon Web Services and Heroku. You’ll need to install the Heroku toolbelt on your machine using “wget -qO- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/install-ubuntu.sh | sh”. I’ll assume you’re running Linux for this, but I’ll see about a Windows tutorial as well later on. Setting up AWS is also not going to be covered right now in this tutorial.

\n\t
1. The first thing to do is setup LAMP on your Linux machine.
\n\t
2. Next get the latest version of Wordpress. Download it and unzip the file into your \"/var/www/html/\" folder.
\n\t
3. Download Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront.
\n\t
4. Unzip both of Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront into the wp-content/plugins folder.
\n\t
5. You should have been given access keys for your AWS user. Add them to your wp-config.php file like this:\n \t

   // AWS Access Keys //
   \n \tdefine( 'AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID', 'your_aws_access_key_id_here' );
   \n \tdefine( 'AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', 'your_aws_secret_access_key_here' );

   \n
\n\t
6. Go here and add your Unique Keys and Salts to your wp-config.php file like below:\n \t

   define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('NONCE_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('NONCE_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');

   \n
\n\t
7. Go to localhost/wordpress/ and run through the installation using the MySQL credentials you setup while setting up your LAMP stack. Check here if you're not sure what to do.
\n\t
8. Go to your dashboard, and click on the plugins tab.
\n\t
9. Activate both the Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront plugins. There should now be another tab at the bottom that says \"AWS\". If your AWS User is setup correctly then they should both work immediately and allow you to connect to a bucket.
\n\t
10. Go into your wordpress folder and open a terminal session there.
\n\t
11. In your terminal type $ git init That'll initialize the whole thing as a git repository.
\n\t
12. In your terminal type git add . to get all the WP files ready to be committed. This will take a second or two.
\n\t
13. Now type git commit -m 'Add your own commit message here' Wait for the wall of text to stop running.
\n\t
14. Now type heroku create That'll create a new Heroku app from that directory.
\n\t
15. Type heroku addons:add cleardb If all goes well then you're almost ready to push your installation to Heroku.
\n\t
16. Copy the code below with the Unique Keys and Salts you got earlier:\n \t

    heroku config:set AUTH_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tSECURE_AUTH_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tLOGGED_IN_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tNONCE_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tAUTH_SALT='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tSECURE_AUTH_SALT='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tLOGGED_IN_SALT='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tNONCE_SALT='put your unique phrase here'

    \n
\n\t
17. Again in the terminal type git checkout -b production You'll store your production environment variables here.
\n\t
18. Add this line to your wp-config.php file:\n\t

    $db = parse_url($_ENV[\"CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL\"]);

    \n
\n\t
19. Change your database information in wp-config.php to the code below:\n \t

    define('DB_NAME', trim($db[\"path\"],\"/\"));
    \n \tdefine('DB_USER', $db[\"user\"]);
    \n \tdefine('DB_PASSWORD', $db[\"pass\"]);
    \n \tdefine('DB_HOST', $db[\"host\"]);

    \n
\n\t
20. Change your Unthentication Unique Keys and Salts to the below:\n \t

    define('AUTH_KEY', getenv('AUTH_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', getenv('SECURE_AUTH_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_KEY', getenv('LOGGED_IN_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('NONCE_KEY', getenv('NONCE_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('AUTH_SALT', getenv('AUTH_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', getenv('SECURE_AUTH_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_SALT', getenv('LOGGED_IN_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('NONCE_SALT', getenv('NONCE_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID', getenv('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'));
    \n \tdefine('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', getenv('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'));

    \n
\n\t
21. Now you're all set. Type git push heroku production:master and let it finish. When that's done you can go to \"http://yourwordpressapp.heroku.com\" and complete your remote installation.\n
    \n\t
    1. In order to check out your remote installation simply switch back to the master branch with git checkout master
    \n
    \n
\n

Updating Wordpress

If you need to update Wordpress (mine updated twice while I was working on this) you’ll need to take a few steps:

\n\t
1. In a terminal in the html folder run sudo chown -R www-data:www-data wordpress/ That'll let you update wordpress locally through the app.
\n\t
2. Make sure you're on the master branch and update WP via the dashboard.
\n\t
3. Once Wordpress is finished updating run sudo chown -R your_user:your_user wordpress/ Now you'll be able to edit the folder yourself again.
\n\t
4. Commit the changes made by the update.
\n\t
5. Switch to the production branch and merge with master by running git merge master This shouldn't create any conflicts (it didn't with me).
\n\t
6. The wp-config file should be untouched, but check it just in case. If it doesn't have your production settings, simply edit the file again, and commit changes.
\n\t
7. Now run git push heroku production:master again, wait and your remote installation will be updated.\n
   \n\t
   • Remember to switch back to the master branch to get your local installation working again.
   \n
   \n
\n

Adding/updating themes and plugins

Adding/updating themes and plugins is easy.

\n\t
1. Download the theme or plugin.
\n\t
2. Make sure you're in your master branch. Unzip the theme/folder into it's respective folder.
\n\t
3. In your local installation active the theme or plugin.
\n\t
4. Commit the changes, then switch to production.
\n\t
5. Run git merge master This should not create any conflicts if the plugin/theme is new.\n
   \n\t
   • If you're updating a conflict might be caused. If so, then in the terminal type git reset --hard
   \n\t
   • Delete the older plugin/theme and replace with the new one, then merge again.
   \n
   \n
\n\t
6. The wp-config file should be untouched, but check it just in case. If it doesn't have your production settings, simply edit the file again, and commit changes.
\n\t
7. Now run git push heroku production:master again, wait and your remote installation should now have the plugin/theme.\n
   \n\t
   • Go to \"http://yourwordpressapp.heroku.com/wp-admin\" and Wordpress might ask you to update the database. Simply go ahead and everything should work fine.
   \n
   \n
\n

* TODO Do a thing\nSome notes, that are insightful.\n

What is org-mode?

Org-mode is a project management solution, but it’s a little different that all that I’ve tried. It’s plain text, and requires no database. It doesn’t have to sit on a server, or even require anything installed if you really don’t want to install it. At a low level, “org-mode” is two things:

The syntax

Org-mode’s syntax is super simple, but super powerful. A basic org-mode file might look like this:

* TODO Do a thing\nSome notes, that are insightful.\n

That’s really simple, and should be easy enough to understand even without a primer on the syntax:

\n
• You have one thing to do: a thing
\n
• There are some notes under that
\n

That by itself isn’t that revolutionary, and not all that useful if you want to manage a larger project. That’s where the second “org-mode” comes in:

The software

As with ledger, org-mode is cool, but not that powerful until you use it with the software. This time, however, instead of a simple binary you install, org-mode is a part of an entire suit of emacs tools. This might make it sound super overwhelming, and may be off-putting. I would argue that the stack you can install makes it well worth the effort:

\n
• org-edna\nThis handles task dependencies. So you can have tasks that depend on each other in any way you desire ((non-)heirarchical, lineear, children-parent relationships, etc). \nThis alone makes org-mode power powerful than anything I’ve ever used before.
\n
• org-id\nVery simply, it sets a UUID for task automatically, so you don’t have to set one. Super useful alongside org-edna for your more complicated task relationships.
\n
• org-roam\nNote taking, and mind-mapping. If you’ve ever found youself writing documentation inside your code, and don’t want to overload your documents with entire treatises that may or may not go off-topic, org-roam is for you. It, alone, has a massive following, and is incredibly powerful.
\n

This is all well and good, but how does it compare to other project management tools?

Comparisons

Taskwarrior

My previous favourite, and my golden boy for almost a year, before finding org-mode. My main gripe with every project management tool is always that they require me to format my projects to suit their thought software. Taskwarrior’s blocking-tasks allowed me to define those relationships however I liked, allowing me the freedom to define my proejcts as I saw fit, instead of how taskwarrior saw fit. org-mode+org-edna does the same thing, plus it’s plain text.

Asana

I didn’t like Asana, but I used it a lot for work, so I’ll cover it here: again, my main gripe was I couldn’t manage projects the way I thought about them.

trello

Trello’s methodology is certainly useful, but again, I didn’t get to do things to way I wanted. Noticing a theme here yet?

gitlab

Gitlab’s project management toolchain is powerful, and is better than org-mode in many ways for software development. If you want to manage a non-software project, though, it starts to fall flat, and feels cumbersome to use.

If you’re still here, I’ll assume you’re either sold, or still interested. So, I’ll move onto some of the advantages org-mode has that I either never see, or don’t see often enough.

Advantages

It’s plain text

This one should be obvious, and I even mentioned it earlier, but I’ll reiterate: having a plain text tool is useful for a few reasons:

\n
• You can read it anywhere, no need for anything installed.
\n
• You can edit it anywhere, with any text editor.
\n
• It can be synced anywhere, easily.
\n

Some tools do allow plain text project management, but their capabilities pale in comparison to org-mode+it’s software. All this without having to host a server, or install a database, or pay for anything!\nOn top of that, if you sync with gitlab you can read your org-mode (and org-roam) files right in the gitlab client! I think you should be able to do the same on github as well.

It’s community

org-mode (the syntax) is open for anyone to check out, and it’s software is all open-source as well. This isn’t the best part, though. The best part is the passionate community that’s constanly building new tools and capabilities that you can add on to org-mode. org-roam, and org-edna are just two, but I’m sure you can find dozens more with some googling if you like.

Disadvantages

Nothing is perfect, and org-mode is no different:

It’s not plug-and-play

Setting up org-mode isn’t necessarily difficult, but it’s no cake walk either. It’ll take time, but I think it’s well worth the effort.

No automated backups

This one isn’t such a huge deal, but tools like asana, trello, and notion sort of have it, so I felt it should be included. Syncing with git gives you this functionality, but that’s for another day.

