As a diabetic there are a number of things we are not able to control but one thing we can do is keep tabs on our data and while in past it would have meant meticulously noting down BG readings in a diary, today it is much much easier with all the apps and connected services. In this article, I aim to go through the list of technologies that I am aware of and use to keep on top of my diabetic data right from my phone.
I like exploring new solutions and anything to do with data always piques my interest. I came across this nice tool through the list of free self hosted software.
UPDATE
I am still getting introduced to the world of docker and while most of it just works few things confuse the hell out of me.
Anyway what happened is there was an update for Metabase and I wanted to apply it on my container and in doing so I realised that some of this post can be changed to make it a better experience from get go because after update all my config and dashboards were gone and I had to reconfigure everything.
It could be that my lack of knowledge meant I did something wrong and faced the issue but irrespective doing it as per updated post below will ensure you dont face the issue at all because I have now tested it twice to ensure it works well.
This how-to assumes that:
domain.name. Any reference to domain.name throughout the tutorial therefore, must be replaced with your own domain name. Router - Router is the device at home that connects all devices in your house to the internet.
I have been with PlusNet for over two years now and am a happy camper as far as fiber optic broadband is concerned but as I am no longer on a broadband contract with PlusNet and had no intention of going on one, so the only way I could get a change to my ageing router was by purchasing a new one.
Hence I started reading about my options and soon enough realised that an old router can be given new lease of life using DD-WRT. Equally soon-ish I also realised that the router from PlusNet - TG582n - is quite rubbish and does not play nice with any of the open source firmwares.
So I figured that if I have to just play around a bit, I might as well start with something cheaper and cheaper is what I found in the TP-Link router TL-WR841n at just £16.00. You can't get any cheaper than that in my opinion. OK, so now that we have established that I am cheap and my new router is cheap, let's move on to interesting stuff.
I had read that TP-Link router and specifically TL-WR841n plays nicely with DD-WRT but it was only after I had my new toy did I realise that these things also come in hardware version and while interwebs is filled with instructions on installing DD-WRT for upto v9, when it comes to v11 in Europe, it can be a bit tricky to proceed. There are some instructions in forums1 but nothing that walks one end to end hence this post.
While I love Ghost as a blogging platform, it is not best placed for things other than blogs - after all that is the basic idea behind creation of this wonderful tool.
As I wanted to host a static website using tools that don't require a database or rely on php, I went searching on interwebs. I came across a lot of options and the most popular one appears to be Jekyll and it's variants (Nikola and such) but they require a lot of terminal activity which won't go well for regular end user responsible for maintaining content of the static website in question.So I continued looking and came across this wonderful project called Grav.
Grav is super fast, very pretty and extremely easy to deploy and maintain. Additionally, it has very good documentation.
The key features that I absolutely loved are as below:
Tip
URL for JDK and JRE is best obtained directly from oracle website
It can't possibly be a coincidence that this is the 7th year since I started blogging on blogger and therefore it is very likely to be a strong case of the 7 year itch syndrome but whichever way you look at it, divorce was inevitable given blogger had just stopped inspiring me.
I have been fiddling with different blogging platforms while getting accused of neglecting my sweet and loving family...😢. Ghost caught my fancy three weeks back. The last post was the beginning of our courtship and this post tells the tale of how a casual fling turned into marital commitment. 😂
To start a fresh blog, choosing any platform is easy and straight forward but to move from one platform to another is - umm... lets just say a very involved process - rewarding but involved.
A complete migration from blogger to WordPress would have been way simpler. I know this as I have done it in past and it appeared like moving to Ghost would require migrating to a WordPress instance anyway. There was - I must admit - a temptation to call WordPress the home but that wouldn't have made a great love-story now - would it?
However, the much publicised WordPress route to Ghost migration did not work for me and eventually after a lot of manual copying, pasting, cleaning, pruning, hiding, reading and learning later, the self-hosted blog is all complete.
To install Ghost as my blogging platform, I had to go through a number of hoops and one of them was to get the nodejs working and what not. I figured this might as well be worth documenting in case I have to do this all over again. It might also be helpful for some other inquisitive minds. 
The most useful reference I found was the post on rosehosting website specific to CentOS 7.
It would have all gone well too; had it not been for the nodejs related issues which resulted in me finding the other helpful pointers from various forums.
Anyway, the steps I took to get this all working are detailed in my notes below - keeping it, where I can, true to the post I have referred above: