Uncategorised – Page 19

Reneging on an old promise

This morning, I activated a feature that would display ads on my blog. I’m given to understand the bulk of my most loyal readers get their dose of ~~Gaplogs~~ edmx via email. However, I still get a reasonable number of hits on the blog itself, and I activated WordAds to capitalise on it and help pay for an upgrade that I think my blog deserves.

Eight years ago, when I launched this blog, I’d promised my readers that this blog would always be a labour of love, free to read and free of ads. The first two still hold. Being able to make money off of my writing doesn’t change what or how I write. Some of my friends can tell you how I complain every once in a while about how unreasonably difficult it is to be read widely and to be considered valuable in an industry as a science writer. But this hasn’t kept from continuing to be a science writer because it’s what I love to do.

The same goes for this blog. It will always be a labour of love and my writing here will always be honest and independent of any financial or other material interests. Case in point: I’m reluctant at the moment to say this blog will always be free to read as well. Who knows, if someday this blog becomes really popular and if it becomes feasible to install a paywall, I will. 😉 The best I can promise is that edmx will always be free to read for the existing clutch of ~2,900 followers.

Featured image credit: andibreit/pixabay.

Ethics in the metadata

On April 30, I published an article discussing lapses in the media coverage of Eman Ahmed’s stint in India. Ahmed is an Egyptian woman who, until a day or so ago, had been undergoing treatment in Saifee Hospital, Mumbai, after a very rare genetic disorder had caused her body to quickly gain weight. As a result, she had been suffering from various disorders and neurological issues, and no doubt was mentally stressed as well. However, much of the Indian media sensationalised her condition and made a freak of her and presented her plight as a spectacle. Some reporters, as well as doctors, also resorted to language that – as one observer put it – dismissed Ahmed’s personhood and diminished her agency in all that was happening.

One of the two people I’d spoken to for the story, Rebecca Puhl, who studies the depiction of obesity in the media and its effects on those who produce and consume such content, provided some invaluable structure as well as perspectives that set up the story very well. Even if I couldn’t include all of the answers she’d provided to my questions in my piece, reading them alerted me to a range of issues and which I think also greatly, and usefully, limited my language and the story’s narrative. For example, it became clear that all the images used by articles on Ahmed in other outlets were unusable because (a) Puhl had highlighted how it was harmful to show people who were obese as just parts of their bodies, and most of the images fell prey to this mistake, and (b) there was no evidence of Ahmed or her family having granted permission for these images to be used.

So far so good. The problem arose when, at the time of publishing the article, I was careful to keep the headline, blurb and tags respectful of and sensitive to the content. This meant, for example, that I couldn’t mention either in the blurb or in the tags that Ahmed was being called “the world’s heaviest woman”. But without this phrase among the tags, the published article wouldn’t ‘rank’ on Google News – i.e. wouldn’t show up among the top five results – because this phrase is what most people were searching for on Google in order to get to content about Ahmed. Such ‘ranking’ is necessary if a story has to find widespread traction, more than Facebook or Twitter, the other major distribution channels, could provide. (Incidentally, the Facebook API also reads tags.) Since I also hadn’t included Ahmed’s image, the article’s natural discoverability had also been hampered.

So should I include the tag or shouldn’t I?

I did, eventually. And I’ve tried to reason my discomfort away saying I’ll be able to introduce a new, more sensitive way of thinking to a group of people who might not be aware of it this way.

The reasoning hasn’t worked yet. I’m not comfortable with this decision – as much as I’m uncomfortable with the fact that The System has forced me to make this decision in order for the story to be read. Conceivably, this difficult choice is inescapable for those seeking to popularise articles that disagree with a certain use of language on ethical grounds. On the other hand, the Google Empire is built on language, on its users employing this word or that in their searches, emails, conversations, etc. As a result, there is bound to be a clash when I, or someone else, refuses to use a certain phrase while Google is actively looking for, prioritising and monetising that phrase. This argument also applies to images: The Wire did not use an image of Eman Ahmed for the reasons specified above – but such images are exactly what catches people’s eyes when they’re scrolling down on Facebook or Twitter.

Then again, how much of this applies to the article’s body and how much to its metadata? I’m on the wall, even if others are likely to have taken sides. The article’s body will be read by humans and the metadata, by machines. So does it matter what the machines are reading as long as the humans are walking away with the right message? But seen another way, using unethical means to publicise content is surely more wrong, even if not absolutely wrong, than being completely ethical. What if the article shows up in the wrong contexts on the web? Also, is there any way one can walk away from these practices with a clean conscience? What’s the endgame going to be?

Featured image credit: Anemone123/pixabay.

Hacking newsroom productivity

Note: The name of this blog has changed from Gaplogs to edmx. This is why.

There are lots of parallels between software teams and newsrooms, their respective ideal workflows and desirable work environments. However, journalism is decidedly more human – considering that’s the species whose stories the profession is engaged in retelling – and journalistic offices wouldn’t entirely benefit from modelling themselves on tech rooms that strive to minimise ‘distractions’ and, more generally, human contact. Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean everyone should be forced to work in an environment that the majority finds comfortable. I’m writing this now because I stumbled upon an ancient piece in GeekWire about how open floor plans are bad for developers because they “don’t want to overhear conversations”.

“Facebook’s campus in Silicon Valley is an 8-acre open room, and Facebook was very pleased with itself for building what it thought was this amazing place for developers,” [StackOverflow CEO Joel] Spolsky said in an interview with GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop. “But developers don’t want to overhear conversations. That’s ideal for a trading floor, but developers need to concentrate, to go to a chatroom and ask questions and get the answers later. Facebook is paying 40-50 percent more than other places, which is usually a sign developers don’t want to work there.”

Spolsky, who in 2011 created project-management software Trello, said the “Joel Test” that he created 16 years ago is still a valid way for developers to evaluate prospective employers. It’s a list of 12 yes-no questions, with one point given for every “yes” answer. “The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time,” Spolsky said when he created the test. He said that remains true today.

This is true of writers – whether you’re hammering out a 1,000-word copy on medical ethics or writing the next Dune – as well as copy-editors. Both writing and editing are benefited when you’re able to concentrate, and neither loses out when you’re unable to talk about what you’re doing when you’re in the middle of it.

But at the same time, newsrooms also need to encourage collaborations, such as between writers, editors, multimedia producers, social media managers, marketing, tech, etc.

This is why I think an ideal newsroom would be an open floor where those who want to work together can do so while the company allows those engaged in solo projects to work from home. Of course, this assumes everyone knows what they want to do, what they want to work on and that it plays down the admittedly incredible value of overhearing two people talk about something and realising you’ve got an idea about that. The inspiration for stories can come from everywhere, after all. It’s just that it might be time to start evaluating, and implementing, these things more systematically. For example, how often do we stumble upon story ideas? Is it a feature that editors deliberately try to work into newsrooms? Under what conditions does it manifest? And can better technology help?

This is because not everyone in a newsroom can work remotely – but every newsroom is likely to have someone who will benefit from being able to, whether temporarily or permanently. Moreover, ‘new media’ newsroom workflows have largely calcified, which means developers today have a greater incentive than before to build integrated/symbiotic newsroom tools with potentially industry-wide adoption. So at this juncture, they should consider collaborative tools for journalists that also make remote-working more efficient and less prone to communication gaps because, as technology promises to offer more solutions to better journalism, its choices will increasingly affect how journalists can or can’t work.

To be clear, the answers could lie in many spheres, could manifest in many forms – just that I’m particularly curious about whether technology has any of them. Because if it does, I can think of at least two major challenges.

Collaboration tools

For a developer, ‘communication pains’ can arise in at least three contexts (I don’t presume to know all of them): when brainstorming, when collaborating and when receiving feedback. For a journalist, there are two corresponding contexts: when brainstorming and when editing (collaborating to create an article seldom happens when the writers are working remotely). Here, the developer has the advantage because her ‘language’ affords shorter paths to truths. It has fewer syntactic rules, the syntax and semantics are strongly connected and the truths that need to be realised are very well-defined. For a journalist working with a natural language, things are more fluid and open to negotiation. The result is that it’s easier for developers to work remotely because building something good together requires a tool that is highly process-oriented and has perfect version control.

(Could one way out be something like the Hemingway app? It lets writers see what could be wrong with their writing by highlighting difficult sentences, the use of passive voice, adverbs, etc. Maybe. Such an app could definitely go a long way in improving bad writing and making it readable – which would be a boon for editors because they can then focus on making more creative kinds of improvements. But until the app is able to discern narrative techniques and styles, it won’t be able to run the last mile, which means you’ve still got an editor working mano y mano with whom is going to be better for everyone.)

Communication tools

None of Skype, Slack, Hangouts, etc. can cut it when it comes to realising perfect communication options for the remote-worker because the barrier they pose isn’t through a built-in function but concerns the user herself. She still has to want to open the app and dial/ping/buzz/whatever. On the other hand, it’s always been easier to just open your mouth and start talking. Moreover, chat-apps like Slack and Hangouts passively discourage users to reply immediately. In one-on-one communication, when someone talks to you, you’re expected to reply then and there if and when you can. This immediacy is very convenient and useful. However, when chatting with your friend, the app maintains an archive of past messages that your friend can return to later. It’s also quite tricky for you to force a response without coming off as pushy or annoying. //

Even if all of these are problems, the advantages of having a newsroom that is distributed yet not disconnected, more accommodating of different ways to be productive, more open to having its workflows hacked and more efficient at communicating feedback could be great. Then again, could technology have the perfect solutions?

Do your bit, broaden your science menu

If you think a story was not covered by the media, it’s quite likely that that story didn’t feature in your limited news menu, and that it was actually covered by an outlet you haven’t discovered yet. In the same vein, saying the entirety of India’s science media is crap is in itself crap. I’ve heard this say from two people today (and some others on Twitter). I’ll concede that the bulk of it is useless but there are still quite a few good players. And not reading what they are writing is a travesty on your part if you consider yourself interested in science news. Why I think so is a long story; to cut it short: given what the prevailing distribution mechanisms as well as business models are, newsrooms can only do so much to ensure they’re visible to the right people. You’ve got to do your bit as well. So if you haven’t found the better players, shame on you. You don’t get to judge the best of us after having read only the worst of us.

And I like to think The Wire is among the best of us (but I can’t be the final judge). Here are some of the others:

The Telegraph – Among the best in the country. They seldom undertake longer pieces but what they publish is crisp and authoritative. Watch out for G.S. Mudur.
Scroll – Doesn’t cover a lot of sciencey science but what they do cover, they tend to get right.
The Hindu – The Big Daddy. Has been covering science for a long time. My only issue with it is that many of its pieces, in an effort to come across as being unafraid of the technicalities, are flush with jargon.
Fountain Ink – Only long-form and does a fab job of the science + society stories.
Reuters India – Plain Jane non-partisan reportage all round.

I’m sure there are other publishers of good science journalism in India. The five I’ve listed here are the ones that came quickest to mind and I just wanted illustrate my point and quickly get this post out.

Note: This is the article the reactions to which prompted this post.

Featured image credit: Hans/pixabay.

Auditing science stories: Two examples from the bottom rungs

There are different kinds of science stories. I don’t just mean the usual long-form, short-form stuff. I mean there are qualitatively different kinds of stories. They inhabit a hierarchy, and right at the bottom is getting something wrong.

Like the way Livemint did on April 20, 2017, reporting that ISRO had plans to mine resources from the Moon to help manage India’s energy needs. ISRO has no such plans. The report’s author, Utpal Bhaskar, is likely referring to comments made by the noted space scientist Sivathanu Pillai at the Observer Research Foundation’s Kalpana Chawla Space Policy Dialogue 2017, held in March. Pillai had said mining helium-3 from the Moon was possible – but he didn’t say anything about ISRO planning such a thing. India TV then quoted Livemint and published a report of their own, not a detail changed.

Right on top of getting something wrong on the quality hierarchy is the act of reporting something that doesn’t deserve to be – the way The Guardian did, also on April 20. Ian Sample, the newspaper’s science editor, published a piece titled ‘No encounters: most ambitious alien search to date draws a blank’. What he seems to make no big deal of is mentioned – to be fair – in the first paragraph, but without playing up its significance in this context: Breakthrough Listen, the search mission, has been online for only a year.

And in this time, nobody expected its odds of finding anything would be noticeable. I’d say the deeper flaw in the story is to pay heed to the fact that this is humans’ most ambitious project of this kind yet. Well, so what if it is? It’s still not big enough to have better odds of finding anything in its first year of ops (the story itself says how they used one telescope last year and that it scanned 629 stars – both puny numbers). In other words, this is a null result and no one expected anything better. At best, it should’ve been a tweet, a status update for the records – not a news report suggesting disappointment. So in a way Sample’s effort can be construed as a null result reported wrong.

Finally, I will not speculate if Sample, who’s probably attending the Breakthrough Discuss conference (also being live-cast through Breakthrough’s Facebook page) on April 20-21, has been obligated by the organisers to publish a report on the subject – but I will say I’m tempted to. 😉 And I recommend just following Paul Gilster’s blog if you’re interested in updates on the Breakthrough Initiatives.

Featured image: The Green Bank radio telescope, West Virginia. Credit: NRAO/AUI, CC BY 3.0.

The worst poem ever

How does feel to write a story and then, just like that, have everyone read it as well as be interested in reading it?

How would it feel to not have to hope quasi-desperately that a story does well after having spent hours – if not days – on it?

How would it feel to not slog and slog, telling yourself that you just need to be proud of covering a beat few others have chosen to?

“Good journalism can only emerge from being a good citizen” – but is there a way to tell what kind of citizenship is valuable and what kind not?

Of course, I’m also asking myself questions about why it is that I chose to be a journalist and then a science journalist.

The first one doesn’t have a short answer and it’s probably also too personal to be discussing on my blog. So let’s leave that for another day, or another forum.

Why science journalist? Because it’s like Kip Thorne has said: it was the pleasure of doing “something in which there was less competition and more opportunity to do something unique.”

When I tell people I’m a science journalist, a common response goes like this: “I’ve distanced myself from science and math since school”. And it goes with a smile. I smile, too.

Except I’m not amused. This mental block that many people have I’ve found is the Indian science journalist’s greatest enemy – at least it’s mine.

What makes it so great is that, to most people, it’s a class- and era-specific ‘survival skill’ they’ve adopted that has likely made their lives more enjoyable.

And we all know how hard it is give fucks about the wonders that unknown unknowns can hold. It’s impossible almost by definition.

Then there are also so many fucks demanded of us to be given to the human condition.

But Ed Yong’s tweet I will never forget, though I do wish I’d faved it: there’s so much more to science than what applies to being human.

Of course, there’s the other, much simpler reason I’m thinking all this, and so likelier to be true: I’m just a lousy science journalist, writing the worst poem ever.

Featured image credit: Pixel-mixer/pixabay.

Titan’s lakes might be fizzing with nitrogen bubbles

Featured image: A shot by Cassini of the lakes Kraken Mare and Ligeia Mare near Titan’s north pole. Credit: NASA.

TITAAAAAAAAAAN!

One more study reporting cool things about my favourite moon this week. Researchers from Mexico and France have found that the conditions exist in which the lakes of nitrogen, ethane and methane around Titan’s poles could be fizzy with nitrogen bubbles. In technical terms, that’s nitrogen exsolution: when one component of a solution of multiple substances separates out. In this case, the nitrogen forms bubbles and floats to the surface of the lakes, becoming spottable by the Cassini probe. The results were published in the journal Nature Astronomy on April 18.

The Cassini probe has been studying Saturn and its moons since 2004. In 2013, its RADAR instrument – which makes observations using radio-waves – found small, bright features on some of Titan’s lakes that winked out over time. These features have been whimsically called ‘magic islands’ and there has been speculation that they could be bubbles. The Mexican-French study provides one scientific form for this speculation.

The researchers used a numerical model to determine how and why the nitrogen could be degassing out of the lakes. Specifically, they extracted estimates of the temperature and pressure on the surface and interiors of the Ligeia Mare lake from past studies and then plugged them into simulations used to predict the properties of Earth’s oil and gas fields. They found that the bubbles could form if the solution of methane, ethane and nitrogen was forced to split up at certain temperatures and pressures. So, the researchers had to figure out the simplest way in which this could happen and then the likelihood of finding it happening in a Titanic lake.

When the lake’s innards are not forced to split up, they’re thought to exist in a liquid-liquid-vapour equilibrium (LLVE). In an LLVE, two liquids and a vapour can coexist without shifting phases (i.e. from liquid to vapour, vapour to liquid, etc.). The researchers write in their paper, “In the laboratory, LLVEs have been observed under cryogenic conditions for systems comparable to Titan’s liquid phases: nitrogen + methane + (ethane, propane or n-butane).” While cryogenic conditions may be hard to create on Earth’s surface, they’re the natural state of affairs on Titan because the latter is so far from the Sun. The surfaces of its lakes are thought to be at 80-90 K (-190º to -180º C), with the lower reaches being a few degrees colder.

For an LLVE-like condition to be disrupted, the researchers figured the lake itself couldn’t be homogenous. The reasons: “A sea with a homogeneous composition that matches that required for the occurrence of an LLVE at a specific depth is an improbable scenario. In addition, such a case would imply nitrogen degassing through the whole extent of the system.” So in a simple workaround, they suggested that the lake’s upper layers could be rich in methane and the lower layers, in ethane. This way, there’s more nitrogen available near the surface because the gas dissolves better in methane – and also because it could be dissolving into the top more from the moon’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere.

Over time, the lake’s top layers could be forced to move downward by weather conditions prevailing above the lake, and push the material at the bottom to the top. But during the downward journey, the rising pressure breaks the LLVE and forces the nitrogen to split off as bubbles. Given the size and depth of Ligeia Mare, the researchers have estimated that nitrogen exsolution can occur at depths of 100-200 m. The bubbles that rise to the top can be a few centimetres wide – not too small for Cassini’s RADAR instrument to spot them, as well as in keeping with what previous studies have recorded.

Of course, this isn’t the only way nitrogen bubbles could be forming on Ligeia Mare. According to another study published in March, when an ultra-cold slush of ethane settling at the bottom of the lake freezes, its crystals release the nitrogen trapped between their atoms. Michael Malaska, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, California, had said at the time:

In effect, it’s as though the lakes of Titan breathe nitrogen. As they cool, they can absorb more of the gas, ‘inhaling’. And as they warm, the liquid’s capacity is reduced, so they ‘exhale’.

The Mexican-French researchers are careful to note that their analysis can’t say anything about the quantities of nitrogen involved or how exactly it might be moving around Ligeia Mare – but only that it pinpoints the conditions in which the bubbles might be able to form. NASA has been tentative about sending a submarine to plumb the depths of another Titanic lake, Kraken Mare, in the 2040s. If it does undertake the mission, it could speak the final word on the ‘magic islands’. Ironically, however, NASA scientists will have to design the sub keeping in mind the formation of LLVEs and nitrogen exsolution.

But won’t the issue be settled by then? Maybe, maybe not. Come April 22, Cassini will fly by Titan’s surface at a distance of 980 km, at 21,000 km/hr. It will be the probe’s last close encounter with the moon, as mission scientists have planned to take a look at some of the smaller lakes. After this, the probe will fly a path that will take it successively through Saturn’s inner rings. Finally, on September 15, NASA will perform the probe’s ‘Grand Finale’ manoeuvre, sending it plunging into Saturn’s gassy atmosphere and unto its death, bringing the curtains down on a glorious 13-year mission that has changed the way we think about the ringed planet and its neighbourhood.

Published in The Wire on April 20, 2017.

Spotting scientists, lazy scientists

Indian scientists are lazy, says CNR Rao:

Bharat Ratna Prof CNR Rao on Wednesday said Indian scientists are “lazy” compared to those in countries like Japan, South Korea and China. “We are generally a lazy lot. If a person is angered by his superiors or something like that happened in Japan, he tends to work for an additional two hours. But in India, we stop working,” he said at a ceremony organized by the Karnataka State Council for Science and Technology, and the department of Information Technology, Biotechnology and Science & Technology to honour scientists and engineers.

Aside from my general displeasure about this man being accorded the prefix ‘Bharat Ratna’ at every mention, Rao has been coming across as a superficial commentator of late. Recently, while speaking at some event, he said that given as large a population as India’s, and making the safe assumption that a fixed fraction of it would have be significantly smarter than the rest, it was a tragedy that we still hadn’t spotted the country’s brightest scientists yet. This might make logical sense to many people but it absolutely should not to educators like Rao. He heads JNCASR and served as the prime minister chief scientific advisor in 2004-2014. To make India’s research excellence a matter of spotting is to abdicate the responsibility of nurturing these scientists. Who will you spot if you aren’t thinking about the best ways to create them?

And then this example of Japanese scientists working longer hours because they’re pissed with their bosses. What’s wrong with the Japanese? At least that was my first thought before I realised I couldn’t disparage Japan. It could be possible that they have a system that rewards hard work without bureaucracy getting in the way. We clearly don’t. I can work 10-times as hard as others in some Indian government offices but I sure as hell won’t receive proportionate appreciation for it. Similarly, I can’t expect people to work harder in any other setting if they think they aren’t going to get their dues, and I’d actively discourage them from doing so if it impacted their personal lives. So like in the previous instance, Rao sounds like he’s simply not thinking things through: calling scientists as a community ‘lazy’ is to abdicate the responsibility to make it easier for them to enjoy the fruits of their labours.

Also, let’s try to stop importing cross-border solutions for good governance?

SC’s cancer-due-to-cell-tower verdict

From Times of India:

Last year, Harish Chand Tiwari, who works at the residence of Prakash Sharma in the Dal Bazar area of Gwalior, moved the SC through advocate Nivedita Sharma, complaining that a BSNL tower illegally installed on a neighbour’s rooftop in 2002 had exposed him to harmful radiation 24×7 for the last 14 years. Radiation from the BSNL tower, less than 50 metres from the house where he worked, afflicted him with Hodgkin’s lymphoma caused by continuous and prolonged exposure to radiation, Tiwari complained. In a recent order, a bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and Navin Sinha said, “We direct that the particular mobile tower shall be deactivated by BSNL within seven days from today.” The tower will be the first to be closed on an individual’s petition alleging harmful radiation.

Unbelievable. If the radiation received and transmitted by base station towers really causes cancer, where’s the explosion of cancer rates in urban centres around the world? In fact, data from the US suggests that cancer incidence is actually on the decline (or at least not exploding if you account for population growth) – except for cancers of the lung/bronchus (due to smoking)…

… whereas the number of cell sites has been surging.

Even if we are to give Harish Chand Tiwari the benefit of doubt, taking a cell site down because one man in its vicinity had cancer seems quite excessive. Moreover, I don’t think Tiwari has a way to prove it was the cell site alone and not anything else that gave him leukaemia. For that matter, how does any study purport to be able to show cancer being caused by one agent exclusively? We speak only in terms of risk and comorbidity even with smoking, the single-largest risk factor in modern times. Moreover, none of this has forced us to distance the hordes of other factors – including the pesticides in our food and excessive air pollution – in our daily lives. But through all these stochasticities and probabilities, the SC seems to be imposing a measure of certainty that we’ll never find. And its judgment has set a precedent that will only make it harder to beat down the pseudoscience that stalks irrational fears.

Featured image credit: Unsplash/pixabay.

A dummy’s attempt to set up WordPress

There’s something to be said about how good it feels when you set up a blog from scratch. And for a CMS, I’ve always liked WordPress because it was always so easy to set up despite being so feature-rich. I’m no developer but the thing was that even when new cloud-hosting options like Digital Ocean and Vultr (which offered the $5/mo server and weren’t BS like the popular shared-hosting retailers) came up, they had one-click installs from the get-go. There really was/is no incentive to learn how to setup WP. It’s become something you take for granted.

On top of this, my technical grammar is infantile, which makes learning to setup these things more difficult because you’ll need documentation that assumes you really know very little. For example: WP is a PHP app; Ubuntu and Debian are OSs; Apache and nginx are web-servers; Redis and MySQL are databases; and LAMP and LEMP are stacks. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to forget all this in a week.

Until I set up WordPress on Linode*, I wasn’t even know how they all fit together. This is because Linode of all the places has the best documentation on how to set up a WordPress site for dummies. Many other VPS solutions have good documentation but they don’t work for someone who wants to learn along the way. This is odd because Linode is marketed as a cloud-hosting solution for developers and its UI is much more daunting (once you login) than, say, Digital Ocean’s or Vultr’s. This is also the reason I’m not sure why Easy Engine has a really simple WordPress-on-nginx deployment option for Linode.

wget -qO ee rt.cx/ee && sudo bash ee
sudo ee site create domain.com --wp

So if you’re looking to set up your own self-hosted WordPress blog and you also want to learn how it’s done, I highly recommend using Linode’s documentation. The cool thing here is that if, for some reason, you’ve picked Digital Ocean to host your WP site, you can still use the Linode documentation: they work with both hosts. I personally would recommend Linode simply because it’s been around for longer (and also offers eight-core CPUs against Ocean’s single-core). The relevant guide is here (if you find this tough: the ‘Getting started’ guide is here). Some steps may not work perfectly but you can trust someone’s answered all the questions you’ll have somewhere on Stack Exchange.

Once you’re up, consider strengthening your security with some basic measures (a firewall plus a log-parsing app to defend against SSH attacks):

sudo apt-get install ufw
sudo ufw allow ssh
sudo ufw default allow outgoing
sudo ufw default deny incoming
sudo ufw allow 80/tcp
sudo ufw allow 1725/udp
sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw logging on
sudo apt-get install fail2ban
sudo cp /etc/fail2ban/fail2ban.conf /etc/fail2ban/fail2ban.local
sudo cp /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf /etc/fail2ban/jail.local
nano /etc/fail2ban/jail.local
# set bantime, findtime, maxretry
# set logpath = /var/log/auth.log
# save
cd /etc/fail2ban/filter.d
sudo cat > wordpress.conf
sudo nano /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/wordpress.conf
# set failregex =  - - [(d{2})/w{3}/d{4}:1:1:1 -d{4}] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200
# set ignoreregex =
# save
sudo nano /etc/fail2ban/jail.local
# set wordpress jail
# set enabled = true
# set filter = wordpres
# set logpath = /var/www/example.com/logs/access.log
# save
sudo fail2ban-client start

Happy blogging!

*The blog I set up is private.

Featured image credit: heladodementa/pixabay.