Nothing fancy going on

If you’re the type of person that needs to see some fancy graphics, then I’m afraid you’d out of luck. emacs itself, though, is highly configurable, and can be made quite beautiful.

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           500\n    assets:wallet               -500\n

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    assets:wallet               -500 GYD\n

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    liabilities:debt:Joe        -200 GYD\n    assets:wallet               -300 GYD\n

Ledger is so simple it’s amazing!

I’ve been through many money manager applications: GnuCash, MoneyLover, Firefly, YNAB (briefly). \nI’ve even tried to build my own, but was too lazy.

They all lacked something that I really wanted (MoneyLover, Firefly), or were too expensive for me (YNAB), finicky/problematic (MoneyLover) or difficult for me to use across all my devices (GnuCash).

Before Ledger I thought Firefly would be the one: it’s a FOSS laravel application, which is something I have loads of experience with, so I figured if it can’t do what I want right now, I’ll just make it do what I want. I never got around to that, and, now, I’ve fallen in love with something else.

Why, though? What’s so great about Ledger?

Naturally, it’s FOSS, but like I said it’s simple. So simple, that I can show how it works right now:

Open a text file, and type this into it:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           500\n    assets:wallet               -500\n

That’s a transaction in ledger. That may not seem like much, and it isn’t. Ledger truly shines when you get the CLI tool, that allows you to perform queries on your ledger file. Like show your balance with ledger -f ledger.txt bal.

That’s still not a lot, admitidely, but there’s more. Ledger allows for handling your commodities instead of just money. Think of it this way: you bought a Gatorade somewhere, and paid for it with some money. The exchanged one commodity for another. In other words, the transaction above can now look like this:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    assets:wallet               -500 GYD\n

You can read that as “Bought 1 Gatorade for 500 Guyana Dollars”. What that allows you to do, now, is a two things:

\n
1. Keep track of how many Gatorade you’ve bought
\n
2. Keep track of the price of Gatorade over time (more on that later)
\n
3. Do silly things like calculate how many Gatorades you can buy with the money in your wallet (ledger -f ledger.txt bal wal -X Gatorade)
\n

This feature is something I’ve wanted to be able to do forever, and none of the other applications I’ve used have included it.

Since ledger is a double-entry system, your transactions can get even fancier. Say your friend helped you pay for the Gatorade. Now your transaction looks like this:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    liabilities:debt:Joe        -200 GYD\n    assets:wallet               -300 GYD\n

This will now allow you to see how much you owe Joe, without having to do multiple transactions, like some applications would have you do.

Now comes the part that’s usually hardest, or costs money: using ledger on multiple devices. With Firefly, this meant running a relational database somewhere (costs money), or with GnuCash this meant synchronizing their database file across devices, finding an application on each operating system that’ll open it and allow me to add stuff to it… you see my dilema. With Ledger this is comically simple since it’s a text file:

\n
• Sync across my devices with anything from Google Drive to Syncthing to some custom S3 solution.
\n
• Put it in git (this is what I did, because that let’s me do some other cool stuff).
\n

Since it’s just text, it’s editable from basically anywhere, so making entries isn’t much of a problem anywhere.

Now, you may be thinking it sounds rather annoying to have to edit a text file on my phone. What happens if I’m in the middle of something, and just want to make a quick entry?

That’s where the community comes in:\nSee, I’m not the only crazy person out here. I’m far from the smartest, too. Ledger, and what’s called “plain text accounting” is already popular enough that there’s a subreddit and a website, not to mention the ledger website has exceptional documentation on how much you can do: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html.

There are a couple Android and iOS apps out there, and countless ports or forks to choose from, as well as some nice web options.

One more thing!

Something I’ve wanted to do, but haven’t been able to: keep track of my taxes. More specifically, keep track of how much I owe the tax-man when I get paid for something, and then keep track of how much I can deduct when I buy stuff. Ledger can do it, rather easily. See an explanation here: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Concrete-Example-of-Automated-Transactions

Bitwarden does everything Dashlane does, better.

That’s the end of the post. You can go home, now.

If you want a further breakdown, consider these points:

Security, most important, most overlooked

From a pure security standpoint, it’s a toss-up between Dashlane and Bitwarden. Both offer best-in-class security, so your passwords are safe on both.

Bitwarden offers 2FA auditing at the organization level for business users, while Dashlane does not. Enforcing is on the roadmap.

I would add that Bitwarden can offer a little more peace of mind for two reasons:

1. It’s open source.

A great many of you just sighed, but it being open source means it can be checked constantly for issues. The source for all their software is here.

This also means that if Bitwarden doesn’t have a feature you like, or something works in a way you don’t like, you can just change it.

2. It’s self-hostable.

Some hacker is far more likely to attack the behemoth that is Dashlane with it’s millions of user passwords, than they are to attack your little server with your 1000 passwords (at best). This also means that you are in control of your data, which is good news for the tin-foil hat wearers out there.

You can even get Bitwarden’s paid features for the price of hosting your server by following this guide

Nobody cares about security, though, right? So let’s move on to the good stuff:

Features, the good stuff (also price)

Bitwarden offers every feature Dashlane does with loads more on top of those, and more of them for free. It’s paid version is also cheaper than Dashlane’s.

Here’s a table I stole, that compares both service’s features:

Note 1: In work profile apps Bitwarden might not pop up a dialog automatically inviting you to auto-fill, but it’ll display a notification you can tap to do it.

Note 2: CLI allows individual attachments to be exported. The user would have to write a script to iterate through and export all of them.

Note 3: On the product roadmap, not yet implemented as of writing (Click to see the feature request)

Extra notes

If you aren’t interested in either Bitwarden or Dashlane, or just want to see what else is out there, Consumer Advocate wrote a great article breaking down a bunch of password managers by their price, feature-set, overall user experience and more. It’s a great read, click here to check it out.

Bitwarden does everything Dashlane does, better.

That’s the end of the post. You can go home, now.

If you want a further breakdown, consider these points:

Security, most important, most overlooked

From a pure security standpoint, it’s a toss-up between Dashlane and Bitwarden. Both offer best-in-class security, so your passwords are safe on both.

Bitwarden offers 2FA auditing at the organization level for business users, while Dashlane does not. Enforcing is on the roadmap.

I would add that Bitwarden can offer a little more peace of mind for two reasons:

1. It’s open source.

A great many of you just sighed, but it being open source means it can be checked constantly for issues. The source for all their software is here.

This also means that if Bitwarden doesn’t have a feature you like, or something works in a way you don’t like, you can just change it.

2. It’s self-hostable.

Some hacker is far more likely to attack the behemoth that is Dashlane with it’s millions of user passwords, than they are to attack your little server with your 1000 passwords (at best). This also means that you are in control of your data, which is good news for the tin-foil hat wearers out there.

You can even get Bitwarden’s paid features for the price of hosting your server by following this guide

Nobody cares about security, though, right? So let’s move on to the good stuff:

Features, the good stuff (also price)

Bitwarden offers every feature Dashlane does with loads more on top of those, and more of them for free. It’s paid version is also cheaper than Dashlane’s.

Here’s a table I stole, that compares both service’s features:

Note 1: In work profile apps Bitwarden might not pop up a dialog automatically inviting you to auto-fill, but it’ll display a notification you can tap to do it.

Note 2: CLI allows individual attachments to be exported. The user would have to write a script to iterate through and export all of them.

Note 3: On the product roadmap, not yet implemented as of writing (Click to see the feature request)

Extra notes

If you aren’t interested in either Bitwarden or Dashlane, or just want to see what else is out there, Consumer Advocate wrote a great article breaking down a bunch of password managers by their price, feature-set, overall user experience and more. It’s a great read, click here to check it out.

Bitwarden does everything Dashlane does, better.

That’s the end of the post. You can go home, now.

If you want a further breakdown, consider these points:

Security, most important, most overlooked

From a pure security standpoint, it’s a toss-up between Dashlane and Bitwarden. Both offer best-in-class security, so your passwords are safe on both.

Bitwarden offers 2FA auditing at the organization level for business users, while Dashlane does not. Enforcing is on the roadmap.

I would add that Bitwarden can offer a little more peace of mind for two reasons:

1. It’s open source.

A great many of you just sighed, but it being open source means it can be checked constantly for issues. The source for all their software is here.

This also means that if Bitwarden doesn’t have a feature you like, or something works in a way you don’t like, you can just change it.

2. It’s self-hostable.

Some hacker is far more likely to attack the behemoth that is Dashlane with it’s millions of user passwords, than they are to attack your little server with your 1000 passwords (at best). This also means that you are in control of your data, which is good news for the tin-foil hat wearers out there.

You can even get Bitwarden’s paid features for the price of hosting your server by following this guide

Nobody cares about security, though, right? So let’s move on to the good stuff:

Features, the good stuff (also price)

Bitwarden offers every feature Dashlane does with loads more on top of those, and more of them for free. It’s paid version is also cheaper than Dashlane’s.

Here’s a table I stole, that compares both service’s features:

Note 1: In work profile apps Bitwarden might not pop up a dialog automatically inviting you to auto-fill, but it’ll display a notification you can tap to do it.

Note 2: CLI allows individual attachments to be exported. The user would have to write a script to iterate through and export all of them.

Note 3: On the product roadmap, not yet implemented as of writing (Click to see the feature request)

Extra notes

If you aren’t interested in either Bitwarden or Dashlane, or just want to see what else is out there, Consumer Advocate wrote a great article breaking down a bunch of password managers by their price, feature-set, overall user experience and more. It’s a great read, click here to check it out.

Funkwhale is an open source grooveshark clone that anyone can self host. Since it offers a docker installation, spinning up an intance shouldn’t be too difficult, and the modest hardware requirements mean hosting should’nt cost much more than a couple dollars a month.

Wordpress is everybody’s favourite blogging platform. It’s simple, and you can be up and running within minutes. There’s a few caveats, though: your site isn’t as customizable as a self-hosted installation of wordpress can be and that can be a little more complicated to set up. Then once it’s setup you’ll end up with a slow-as-mud website and no upward scalability. What if in the future you wanted to add a rails application to your website and move the blog to a subdomain? Can’t do that here.

Simplicity is the name of the game. With Jekyll your content is the first thing you start creating, then you have Jekyll build your site and you’re left with a completely static website that you can host almost anywhere. The advantages to this are great: since the site is static and doesn’t require a database, hosting it is a cynch. You might even be able to host it for free! Since there’s no database there’s nothing a naughty user can mess with to damage your site. Finally since there’s no database calls to be made your site becomes incredibly fast. I think the pros far outweight the cons. If you don’t mind your site’s code being public then you can host it completely for free on github pages, too. Then it’s just a matter of pointing your domain there, setting up your cname file (a painless and simple setup) and you’re done!

Jekyll isn’t for everything, though. It’s not going to replace Ruby on Rails and you’re not about to build a large scale web application with it. The best fit for a Jekyll site is, I think, most often the one that needs it most: users that want to build a website, but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg to just get a simple message out there. Even if programming isn’t your thing setting Jekyll up is a breeze, and I can help you out with that.

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           500\n    assets:wallet               -500\n

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    assets:wallet               -500 GYD\n

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    liabilities:debt:Joe        -200 GYD\n    assets:wallet               -300 GYD\n

Ledger is so simple it’s amazing!

I’ve been through many money manager applications: GnuCash, MoneyLover, Firefly, YNAB (briefly). \nI’ve even tried to build my own, but was too lazy.

They all lacked something that I really wanted (MoneyLover, Firefly), or were too expensive for me (YNAB), finicky/problematic (MoneyLover) or difficult for me to use across all my devices (GnuCash).

Before Ledger I thought Firefly would be the one: it’s a FOSS laravel application, which is something I have loads of experience with, so I figured if it can’t do what I want right now, I’ll just make it do what I want. I never got around to that, and, now, I’ve fallen in love with something else.

Why, though? What’s so great about Ledger?

Naturally, it’s FOSS, but like I said it’s simple. So simple, that I can show how it works right now:

Open a text file, and type this into it:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           500\n    assets:wallet               -500\n

That’s a transaction in ledger. That may not seem like much, and it isn’t. Ledger truly shines when you get the CLI tool, that allows you to perform queries on your ledger file. Like show your balance with ledger -f ledger.txt bal.

That’s still not a lot, admitidely, but there’s more. Ledger allows for handling your commodities instead of just money. Think of it this way: you bought a Gatorade somewhere, and paid for it with some money. The exchanged one commodity for another. In other words, the transaction above can now look like this:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    assets:wallet               -500 GYD\n

You can read that as “Bought 1 Gatorade for 500 Guyana Dollars”. What that allows you to do, now, is a two things:

\n
1. Keep track of how many Gatorade you’ve bought
\n
2. Keep track of the price of Gatorade over time (more on that later)
\n
3. Do silly things like calculate how many Gatorades you can buy with the money in your wallet (ledger -f ledger.txt bal wal -X Gatorade)
\n

This feature is something I’ve wanted to be able to do forever, and none of the other applications I’ve used have included it.

Since ledger is a double-entry system, your transactions can get even fancier. Say your friend helped you pay for the Gatorade. Now your transaction looks like this:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    liabilities:debt:Joe        -200 GYD\n    assets:wallet               -300 GYD\n

This will now allow you to see how much you owe Joe, without having to do multiple transactions, like some applications would have you do.

Now comes the part that’s usually hardest, or costs money: using ledger on multiple devices. With Firefly, this meant running a relational database somewhere (costs money), or with GnuCash this meant synchronizing their database file across devices, finding an application on each operating system that’ll open it and allow me to add stuff to it… you see my dilema. With Ledger this is comically simple since it’s a text file:

\n
• Sync across my devices with anything from Google Drive to Syncthing to some custom S3 solution.
\n
• Put it in git (this is what I did, because that let’s me do some other cool stuff).
\n

Since it’s just text, it’s editable from basically anywhere, so making entries isn’t much of a problem anywhere.

Now, you may be thinking it sounds rather annoying to have to edit a text file on my phone. What happens if I’m in the middle of something, and just want to make a quick entry?

That’s where the community comes in:\nSee, I’m not the only crazy person out here. I’m far from the smartest, too. Ledger, and what’s called “plain text accounting” is already popular enough that there’s a subreddit and a website, not to mention the ledger website has exceptional documentation on how much you can do: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html.

There are a couple Android and iOS apps out there, and countless ports or forks to choose from, as well as some nice web options.

One more thing!

Something I’ve wanted to do, but haven’t been able to: keep track of my taxes. More specifically, keep track of how much I owe the tax-man when I get paid for something, and then keep track of how much I can deduct when I buy stuff. Ledger can do it, rather easily. See an explanation here: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Concrete-Example-of-Automated-Transactions

Bitwarden does everything Dashlane does, better.

That’s the end of the post. You can go home, now.

If you want a further breakdown, consider these points:

Security, most important, most overlooked

From a pure security standpoint, it’s a toss-up between Dashlane and Bitwarden. Both offer best-in-class security, so your passwords are safe on both.

Bitwarden offers 2FA auditing at the organization level for business users, while Dashlane does not. Enforcing is on the roadmap.

I would add that Bitwarden can offer a little more peace of mind for two reasons:

1. It’s open source.

A great many of you just sighed, but it being open source means it can be checked constantly for issues. The source for all their software is here.

This also means that if Bitwarden doesn’t have a feature you like, or something works in a way you don’t like, you can just change it.

2. It’s self-hostable.

Some hacker is far more likely to attack the behemoth that is Dashlane with it’s millions of user passwords, than they are to attack your little server with your 1000 passwords (at best). This also means that you are in control of your data, which is good news for the tin-foil hat wearers out there.

You can even get Bitwarden’s paid features for the price of hosting your server by following this guide

Nobody cares about security, though, right? So let’s move on to the good stuff:

Features, the good stuff (also price)

Bitwarden offers every feature Dashlane does with loads more on top of those, and more of them for free. It’s paid version is also cheaper than Dashlane’s.

Here’s a table I stole, that compares both service’s features:

Note 1: In work profile apps Bitwarden might not pop up a dialog automatically inviting you to auto-fill, but it’ll display a notification you can tap to do it.

Note 2: CLI allows individual attachments to be exported. The user would have to write a script to iterate through and export all of them.

Note 3: On the product roadmap, not yet implemented as of writing (Click to see the feature request)

Extra notes

If you aren’t interested in either Bitwarden or Dashlane, or just want to see what else is out there, Consumer Advocate wrote a great article breaking down a bunch of password managers by their price, feature-set, overall user experience and more. It’s a great read, click here to check it out.

Funkwhale is an open source grooveshark clone that anyone can self host. Since it offers a docker installation, spinning up an intance shouldn’t be too difficult, and the modest hardware requirements mean hosting should’nt cost much more than a couple dollars a month.

Funkwhale is an open source grooveshark clone that anyone can self host. Since it offers a docker installation, spinning up an intance shouldn’t be too difficult, and the modest hardware requirements mean hosting should’nt cost much more than a couple dollars a month.

Funkwhale is an open source grooveshark clone that anyone can self host. Since it offers a docker installation, spinning up an intance shouldn’t be too difficult, and the modest hardware requirements mean hosting should’nt cost much more than a couple dollars a month.

Wordpress is everybody’s favourite blogging platform. It’s simple, and you can be up and running within minutes. There’s a few caveats, though: your site isn’t as customizable as a self-hosted installation of wordpress can be and that can be a little more complicated to set up. Then once it’s setup you’ll end up with a slow-as-mud website and no upward scalability. What if in the future you wanted to add a rails application to your website and move the blog to a subdomain? Can’t do that here.

Simplicity is the name of the game. With Jekyll your content is the first thing you start creating, then you have Jekyll build your site and you’re left with a completely static website that you can host almost anywhere. The advantages to this are great: since the site is static and doesn’t require a database, hosting it is a cynch. You might even be able to host it for free! Since there’s no database there’s nothing a naughty user can mess with to damage your site. Finally since there’s no database calls to be made your site becomes incredibly fast. I think the pros far outweight the cons. If you don’t mind your site’s code being public then you can host it completely for free on github pages, too. Then it’s just a matter of pointing your domain there, setting up your cname file (a painless and simple setup) and you’re done!

Jekyll isn’t for everything, though. It’s not going to replace Ruby on Rails and you’re not about to build a large scale web application with it. The best fit for a Jekyll site is, I think, most often the one that needs it most: users that want to build a website, but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg to just get a simple message out there. Even if programming isn’t your thing setting Jekyll up is a breeze, and I can help you out with that.

Wordpress on Heroku is great, but difficult to setup. You will need to sign up for Amazon Web Services and Heroku. You’ll need to install the Heroku toolbelt on your machine using “wget -qO- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/install-ubuntu.sh | sh”. I’ll assume you’re running Linux for this, but I’ll see about a Windows tutorial as well later on. Setting up AWS is also not going to be covered right now in this tutorial.

