Dan J’s Website

A variety of interesting things

Setting Up DropShare With a VPS

I want to switch away from CloudApp to a host/domain under my control, and DropShare looks like a great alternative, because it lets you pick a back-end.

They have instructions for setting up SCP/SSH using your own server via nginx on DigitalOcean. I’ve already got danj.ca running on Apache on Linode, so I should be able to replicate the same.

Another alternative is to use S3-compatible object storage which, again, Linode offers and I could potentially use by mirroring DropShare’s DigitalOcean instructions. Object storage might be a better move because it comes with CDN and takes away the overhead of administering a server, but we’ll see. I’ll try just putting this on my web server first…

Instructions

Requirements

I already have the server and web server running, I just need to add:

Adding the site to Apache

Set up a user for dropshare

Set up the domain

Sidebar: Adding domains to an SSL certificate

Fixing the Apache config

Letting DropShare communicate with the server

Setting up DropShare on the Mac

Next Up

I think the next thing I want to do is set up YOURLS on my server, and set DropShare to use it. I suspect I’ll have to stop using www.danj.ca as an alias for danj.ca, and make them into two separate sites. But that should be fine, as the canonical URLs for my website use www.danj.ca anyway. danj.ca is perfect for short URLs…


  1. (Update after a few months of using CleanShot): CleanShot is great. It's got an easy-to-use screen recorder built right in that lets you capture video or animated GIFs, great for demonstrations. It also has a feature that lets you quickly hide your desktop icons, which I used in haste whilse sharing my screen on a video call the other day. Thus far my only complaint about CleanShot is it doesn't seem to support emoji in its text annotation which is a big 👎🏼.