Josh Austin's Blog

hugo blog issues

Sun, 27 Nov 2016 09:00:00 -0500

The conversion to a Hugo based blog from a Wordpress based blog went pretty smoothly, but there were a few issues that came up during the conversion. I was able to work through some of the issues, but some are still pending.

Export From Wordpress

The first issue I encountered was that the plugin to export a Wordpress blog to Hugo wasn’t very easy to use. The Hugo documentation suggested that an easier path would be to use the Jekyll-Exporter plugin and then import using the built-in “Import from Jekyll” command in Hugo. Fortunately this worked really well. All of my pictures were imported to the appropriate Hugo static path and all the links seemed to work great.

I’m not 100% certain but I think I would need to install the “Export to Hugo” plugin from the terminal by copying its files directly into the correct Wordpress directory location. The plugin readme also recommends running the export from the terminal and for some folks that might be a bridge too far. As a comparison I was able to install the Jekyll-Exporter plugin from inside the Wordpress admin interface and run it from there. It seems like this is an easier approach and I would recommend it over using the “Export to Hugo” plugin for most people.

I consider this issue solved since the Jekyll-Exporter plugin worked so well.

CSS Issues

The next issue I noticed was some of my links and images were running off the page and causing horizontal scroll bars. I don’t remember if I had to tweak the CSS on the Wordpress site to get the look I wanted or if it looked that way by default.

This issue is still pending and I suspect I’ll have to add a few tweaks to my CSS to get the correct look for the new site.

Mobile Workflow

One of the great things about the Wordpress ecosystem is that there are a bunch of options for writing posts and managing the site from a mobile device. I need to figure out some sort of workflow so I can compose/edit and publish from my mobile device.

One issue that has been pretty easy to sort out is a mobile Markdown editor. I’m writing this on the 1Writer app which has been excellent so far. I’m not sure how to handle the TOML front-matter Hugo needs but I think I may be able to write a script to generate it.

I’m storing my Hugo source folder on Dropbox so accessing my content folder is super easy and any documents I compose or edit will be synced back to my Linux workstation when I save them. Right now I’m thinking I’ll SSH into my workstation and run hugo then rsync to update the site on the Digital Ocean droplet where it’s hosted.

license

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 10:12:44 -0500

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

new blog

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 09:08:48 -0500

I’m updating my blog to run as a “static” website using the static site generator Hugo instead of WordPress like I’ve used in the past. There are several reasons for this, but largely it’s that maintaining an active site is kind of a pain and I’ve got plenty of other stuff to do.

In order to get this off the ground, I’m using the Hugo Quick Start Guide. I’m going to try and just follow the instructions they provide and we’ll see how easy it is to move from an old WordPress site to a new Hugo site.

After getting the content moved over I’ll need to worry about comments. I don’t see a good way to import existing comments but I figure I can make this transition once and use some sort of “comments-as-a-service” service to deal with the issue of commenting going forward. But if I can’t get that to work in a way that makes me happy I won’t worry about it. The comments were mostly spam anyway.

Themes

When choosing a theme I had a bit of trouble figuring out which of the available themes was well maintained and had responsive templates. I ended up just cloning the entire theme repository and using ack to track down some themes with keywords that I was looking for. I ended up using hyde-x which seems like a reasonably well maintained clone of the classic hyde theme for Jekyll.

Embedded Code

Just a quick test of what embedded Elixir source code might look like:

@spec new([redis_pool_option]) :: {:ok, pool} | {:error, reason}
def new(opts) when is_list(opts) do
  worker_opts = [
    id: :erlang.make_ref()
  ]
  child_spec = worker(ExRedisPool.RedisPool, [opts], worker_opts)
  {:ok, pid} = Supervisor.start_child(ExRedisPool.Supervisor, child_spec)
  pid
end

That is really not too bad.

Next…

I’m going to give this Wordpress-to-Hugo-Exporter mentioned on the Hugo Tools page a try to move my old posts from the WordPress site over to the new Hugo Site. We’ll see how it goes.

Dell m3800 Developer Edition

Fri, 15 May 2015 14:12:45 +0000

A developer has different priorities than a general user when selecting a laptop, especially for work. Right now IMHO the most exiting option is the Dell m3800 in developer edition trim. Here is a picture of my new m3800 in developer edition trim at the coffee shop!