\n\t
1. The first thing to do is setup LAMP on your Linux machine.
\n\t
2. Next get the latest version of Wordpress. Download it and unzip the file into your \"/var/www/html/\" folder.
\n\t
3. Download Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront.
\n\t
4. Unzip both of Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront into the wp-content/plugins folder.
\n\t
5. You should have been given access keys for your AWS user. Add them to your wp-config.php file like this:\n \t

   // AWS Access Keys //
   \n \tdefine( 'AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID', 'your_aws_access_key_id_here' );
   \n \tdefine( 'AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', 'your_aws_secret_access_key_here' );

   \n
\n\t
6. Go here and add your Unique Keys and Salts to your wp-config.php file like below:\n \t

   define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('NONCE_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('NONCE_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');

   \n
\n\t
7. Go to localhost/wordpress/ and run through the installation using the MySQL credentials you setup while setting up your LAMP stack. Check here if you're not sure what to do.
\n\t
8. Go to your dashboard, and click on the plugins tab.
\n\t
9. Activate both the Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront plugins. There should now be another tab at the bottom that says \"AWS\". If your AWS User is setup correctly then they should both work immediately and allow you to connect to a bucket.
\n\t
10. Go into your wordpress folder and open a terminal session there.
\n\t
11. In your terminal type $ git init That'll initialize the whole thing as a git repository.
\n\t
12. In your terminal type git add . to get all the WP files ready to be committed. This will take a second or two.
\n\t
13. Now type git commit -m 'Add your own commit message here' Wait for the wall of text to stop running.
\n\t
14. Now type heroku create That'll create a new Heroku app from that directory.
\n\t
15. Type heroku addons:add cleardb If all goes well then you're almost ready to push your installation to Heroku.
\n\t
16. Copy the code below with the Unique Keys and Salts you got earlier:\n \t

    heroku config:set AUTH_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tSECURE_AUTH_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tLOGGED_IN_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tNONCE_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tAUTH_SALT='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tSECURE_AUTH_SALT='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tLOGGED_IN_SALT='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tNONCE_SALT='put your unique phrase here'

    \n
\n\t
17. Again in the terminal type git checkout -b production You'll store your production environment variables here.
\n\t
18. Add this line to your wp-config.php file:\n\t

    $db = parse_url($_ENV[\"CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL\"]);

    \n
\n\t
19. Change your database information in wp-config.php to the code below:\n \t

    define('DB_NAME', trim($db[\"path\"],\"/\"));
    \n \tdefine('DB_USER', $db[\"user\"]);
    \n \tdefine('DB_PASSWORD', $db[\"pass\"]);
    \n \tdefine('DB_HOST', $db[\"host\"]);

    \n
\n\t
20. Change your Unthentication Unique Keys and Salts to the below:\n \t

    define('AUTH_KEY', getenv('AUTH_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', getenv('SECURE_AUTH_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_KEY', getenv('LOGGED_IN_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('NONCE_KEY', getenv('NONCE_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('AUTH_SALT', getenv('AUTH_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', getenv('SECURE_AUTH_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_SALT', getenv('LOGGED_IN_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('NONCE_SALT', getenv('NONCE_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID', getenv('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'));
    \n \tdefine('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', getenv('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'));

    \n
\n\t
21. Now you're all set. Type git push heroku production:master and let it finish. When that's done you can go to \"http://yourwordpressapp.heroku.com\" and complete your remote installation.\n
    \n\t
    1. In order to check out your remote installation simply switch back to the master branch with git checkout master
    \n
    \n
\n

Updating Wordpress

If you need to update Wordpress (mine updated twice while I was working on this) you’ll need to take a few steps:

\n\t
1. In a terminal in the html folder run sudo chown -R www-data:www-data wordpress/ That'll let you update wordpress locally through the app.
\n\t
2. Make sure you're on the master branch and update WP via the dashboard.
\n\t
3. Once Wordpress is finished updating run sudo chown -R your_user:your_user wordpress/ Now you'll be able to edit the folder yourself again.
\n\t
4. Commit the changes made by the update.
\n\t
5. Switch to the production branch and merge with master by running git merge master This shouldn't create any conflicts (it didn't with me).
\n\t
6. The wp-config file should be untouched, but check it just in case. If it doesn't have your production settings, simply edit the file again, and commit changes.
\n\t
7. Now run git push heroku production:master again, wait and your remote installation will be updated.\n
   \n\t
   • Remember to switch back to the master branch to get your local installation working again.
   \n
   \n
\n

Adding/updating themes and plugins

Adding/updating themes and plugins is easy.

\n\t
1. Download the theme or plugin.
\n\t
2. Make sure you're in your master branch. Unzip the theme/folder into it's respective folder.
\n\t
3. In your local installation active the theme or plugin.
\n\t
4. Commit the changes, then switch to production.
\n\t
5. Run git merge master This should not create any conflicts if the plugin/theme is new.\n
   \n\t
   • If you're updating a conflict might be caused. If so, then in the terminal type git reset --hard
   \n\t
   • Delete the older plugin/theme and replace with the new one, then merge again.
   \n
   \n
\n\t
6. The wp-config file should be untouched, but check it just in case. If it doesn't have your production settings, simply edit the file again, and commit changes.
\n\t
7. Now run git push heroku production:master again, wait and your remote installation should now have the plugin/theme.\n
   \n\t
   • Go to \"http://yourwordpressapp.heroku.com/wp-admin\" and Wordpress might ask you to update the database. Simply go ahead and everything should work fine.
   \n
   \n
\n

Bitwarden does everything Dashlane does, better.

That’s the end of the post. You can go home, now.

If you want a further breakdown, consider these points:

Security, most important, most overlooked

From a pure security standpoint, it’s a toss-up between Dashlane and Bitwarden. Both offer best-in-class security, so your passwords are safe on both.

Bitwarden offers 2FA auditing at the organization level for business users, while Dashlane does not. Enforcing is on the roadmap.

I would add that Bitwarden can offer a little more peace of mind for two reasons:

1. It’s open source.

A great many of you just sighed, but it being open source means it can be checked constantly for issues. The source for all their software is here.

This also means that if Bitwarden doesn’t have a feature you like, or something works in a way you don’t like, you can just change it.

2. It’s self-hostable.

Some hacker is far more likely to attack the behemoth that is Dashlane with it’s millions of user passwords, than they are to attack your little server with your 1000 passwords (at best). This also means that you are in control of your data, which is good news for the tin-foil hat wearers out there.

You can even get Bitwarden’s paid features for the price of hosting your server by following this guide

Nobody cares about security, though, right? So let’s move on to the good stuff:

Features, the good stuff (also price)

Bitwarden offers every feature Dashlane does with loads more on top of those, and more of them for free. It’s paid version is also cheaper than Dashlane’s.

Here’s a table I stole, that compares both service’s features:

Note 1: In work profile apps Bitwarden might not pop up a dialog automatically inviting you to auto-fill, but it’ll display a notification you can tap to do it.

Note 2: CLI allows individual attachments to be exported. The user would have to write a script to iterate through and export all of them.

Note 3: On the product roadmap, not yet implemented as of writing (Click to see the feature request)

Extra notes

If you aren’t interested in either Bitwarden or Dashlane, or just want to see what else is out there, Consumer Advocate wrote a great article breaking down a bunch of password managers by their price, feature-set, overall user experience and more. It’s a great read, click here to check it out.

Funkwhale is an open source grooveshark clone that anyone can self host. Since it offers a docker installation, spinning up an intance shouldn’t be too difficult, and the modest hardware requirements mean hosting should’nt cost much more than a couple dollars a month.

Wordpress is everybody’s favourite blogging platform. It’s simple, and you can be up and running within minutes. There’s a few caveats, though: your site isn’t as customizable as a self-hosted installation of wordpress can be and that can be a little more complicated to set up. Then once it’s setup you’ll end up with a slow-as-mud website and no upward scalability. What if in the future you wanted to add a rails application to your website and move the blog to a subdomain? Can’t do that here.

Simplicity is the name of the game. With Jekyll your content is the first thing you start creating, then you have Jekyll build your site and you’re left with a completely static website that you can host almost anywhere. The advantages to this are great: since the site is static and doesn’t require a database, hosting it is a cynch. You might even be able to host it for free! Since there’s no database there’s nothing a naughty user can mess with to damage your site. Finally since there’s no database calls to be made your site becomes incredibly fast. I think the pros far outweight the cons. If you don’t mind your site’s code being public then you can host it completely for free on github pages, too. Then it’s just a matter of pointing your domain there, setting up your cname file (a painless and simple setup) and you’re done!

Jekyll isn’t for everything, though. It’s not going to replace Ruby on Rails and you’re not about to build a large scale web application with it. The best fit for a Jekyll site is, I think, most often the one that needs it most: users that want to build a website, but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg to just get a simple message out there. Even if programming isn’t your thing setting Jekyll up is a breeze, and I can help you out with that.

Wordpress is everybody’s favourite blogging platform. It’s simple, and you can be up and running within minutes. There’s a few caveats, though: your site isn’t as customizable as a self-hosted installation of wordpress can be and that can be a little more complicated to set up. Then once it’s setup you’ll end up with a slow-as-mud website and no upward scalability. What if in the future you wanted to add a rails application to your website and move the blog to a subdomain? Can’t do that here.

Simplicity is the name of the game. With Jekyll your content is the first thing you start creating, then you have Jekyll build your site and you’re left with a completely static website that you can host almost anywhere. The advantages to this are great: since the site is static and doesn’t require a database, hosting it is a cynch. You might even be able to host it for free! Since there’s no database there’s nothing a naughty user can mess with to damage your site. Finally since there’s no database calls to be made your site becomes incredibly fast. I think the pros far outweight the cons. If you don’t mind your site’s code being public then you can host it completely for free on github pages, too. Then it’s just a matter of pointing your domain there, setting up your cname file (a painless and simple setup) and you’re done!

Jekyll isn’t for everything, though. It’s not going to replace Ruby on Rails and you’re not about to build a large scale web application with it. The best fit for a Jekyll site is, I think, most often the one that needs it most: users that want to build a website, but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg to just get a simple message out there. Even if programming isn’t your thing setting Jekyll up is a breeze, and I can help you out with that.

