28 January 2026

It has been a while since I actually wrote down my rants. Mainly due to fighting medical problems over the last several weeks. I've now got the problem with my left arm under control, but it's still giving a bit of jipp. Just need to keep things moving while it recovers and the GP physio was little help with that! But that is another rant for the health blog.

I decided as a new year 'resolution', although it's more of an old TODO item, to finally do something about making my desktop, tablet and phone work together better. The original plans at the end of the last century was for a website that would handle email archive, calendar, contacts in addition to the facilities that bitweaver currently provides. The original tikiwiki roadmap made some of the steps difficult which is why some developers forked tikipro which was later renamed bitweaver due to pressure from the tikiwiki project and because it's aim was to weave together the various bits we wanted. I developed a very flexible contacts app for bitweaver which I am still using, but which does not integrate with the mobile devices easily, however the contact apps on the mobile do not allow the secondary material anyway, so access through the bitweaver powered website is the still useful. One aspect of that is listing notes, messages, emails and events related to a single contact which was the base for the security sites operating process, but with James's death the use of that has also been retired. Hence the review of just where I am today.

I had set up myhomecloud.co.uk back in 2011 with the plan then to run owncloud on that, but other things got in the way, and while adding the myhomecloud.uk when the protection provided by that particular can ran out, neither domains were being used as originally planned. Given the history contained in the business sites, switching to this domain in my semi-retirement gave a clean sheet to blog and write material going forward, but still without some of the original extensions. Hence having another go at owncloud, which has now morphed into nextcloud.

The own thing that seems to be fairly obvious is that nextcloud has the same limitations that tikiwiki was pushing towards and anonymous browsing of material was not well supported. While developing the client management system I expanded the content management security to allow various levels of anonymous access. Enquirysolve although better known as Postfield after the company who handled the installation initially and which did not die when they sold out the railway, had pure anonymous access and a generic access level when accessed from a site specific domain name. Only private material needed a login to view it. So there is still a place for bitweaver which nextcloud currently can not replace (although I may be wrong there?). Anyway, rdmcloud.uk has been added as the home for the rainbowdigitalmedia nextcloud hosting and is working well.

Lots of little rant points in all of that, and more to come ... I never subscribed to 'composer' when it was initially pushed, partly because it needed autoload to be integrated into all of the code base and there was little to be gained at the time. While bitweaver today (at least my version) happily uses autoload, it retains the nice feature that I have been using for years, and while I have several live sites, there is only one copy of the code and external libraries, something which I've not been able to reconcile with the composer ethos for file structure. So apparently needing composer to install nextcloud was something I was not comfortable with, and my own copy has been installed direct from github without resorting to the composer installer, something which I think is now biting as a couple of extra apps are not loading properly via that route. Cookbook is something I've looked at in the past for bitweaver but it failed to install automatically and the manually loaded build is just giving a blank screen.

Another area that I've had fun with in the past is Music and while that app has installed nicely, getting the existing archive to display properly was contorted. Nextcloud - Music is the discussion on the fine detail, but the rants relate to the way MusicBrainz tries to enforce it's standards on how content is managed. Discogs is in my book the more accurate reference as it is built on the physical media and while MusicBrainz does have facilities for different releases of a particular album, the management of remixes some 50 years on from the original can be fun. I will put my hand up that many of my files I no longer have the original vinyl and CD's which were lost in the 2007 flooding around here, so while some I can rebuild with the help of the physical media, getting the legacy stuff to play ball is proving fun. What I have done in the last couple of days is once again processed a 20CD set, "30 Years Of Pop", or is that "30 Years of Pop" since MusicBrainz complains about the "Of" and prefers "of" as it does with several short words. The long story is on the wiki, but I now have the local collection complete with embedded cover images and a matching collection in MusicBrianz, having cloned the missing disks from Discogs. The Music app is displaying them nicely and now Plex and Jellyfin are doing a better job due to the embedded metadata provided via Picard. The next step is the 64 disk "Classic Composers" collection which is already on MusicBrainz from the time in the past which I processed that. The thing missing in Music is going to be "Composer" as a grouping rather than "Artist". Something that Plex attempts and fails at as does Jellyfin, but I think that if I can get the top folder structure right, Music may do a better job. It will at least give me albums that have various artists and composers in the album view! I just need to ensure that the embedded metadata has a clean "album" tag, something that I am also appreciating in tidying modern releases such as Pink Floyd's The Wall and The Wall (2007 Remaster) ... At least my collectors edition of Shine On is still on the shelf having not been in the workshop on Honeybourne Airfield in 2007 when a foot of water flowed across the site.

I must also fix the bitweaver search function which has stopped indexing and so that site search is not working properly for this new material. :(