Wordpress is everybody’s favourite blogging platform. It’s simple, and you can be up and running within minutes. There’s a few caveats, though: your site isn’t as customizable as a self-hosted installation of wordpress can be and that can be a little more complicated to set up. Then once it’s setup you’ll end up with a slow-as-mud website and no upward scalability. What if in the future you wanted to add a rails application to your website and move the blog to a subdomain? Can’t do that here.

Simplicity is the name of the game. With Jekyll your content is the first thing you start creating, then you have Jekyll build your site and you’re left with a completely static website that you can host almost anywhere. The advantages to this are great: since the site is static and doesn’t require a database, hosting it is a cynch. You might even be able to host it for free! Since there’s no database there’s nothing a naughty user can mess with to damage your site. Finally since there’s no database calls to be made your site becomes incredibly fast. I think the pros far outweight the cons. If you don’t mind your site’s code being public then you can host it completely for free on github pages, too. Then it’s just a matter of pointing your domain there, setting up your cname file (a painless and simple setup) and you’re done!

Jekyll isn’t for everything, though. It’s not going to replace Ruby on Rails and you’re not about to build a large scale web application with it. The best fit for a Jekyll site is, I think, most often the one that needs it most: users that want to build a website, but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg to just get a simple message out there. Even if programming isn’t your thing setting Jekyll up is a breeze, and I can help you out with that.

Wordpress on Heroku is great, but difficult to setup. You will need to sign up for Amazon Web Services and Heroku. You’ll need to install the Heroku toolbelt on your machine using “wget -qO- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/install-ubuntu.sh | sh”. I’ll assume you’re running Linux for this, but I’ll see about a Windows tutorial as well later on. Setting up AWS is also not going to be covered right now in this tutorial.

\n\t
1. The first thing to do is setup LAMP on your Linux machine.
\n\t
2. Next get the latest version of Wordpress. Download it and unzip the file into your \"/var/www/html/\" folder.
\n\t
3. Download Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront.
\n\t
4. Unzip both of Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront into the wp-content/plugins folder.
\n\t
5. You should have been given access keys for your AWS user. Add them to your wp-config.php file like this:\n \t

   // AWS Access Keys //
   \n \tdefine( 'AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID', 'your_aws_access_key_id_here' );
   \n \tdefine( 'AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', 'your_aws_secret_access_key_here' );

   \n
\n\t
6. Go here and add your Unique Keys and Salts to your wp-config.php file like below:\n \t

   define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('NONCE_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
   \n \tdefine('NONCE_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');

   \n
\n\t
7. Go to localhost/wordpress/ and run through the installation using the MySQL credentials you setup while setting up your LAMP stack. Check here if you're not sure what to do.
\n\t
8. Go to your dashboard, and click on the plugins tab.
\n\t
9. Activate both the Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront plugins. There should now be another tab at the bottom that says \"AWS\". If your AWS User is setup correctly then they should both work immediately and allow you to connect to a bucket.
\n\t
10. Go into your wordpress folder and open a terminal session there.
\n\t
11. In your terminal type $ git init That'll initialize the whole thing as a git repository.
\n\t
12. In your terminal type git add . to get all the WP files ready to be committed. This will take a second or two.
\n\t
13. Now type git commit -m 'Add your own commit message here' Wait for the wall of text to stop running.
\n\t
14. Now type heroku create That'll create a new Heroku app from that directory.
\n\t
15. Type heroku addons:add cleardb If all goes well then you're almost ready to push your installation to Heroku.
\n\t
16. Copy the code below with the Unique Keys and Salts you got earlier:\n \t

    heroku config:set AUTH_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tSECURE_AUTH_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tLOGGED_IN_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tNONCE_KEY='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tAUTH_SALT='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tSECURE_AUTH_SALT='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tLOGGED_IN_SALT='put your unique phrase here'
    \n \tNONCE_SALT='put your unique phrase here'

    \n
\n\t
17. Again in the terminal type git checkout -b production You'll store your production environment variables here.
\n\t
18. Add this line to your wp-config.php file:\n\t

    $db = parse_url($_ENV[\"CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL\"]);

    \n
\n\t
19. Change your database information in wp-config.php to the code below:\n \t

    define('DB_NAME', trim($db[\"path\"],\"/\"));
    \n \tdefine('DB_USER', $db[\"user\"]);
    \n \tdefine('DB_PASSWORD', $db[\"pass\"]);
    \n \tdefine('DB_HOST', $db[\"host\"]);

    \n
\n\t
20. Change your Unthentication Unique Keys and Salts to the below:\n \t

    define('AUTH_KEY', getenv('AUTH_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', getenv('SECURE_AUTH_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_KEY', getenv('LOGGED_IN_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('NONCE_KEY', getenv('NONCE_KEY'));
    \n \tdefine('AUTH_SALT', getenv('AUTH_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', getenv('SECURE_AUTH_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('LOGGED_IN_SALT', getenv('LOGGED_IN_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('NONCE_SALT', getenv('NONCE_SALT'));
    \n \tdefine('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID', getenv('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'));
    \n \tdefine('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', getenv('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'));

    \n
\n\t
21. Now you're all set. Type git push heroku production:master and let it finish. When that's done you can go to \"http://yourwordpressapp.heroku.com\" and complete your remote installation.\n
    \n\t
    1. In order to check out your remote installation simply switch back to the master branch with git checkout master
    \n
    \n
\n

Updating Wordpress

If you need to update Wordpress (mine updated twice while I was working on this) you’ll need to take a few steps:

\n\t
1. In a terminal in the html folder run sudo chown -R www-data:www-data wordpress/ That'll let you update wordpress locally through the app.
\n\t
2. Make sure you're on the master branch and update WP via the dashboard.
\n\t
3. Once Wordpress is finished updating run sudo chown -R your_user:your_user wordpress/ Now you'll be able to edit the folder yourself again.
\n\t
4. Commit the changes made by the update.
\n\t
5. Switch to the production branch and merge with master by running git merge master This shouldn't create any conflicts (it didn't with me).
\n\t
6. The wp-config file should be untouched, but check it just in case. If it doesn't have your production settings, simply edit the file again, and commit changes.
\n\t
7. Now run git push heroku production:master again, wait and your remote installation will be updated.\n
   \n\t
   • Remember to switch back to the master branch to get your local installation working again.
   \n
   \n
\n

Adding/updating themes and plugins

Adding/updating themes and plugins is easy.

\n\t
1. Download the theme or plugin.
\n\t
2. Make sure you're in your master branch. Unzip the theme/folder into it's respective folder.
\n\t
3. In your local installation active the theme or plugin.
\n\t
4. Commit the changes, then switch to production.
\n\t
5. Run git merge master This should not create any conflicts if the plugin/theme is new.\n
   \n\t
   • If you're updating a conflict might be caused. If so, then in the terminal type git reset --hard
   \n\t
   • Delete the older plugin/theme and replace with the new one, then merge again.
   \n
   \n
\n\t
6. The wp-config file should be untouched, but check it just in case. If it doesn't have your production settings, simply edit the file again, and commit changes.
\n\t
7. Now run git push heroku production:master again, wait and your remote installation should now have the plugin/theme.\n
   \n\t
   • Go to \"http://yourwordpressapp.heroku.com/wp-admin\" and Wordpress might ask you to update the database. Simply go ahead and everything should work fine.
   \n
   \n
\n

* TODO Do a thing\nSome notes, that are insightful.\n

What is org-mode?

Org-mode is a project management solution, but it’s a little different that all that I’ve tried. It’s plain text, and requires no database. It doesn’t have to sit on a server, or even require anything installed if you really don’t want to install it. At a low level, “org-mode” is two things:

The syntax

Org-mode’s syntax is super simple, but super powerful. A basic org-mode file might look like this:

* TODO Do a thing\nSome notes, that are insightful.\n

That’s really simple, and should be easy enough to understand even without a primer on the syntax:

\n
• You have one thing to do: a thing
\n
• There are some notes under that
\n

That by itself isn’t that revolutionary, and not all that useful if you want to manage a larger project. That’s where the second “org-mode” comes in:

The software

As with ledger, org-mode is cool, but not that powerful until you use it with the software. This time, however, instead of a simple binary you install, org-mode is a part of an entire suit of emacs tools. This might make it sound super overwhelming, and may be off-putting. I would argue that the stack you can install makes it well worth the effort:

\n
• org-edna\nThis handles task dependencies. So you can have tasks that depend on each other in any way you desire ((non-)heirarchical, lineear, children-parent relationships, etc). \nThis alone makes org-mode power powerful than anything I’ve ever used before.
\n
• org-id\nVery simply, it sets a UUID for task automatically, so you don’t have to set one. Super useful alongside org-edna for your more complicated task relationships.
\n
• org-roam\nNote taking, and mind-mapping. If you’ve ever found youself writing documentation inside your code, and don’t want to overload your documents with entire treatises that may or may not go off-topic, org-roam is for you. It, alone, has a massive following, and is incredibly powerful.
\n

This is all well and good, but how does it compare to other project management tools?

Comparisons

Taskwarrior

My previous favourite, and my golden boy for almost a year, before finding org-mode. My main gripe with every project management tool is always that they require me to format my projects to suit their thought software. Taskwarrior’s blocking-tasks allowed me to define those relationships however I liked, allowing me the freedom to define my proejcts as I saw fit, instead of how taskwarrior saw fit. org-mode+org-edna does the same thing, plus it’s plain text.

Asana

I didn’t like Asana, but I used it a lot for work, so I’ll cover it here: again, my main gripe was I couldn’t manage projects the way I thought about them.

trello

Trello’s methodology is certainly useful, but again, I didn’t get to do things to way I wanted. Noticing a theme here yet?

gitlab

Gitlab’s project management toolchain is powerful, and is better than org-mode in many ways for software development. If you want to manage a non-software project, though, it starts to fall flat, and feels cumbersome to use.

If you’re still here, I’ll assume you’re either sold, or still interested. So, I’ll move onto some of the advantages org-mode has that I either never see, or don’t see often enough.

Advantages

It’s plain text

This one should be obvious, and I even mentioned it earlier, but I’ll reiterate: having a plain text tool is useful for a few reasons:

\n
• You can read it anywhere, no need for anything installed.
\n
• You can edit it anywhere, with any text editor.
\n
• It can be synced anywhere, easily.
\n

Some tools do allow plain text project management, but their capabilities pale in comparison to org-mode+it’s software. All this without having to host a server, or install a database, or pay for anything!\nOn top of that, if you sync with gitlab you can read your org-mode (and org-roam) files right in the gitlab client! I think you should be able to do the same on github as well.

It’s community

org-mode (the syntax) is open for anyone to check out, and it’s software is all open-source as well. This isn’t the best part, though. The best part is the passionate community that’s constanly building new tools and capabilities that you can add on to org-mode. org-roam, and org-edna are just two, but I’m sure you can find dozens more with some googling if you like.

Disadvantages

Nothing is perfect, and org-mode is no different:

It’s not plug-and-play

Setting up org-mode isn’t necessarily difficult, but it’s no cake walk either. It’ll take time, but I think it’s well worth the effort.

No automated backups

This one isn’t such a huge deal, but tools like asana, trello, and notion sort of have it, so I felt it should be included. Syncing with git gives you this functionality, but that’s for another day.

Nothing fancy going on

If you’re the type of person that needs to see some fancy graphics, then I’m afraid you’d out of luck. emacs itself, though, is highly configurable, and can be made quite beautiful.

* TODO Do a thing\nSome notes, that are insightful.\n

What is org-mode?

Org-mode is a project management solution, but it’s a little different that all that I’ve tried. It’s plain text, and requires no database. It doesn’t have to sit on a server, or even require anything installed if you really don’t want to install it. At a low level, “org-mode” is two things:

The syntax

Org-mode’s syntax is super simple, but super powerful. A basic org-mode file might look like this:

* TODO Do a thing\nSome notes, that are insightful.\n

That’s really simple, and should be easy enough to understand even without a primer on the syntax:

\n
• You have one thing to do: a thing
\n
• There are some notes under that
\n

That by itself isn’t that revolutionary, and not all that useful if you want to manage a larger project. That’s where the second “org-mode” comes in:

The software

As with ledger, org-mode is cool, but not that powerful until you use it with the software. This time, however, instead of a simple binary you install, org-mode is a part of an entire suit of emacs tools. This might make it sound super overwhelming, and may be off-putting. I would argue that the stack you can install makes it well worth the effort:

\n
• org-edna\nThis handles task dependencies. So you can have tasks that depend on each other in any way you desire ((non-)heirarchical, lineear, children-parent relationships, etc). \nThis alone makes org-mode power powerful than anything I’ve ever used before.
\n
• org-id\nVery simply, it sets a UUID for task automatically, so you don’t have to set one. Super useful alongside org-edna for your more complicated task relationships.
\n
• org-roam\nNote taking, and mind-mapping. If you’ve ever found youself writing documentation inside your code, and don’t want to overload your documents with entire treatises that may or may not go off-topic, org-roam is for you. It, alone, has a massive following, and is incredibly powerful.
\n

This is all well and good, but how does it compare to other project management tools?

Comparisons

Taskwarrior

My previous favourite, and my golden boy for almost a year, before finding org-mode. My main gripe with every project management tool is always that they require me to format my projects to suit their thought software. Taskwarrior’s blocking-tasks allowed me to define those relationships however I liked, allowing me the freedom to define my proejcts as I saw fit, instead of how taskwarrior saw fit. org-mode+org-edna does the same thing, plus it’s plain text.

Asana

I didn’t like Asana, but I used it a lot for work, so I’ll cover it here: again, my main gripe was I couldn’t manage projects the way I thought about them.

trello

Trello’s methodology is certainly useful, but again, I didn’t get to do things to way I wanted. Noticing a theme here yet?

gitlab

Gitlab’s project management toolchain is powerful, and is better than org-mode in many ways for software development. If you want to manage a non-software project, though, it starts to fall flat, and feels cumbersome to use.

If you’re still here, I’ll assume you’re either sold, or still interested. So, I’ll move onto some of the advantages org-mode has that I either never see, or don’t see often enough.

Advantages

It’s plain text

This one should be obvious, and I even mentioned it earlier, but I’ll reiterate: having a plain text tool is useful for a few reasons:

\n
• You can read it anywhere, no need for anything installed.
\n
• You can edit it anywhere, with any text editor.
\n
• It can be synced anywhere, easily.
\n

Some tools do allow plain text project management, but their capabilities pale in comparison to org-mode+it’s software. All this without having to host a server, or install a database, or pay for anything!\nOn top of that, if you sync with gitlab you can read your org-mode (and org-roam) files right in the gitlab client! I think you should be able to do the same on github as well.

It’s community

org-mode (the syntax) is open for anyone to check out, and it’s software is all open-source as well. This isn’t the best part, though. The best part is the passionate community that’s constanly building new tools and capabilities that you can add on to org-mode. org-roam, and org-edna are just two, but I’m sure you can find dozens more with some googling if you like.

Disadvantages

Nothing is perfect, and org-mode is no different:

It’s not plug-and-play

Setting up org-mode isn’t necessarily difficult, but it’s no cake walk either. It’ll take time, but I think it’s well worth the effort.

No automated backups

This one isn’t such a huge deal, but tools like asana, trello, and notion sort of have it, so I felt it should be included. Syncing with git gives you this functionality, but that’s for another day.

Nothing fancy going on

If you’re the type of person that needs to see some fancy graphics, then I’m afraid you’d out of luck. emacs itself, though, is highly configurable, and can be made quite beautiful.

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           500\n    assets:wallet               -500\n

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    assets:wallet               -500 GYD\n

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    liabilities:debt:Joe        -200 GYD\n    assets:wallet               -300 GYD\n

Ledger is so simple it’s amazing!

I’ve been through many money manager applications: GnuCash, MoneyLover, Firefly, YNAB (briefly). \nI’ve even tried to build my own, but was too lazy.

They all lacked something that I really wanted (MoneyLover, Firefly), or were too expensive for me (YNAB), finicky/problematic (MoneyLover) or difficult for me to use across all my devices (GnuCash).

Before Ledger I thought Firefly would be the one: it’s a FOSS laravel application, which is something I have loads of experience with, so I figured if it can’t do what I want right now, I’ll just make it do what I want. I never got around to that, and, now, I’ve fallen in love with something else.

Why, though? What’s so great about Ledger?

Naturally, it’s FOSS, but like I said it’s simple. So simple, that I can show how it works right now:

Open a text file, and type this into it:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           500\n    assets:wallet               -500\n

That’s a transaction in ledger. That may not seem like much, and it isn’t. Ledger truly shines when you get the CLI tool, that allows you to perform queries on your ledger file. Like show your balance with ledger -f ledger.txt bal.

That’s still not a lot, admitidely, but there’s more. Ledger allows for handling your commodities instead of just money. Think of it this way: you bought a Gatorade somewhere, and paid for it with some money. The exchanged one commodity for another. In other words, the transaction above can now look like this:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    assets:wallet               -500 GYD\n

You can read that as “Bought 1 Gatorade for 500 Guyana Dollars”. What that allows you to do, now, is a two things:

\n
1. Keep track of how many Gatorade you’ve bought
\n
2. Keep track of the price of Gatorade over time (more on that later)
\n
3. Do silly things like calculate how many Gatorades you can buy with the money in your wallet (ledger -f ledger.txt bal wal -X Gatorade)
\n

This feature is something I’ve wanted to be able to do forever, and none of the other applications I’ve used have included it.

Since ledger is a double-entry system, your transactions can get even fancier. Say your friend helped you pay for the Gatorade. Now your transaction looks like this:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    liabilities:debt:Joe        -200 GYD\n    assets:wallet               -300 GYD\n

This will now allow you to see how much you owe Joe, without having to do multiple transactions, like some applications would have you do.

Now comes the part that’s usually hardest, or costs money: using ledger on multiple devices. With Firefly, this meant running a relational database somewhere (costs money), or with GnuCash this meant synchronizing their database file across devices, finding an application on each operating system that’ll open it and allow me to add stuff to it… you see my dilema. With Ledger this is comically simple since it’s a text file:

\n
• Sync across my devices with anything from Google Drive to Syncthing to some custom S3 solution.
\n
• Put it in git (this is what I did, because that let’s me do some other cool stuff).
\n

Since it’s just text, it’s editable from basically anywhere, so making entries isn’t much of a problem anywhere.

Now, you may be thinking it sounds rather annoying to have to edit a text file on my phone. What happens if I’m in the middle of something, and just want to make a quick entry?

That’s where the community comes in:\nSee, I’m not the only crazy person out here. I’m far from the smartest, too. Ledger, and what’s called “plain text accounting” is already popular enough that there’s a subreddit and a website, not to mention the ledger website has exceptional documentation on how much you can do: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html.

There are a couple Android and iOS apps out there, and countless ports or forks to choose from, as well as some nice web options.

One more thing!

Something I’ve wanted to do, but haven’t been able to: keep track of my taxes. More specifically, keep track of how much I owe the tax-man when I get paid for something, and then keep track of how much I can deduct when I buy stuff. Ledger can do it, rather easily. See an explanation here: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Concrete-Example-of-Automated-Transactions

Bitwarden does everything Dashlane does, better.

That’s the end of the post. You can go home, now.

If you want a further breakdown, consider these points:

Security, most important, most overlooked

From a pure security standpoint, it’s a toss-up between Dashlane and Bitwarden. Both offer best-in-class security, so your passwords are safe on both.

Bitwarden offers 2FA auditing at the organization level for business users, while Dashlane does not. Enforcing is on the roadmap.

I would add that Bitwarden can offer a little more peace of mind for two reasons:

1. It’s open source.

A great many of you just sighed, but it being open source means it can be checked constantly for issues. The source for all their software is here.

This also means that if Bitwarden doesn’t have a feature you like, or something works in a way you don’t like, you can just change it.

2. It’s self-hostable.

Some hacker is far more likely to attack the behemoth that is Dashlane with it’s millions of user passwords, than they are to attack your little server with your 1000 passwords (at best). This also means that you are in control of your data, which is good news for the tin-foil hat wearers out there.

You can even get Bitwarden’s paid features for the price of hosting your server by following this guide

Nobody cares about security, though, right? So let’s move on to the good stuff:

Features, the good stuff (also price)

Bitwarden offers every feature Dashlane does with loads more on top of those, and more of them for free. It’s paid version is also cheaper than Dashlane’s.

Here’s a table I stole, that compares both service’s features:

Note 1: In work profile apps Bitwarden might not pop up a dialog automatically inviting you to auto-fill, but it’ll display a notification you can tap to do it.

Note 2: CLI allows individual attachments to be exported. The user would have to write a script to iterate through and export all of them.

Note 3: On the product roadmap, not yet implemented as of writing (Click to see the feature request)

Extra notes

If you aren’t interested in either Bitwarden or Dashlane, or just want to see what else is out there, Consumer Advocate wrote a great article breaking down a bunch of password managers by their price, feature-set, overall user experience and more. It’s a great read, click here to check it out.

* TODO Do a thing\nSome notes, that are insightful.\n

What is org-mode?

Org-mode is a project management solution, but it’s a little different that all that I’ve tried. It’s plain text, and requires no database. It doesn’t have to sit on a server, or even require anything installed if you really don’t want to install it. At a low level, “org-mode” is two things:

The syntax

Org-mode’s syntax is super simple, but super powerful. A basic org-mode file might look like this:

* TODO Do a thing\nSome notes, that are insightful.\n

That’s really simple, and should be easy enough to understand even without a primer on the syntax:

\n
• You have one thing to do: a thing
\n
• There are some notes under that
\n

That by itself isn’t that revolutionary, and not all that useful if you want to manage a larger project. That’s where the second “org-mode” comes in:

The software

As with ledger, org-mode is cool, but not that powerful until you use it with the software. This time, however, instead of a simple binary you install, org-mode is a part of an entire suit of emacs tools. This might make it sound super overwhelming, and may be off-putting. I would argue that the stack you can install makes it well worth the effort:

\n
• org-edna\nThis handles task dependencies. So you can have tasks that depend on each other in any way you desire ((non-)heirarchical, lineear, children-parent relationships, etc). \nThis alone makes org-mode power powerful than anything I’ve ever used before.
\n
• org-id\nVery simply, it sets a UUID for task automatically, so you don’t have to set one. Super useful alongside org-edna for your more complicated task relationships.
\n
• org-roam\nNote taking, and mind-mapping. If you’ve ever found youself writing documentation inside your code, and don’t want to overload your documents with entire treatises that may or may not go off-topic, org-roam is for you. It, alone, has a massive following, and is incredibly powerful.
\n

This is all well and good, but how does it compare to other project management tools?

Comparisons

Taskwarrior

My previous favourite, and my golden boy for almost a year, before finding org-mode. My main gripe with every project management tool is always that they require me to format my projects to suit their thought software. Taskwarrior’s blocking-tasks allowed me to define those relationships however I liked, allowing me the freedom to define my proejcts as I saw fit, instead of how taskwarrior saw fit. org-mode+org-edna does the same thing, plus it’s plain text.

Asana

I didn’t like Asana, but I used it a lot for work, so I’ll cover it here: again, my main gripe was I couldn’t manage projects the way I thought about them.

trello

Trello’s methodology is certainly useful, but again, I didn’t get to do things to way I wanted. Noticing a theme here yet?

gitlab

Gitlab’s project management toolchain is powerful, and is better than org-mode in many ways for software development. If you want to manage a non-software project, though, it starts to fall flat, and feels cumbersome to use.

If you’re still here, I’ll assume you’re either sold, or still interested. So, I’ll move onto some of the advantages org-mode has that I either never see, or don’t see often enough.

Advantages

It’s plain text

This one should be obvious, and I even mentioned it earlier, but I’ll reiterate: having a plain text tool is useful for a few reasons:

\n
• You can read it anywhere, no need for anything installed.
\n
• You can edit it anywhere, with any text editor.
\n
• It can be synced anywhere, easily.
\n

Some tools do allow plain text project management, but their capabilities pale in comparison to org-mode+it’s software. All this without having to host a server, or install a database, or pay for anything!\nOn top of that, if you sync with gitlab you can read your org-mode (and org-roam) files right in the gitlab client! I think you should be able to do the same on github as well.

It’s community

org-mode (the syntax) is open for anyone to check out, and it’s software is all open-source as well. This isn’t the best part, though. The best part is the passionate community that’s constanly building new tools and capabilities that you can add on to org-mode. org-roam, and org-edna are just two, but I’m sure you can find dozens more with some googling if you like.

Disadvantages

Nothing is perfect, and org-mode is no different:

It’s not plug-and-play

Setting up org-mode isn’t necessarily difficult, but it’s no cake walk either. It’ll take time, but I think it’s well worth the effort.

No automated backups

This one isn’t such a huge deal, but tools like asana, trello, and notion sort of have it, so I felt it should be included. Syncing with git gives you this functionality, but that’s for another day.

Nothing fancy going on

If you’re the type of person that needs to see some fancy graphics, then I’m afraid you’d out of luck. emacs itself, though, is highly configurable, and can be made quite beautiful.

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           500\n    assets:wallet               -500\n

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    assets:wallet               -500 GYD\n

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    liabilities:debt:Joe        -200 GYD\n    assets:wallet               -300 GYD\n

Ledger is so simple it’s amazing!

I’ve been through many money manager applications: GnuCash, MoneyLover, Firefly, YNAB (briefly). \nI’ve even tried to build my own, but was too lazy.

They all lacked something that I really wanted (MoneyLover, Firefly), or were too expensive for me (YNAB), finicky/problematic (MoneyLover) or difficult for me to use across all my devices (GnuCash).

Before Ledger I thought Firefly would be the one: it’s a FOSS laravel application, which is something I have loads of experience with, so I figured if it can’t do what I want right now, I’ll just make it do what I want. I never got around to that, and, now, I’ve fallen in love with something else.

Why, though? What’s so great about Ledger?

Naturally, it’s FOSS, but like I said it’s simple. So simple, that I can show how it works right now:

Open a text file, and type this into it:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           500\n    assets:wallet               -500\n

That’s a transaction in ledger. That may not seem like much, and it isn’t. Ledger truly shines when you get the CLI tool, that allows you to perform queries on your ledger file. Like show your balance with ledger -f ledger.txt bal.

That’s still not a lot, admitidely, but there’s more. Ledger allows for handling your commodities instead of just money. Think of it this way: you bought a Gatorade somewhere, and paid for it with some money. The exchanged one commodity for another. In other words, the transaction above can now look like this:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    assets:wallet               -500 GYD\n

You can read that as “Bought 1 Gatorade for 500 Guyana Dollars”. What that allows you to do, now, is a two things:

\n
1. Keep track of how many Gatorade you’ve bought
\n
2. Keep track of the price of Gatorade over time (more on that later)
\n
3. Do silly things like calculate how many Gatorades you can buy with the money in your wallet (ledger -f ledger.txt bal wal -X Gatorade)
\n

This feature is something I’ve wanted to be able to do forever, and none of the other applications I’ve used have included it.

Since ledger is a double-entry system, your transactions can get even fancier. Say your friend helped you pay for the Gatorade. Now your transaction looks like this:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    liabilities:debt:Joe        -200 GYD\n    assets:wallet               -300 GYD\n

This will now allow you to see how much you owe Joe, without having to do multiple transactions, like some applications would have you do.

Now comes the part that’s usually hardest, or costs money: using ledger on multiple devices. With Firefly, this meant running a relational database somewhere (costs money), or with GnuCash this meant synchronizing their database file across devices, finding an application on each operating system that’ll open it and allow me to add stuff to it… you see my dilema. With Ledger this is comically simple since it’s a text file:

\n
• Sync across my devices with anything from Google Drive to Syncthing to some custom S3 solution.
\n
• Put it in git (this is what I did, because that let’s me do some other cool stuff).
\n

Since it’s just text, it’s editable from basically anywhere, so making entries isn’t much of a problem anywhere.

Now, you may be thinking it sounds rather annoying to have to edit a text file on my phone. What happens if I’m in the middle of something, and just want to make a quick entry?

That’s where the community comes in:\nSee, I’m not the only crazy person out here. I’m far from the smartest, too. Ledger, and what’s called “plain text accounting” is already popular enough that there’s a subreddit and a website, not to mention the ledger website has exceptional documentation on how much you can do: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html.

There are a couple Android and iOS apps out there, and countless ports or forks to choose from, as well as some nice web options.

One more thing!

Something I’ve wanted to do, but haven’t been able to: keep track of my taxes. More specifically, keep track of how much I owe the tax-man when I get paid for something, and then keep track of how much I can deduct when I buy stuff. Ledger can do it, rather easily. See an explanation here: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Concrete-Example-of-Automated-Transactions

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           500\n    assets:wallet               -500\n

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    assets:wallet               -500 GYD\n

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    liabilities:debt:Joe        -200 GYD\n    assets:wallet               -300 GYD\n

Ledger is so simple it’s amazing!

I’ve been through many money manager applications: GnuCash, MoneyLover, Firefly, YNAB (briefly). \nI’ve even tried to build my own, but was too lazy.

They all lacked something that I really wanted (MoneyLover, Firefly), or were too expensive for me (YNAB), finicky/problematic (MoneyLover) or difficult for me to use across all my devices (GnuCash).

Before Ledger I thought Firefly would be the one: it’s a FOSS laravel application, which is something I have loads of experience with, so I figured if it can’t do what I want right now, I’ll just make it do what I want. I never got around to that, and, now, I’ve fallen in love with something else.

Why, though? What’s so great about Ledger?

Naturally, it’s FOSS, but like I said it’s simple. So simple, that I can show how it works right now:

Open a text file, and type this into it:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           500\n    assets:wallet               -500\n

That’s a transaction in ledger. That may not seem like much, and it isn’t. Ledger truly shines when you get the CLI tool, that allows you to perform queries on your ledger file. Like show your balance with ledger -f ledger.txt bal.

That’s still not a lot, admitidely, but there’s more. Ledger allows for handling your commodities instead of just money. Think of it this way: you bought a Gatorade somewhere, and paid for it with some money. The exchanged one commodity for another. In other words, the transaction above can now look like this:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    assets:wallet               -500 GYD\n

You can read that as “Bought 1 Gatorade for 500 Guyana Dollars”. What that allows you to do, now, is a two things:

\n
1. Keep track of how many Gatorade you’ve bought
\n
2. Keep track of the price of Gatorade over time (more on that later)
\n
3. Do silly things like calculate how many Gatorades you can buy with the money in your wallet (ledger -f ledger.txt bal wal -X Gatorade)
\n

This feature is something I’ve wanted to be able to do forever, and none of the other applications I’ve used have included it.

Since ledger is a double-entry system, your transactions can get even fancier. Say your friend helped you pay for the Gatorade. Now your transaction looks like this:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    liabilities:debt:Joe        -200 GYD\n    assets:wallet               -300 GYD\n

This will now allow you to see how much you owe Joe, without having to do multiple transactions, like some applications would have you do.

Now comes the part that’s usually hardest, or costs money: using ledger on multiple devices. With Firefly, this meant running a relational database somewhere (costs money), or with GnuCash this meant synchronizing their database file across devices, finding an application on each operating system that’ll open it and allow me to add stuff to it… you see my dilema. With Ledger this is comically simple since it’s a text file:

\n
• Sync across my devices with anything from Google Drive to Syncthing to some custom S3 solution.
\n
• Put it in git (this is what I did, because that let’s me do some other cool stuff).
\n

Since it’s just text, it’s editable from basically anywhere, so making entries isn’t much of a problem anywhere.

Now, you may be thinking it sounds rather annoying to have to edit a text file on my phone. What happens if I’m in the middle of something, and just want to make a quick entry?

That’s where the community comes in:\nSee, I’m not the only crazy person out here. I’m far from the smartest, too. Ledger, and what’s called “plain text accounting” is already popular enough that there’s a subreddit and a website, not to mention the ledger website has exceptional documentation on how much you can do: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html.

There are a couple Android and iOS apps out there, and countless ports or forks to choose from, as well as some nice web options.

One more thing!

Something I’ve wanted to do, but haven’t been able to: keep track of my taxes. More specifically, keep track of how much I owe the tax-man when I get paid for something, and then keep track of how much I can deduct when I buy stuff. Ledger can do it, rather easily. See an explanation here: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Concrete-Example-of-Automated-Transactions

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           500\n    assets:wallet               -500\n

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    assets:wallet               -500 GYD\n

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    liabilities:debt:Joe        -200 GYD\n    assets:wallet               -300 GYD\n

Ledger is so simple it’s amazing!

I’ve been through many money manager applications: GnuCash, MoneyLover, Firefly, YNAB (briefly). \nI’ve even tried to build my own, but was too lazy.

They all lacked something that I really wanted (MoneyLover, Firefly), or were too expensive for me (YNAB), finicky/problematic (MoneyLover) or difficult for me to use across all my devices (GnuCash).

Before Ledger I thought Firefly would be the one: it’s a FOSS laravel application, which is something I have loads of experience with, so I figured if it can’t do what I want right now, I’ll just make it do what I want. I never got around to that, and, now, I’ve fallen in love with something else.

Why, though? What’s so great about Ledger?

Naturally, it’s FOSS, but like I said it’s simple. So simple, that I can show how it works right now:

Open a text file, and type this into it:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           500\n    assets:wallet               -500\n

That’s a transaction in ledger. That may not seem like much, and it isn’t. Ledger truly shines when you get the CLI tool, that allows you to perform queries on your ledger file. Like show your balance with ledger -f ledger.txt bal.

That’s still not a lot, admitidely, but there’s more. Ledger allows for handling your commodities instead of just money. Think of it this way: you bought a Gatorade somewhere, and paid for it with some money. The exchanged one commodity for another. In other words, the transaction above can now look like this:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    assets:wallet               -500 GYD\n

You can read that as “Bought 1 Gatorade for 500 Guyana Dollars”. What that allows you to do, now, is a two things:

\n
1. Keep track of how many Gatorade you’ve bought
\n
2. Keep track of the price of Gatorade over time (more on that later)
\n
3. Do silly things like calculate how many Gatorades you can buy with the money in your wallet (ledger -f ledger.txt bal wal -X Gatorade)
\n

This feature is something I’ve wanted to be able to do forever, and none of the other applications I’ve used have included it.

Since ledger is a double-entry system, your transactions can get even fancier. Say your friend helped you pay for the Gatorade. Now your transaction looks like this:

2019/07/11  Amazon\n    expenses:gatorade           1 Gatorade\n    liabilities:debt:Joe        -200 GYD\n    assets:wallet               -300 GYD\n

This will now allow you to see how much you owe Joe, without having to do multiple transactions, like some applications would have you do.

Now comes the part that’s usually hardest, or costs money: using ledger on multiple devices. With Firefly, this meant running a relational database somewhere (costs money), or with GnuCash this meant synchronizing their database file across devices, finding an application on each operating system that’ll open it and allow me to add stuff to it… you see my dilema. With Ledger this is comically simple since it’s a text file:

\n
• Sync across my devices with anything from Google Drive to Syncthing to some custom S3 solution.
\n
• Put it in git (this is what I did, because that let’s me do some other cool stuff).
\n

Since it’s just text, it’s editable from basically anywhere, so making entries isn’t much of a problem anywhere.

Now, you may be thinking it sounds rather annoying to have to edit a text file on my phone. What happens if I’m in the middle of something, and just want to make a quick entry?

That’s where the community comes in:\nSee, I’m not the only crazy person out here. I’m far from the smartest, too. Ledger, and what’s called “plain text accounting” is already popular enough that there’s a subreddit and a website, not to mention the ledger website has exceptional documentation on how much you can do: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html.

There are a couple Android and iOS apps out there, and countless ports or forks to choose from, as well as some nice web options.

One more thing!

Something I’ve wanted to do, but haven’t been able to: keep track of my taxes. More specifically, keep track of how much I owe the tax-man when I get paid for something, and then keep track of how much I can deduct when I buy stuff. Ledger can do it, rather easily. See an explanation here: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Concrete-Example-of-Automated-Transactions

Bitwarden does everything Dashlane does, better.

That’s the end of the post. You can go home, now.

If you want a further breakdown, consider these points:

Security, most important, most overlooked

From a pure security standpoint, it’s a toss-up between Dashlane and Bitwarden. Both offer best-in-class security, so your passwords are safe on both.

Bitwarden offers 2FA auditing at the organization level for business users, while Dashlane does not. Enforcing is on the roadmap.

I would add that Bitwarden can offer a little more peace of mind for two reasons:

1. It’s open source.

A great many of you just sighed, but it being open source means it can be checked constantly for issues. The source for all their software is here.

This also means that if Bitwarden doesn’t have a feature you like, or something works in a way you don’t like, you can just change it.

2. It’s self-hostable.

Some hacker is far more likely to attack the behemoth that is Dashlane with it’s millions of user passwords, than they are to attack your little server with your 1000 passwords (at best). This also means that you are in control of your data, which is good news for the tin-foil hat wearers out there.

You can even get Bitwarden’s paid features for the price of hosting your server by following this guide

Nobody cares about security, though, right? So let’s move on to the good stuff:

Features, the good stuff (also price)

Bitwarden offers every feature Dashlane does with loads more on top of those, and more of them for free. It’s paid version is also cheaper than Dashlane’s.

Here’s a table I stole, that compares both service’s features:

Note 1: In work profile apps Bitwarden might not pop up a dialog automatically inviting you to auto-fill, but it’ll display a notification you can tap to do it.

Note 2: CLI allows individual attachments to be exported. The user would have to write a script to iterate through and export all of them.

Note 3: On the product roadmap, not yet implemented as of writing (Click to see the feature request)

Extra notes

If you aren’t interested in either Bitwarden or Dashlane, or just want to see what else is out there, Consumer Advocate wrote a great article breaking down a bunch of password managers by their price, feature-set, overall user experience and more. It’s a great read, click here to check it out.

Funkwhale is an open source grooveshark clone that anyone can self host. Since it offers a docker installation, spinning up an intance shouldn’t be too difficult, and the modest hardware requirements mean hosting should’nt cost much more than a couple dollars a month.

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