For the last several years I’ve had a MacBook Pro as my primary workstation and like most recent Apple products, it is quite polished. The main issue is that I generally don’t write software designed to run on OS X. I write software designed to run on Linux. A bunch of options like Vagrant and more recently Docker have cropped up to help provide a Linux environment on OS X. And of course there is always the option of simply running a plain old virtual machine.

These solutions are fine and work well for many things, but one place they fall short is debugging. Does anyone like using a remote debugger? They are better now than ever, but the experience still isn’t great and that might push a developer toward using Linux as their primary desktop OS rather than something like OS X.

I probably don’t need to mention the host of other reasons that Linux makes a nice desktop OS but the other main issue for me is that as nice as MacPorts and Homebrew are, they really don’t compare to the package managers available in Linux.

As much as I would like to think that the good folks at Dell are working on providing machines like the m3800 with Linux pre-installed because they just love developers so much, I have to think that the real reason the suits green-lighted the Sputnik program is because they smell blood in the water due to Apple’s tendency to move OS X closer and closer to the idiot proof experience provided in iOS. With each new release, OS X has added behaviors clearly targeted at getting iOS users to buy a Mac.

That’s not a bad business decision on Apple’s part, but improvements that power users would like seem to be ignored. There are basic things missing from the OS X experience like window management because the average OS X user doesn’t have multiple large format external displays on their desk. Additionally Apple doesn’t seem to trust outside developers with reasonable access to the bug reporting system. Let’s not kid ourselves, Darwin is not really an open-source project. And with basic features like Window management and package management missing from OS X, developers often look to Linux as an alternative.

That’s what makes the Sputnik project at Dell so exciting to me. Linux has always suffered from a rough user experience on laptops because the integration work is not trivial to get a desktop environment running well, with reasonable battery life, and working track-pad drivers. Let’s not even get started on suspend/resume functionality or getting the graphics stack working properly.

The m3800 experience is not like that. It’s not rough at all. It’s not the padded room experience like OS X, but it’s very nice. The experience with the m3800 is the experience I hoped I would have the last time I tried to install Linux on my MacBook Pro.

My only suggestion to Dell is to make sure enough resources are allocated to maintain and improve the user experience with Linux. With the business support structure already in place it’s easy to imagine 75 of these m3800 laptops provisioned for our engineering group. The m3800 developer edition does not need to be less expensive than the Windows version of the same laptop. I would gladly pay the extra $100 for the computer without the windows license if that extra money could be reinvested into the Sputnik Project.

If the developer edition laptops run a higher profit margin for Dell that would hopefully provide a good incentive for them to produce the very best laptop for running Linux. Who knows they might even design laptops from the ground up to run Linux rather than just making sure it runs properly on the most suitable variants of the machines designed to run Windows. I know not everyone may agree with that, but if your reasons for using Linux are strictly financial, your priorities are different than mine.

Anyway, kudos to Dell for a great job bringing this product to market!

Setting up WiFi on Ubuntu 14.04 Server from the Terminal

Sat, 27 Dec 2014 21:56:57 +0000

I was setting up a server today and I didn’t have a wired ethernet drop available for it but I did have WiFi. So I decided to just setup WiFi for today and get it plugged into the network on Monday. I mean how hard could it be to set up wifi right?

I started with this article on the Ubuntu community help portal:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NetworkConfigurationCommandLine/Automatic#WPA_supplicant

I have to admit this got me most of the way, but for my machine there was a crucial piece of configuration missing. It turns out there are two driver options available for wifi cards, wext and nl80211. It took me far too many ~~minutes~~ hours of googling to discover this. Here was the page that explained it for me:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/97828/driver-d-option-under-wpa-supplicant

After updating the driver, here is what my wpa.sh file looks like:

#!/bin/bash
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: wpa
# Required-Start: $network $syslog $local_fs
# Required-Stop: $network $syslog $local_fs
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: Start/stop script for wpa supplicant
# Description: Custom start/stop script for wpa_supplicant.
### END INIT INFO

SELF=`basename $0`
WPA=wpa_supplicant
PROGRAM=/sbin/${WPA}
CONF=/etc/${WPA}.conf
INTERFACE=wlan0
DRIVER=nl80211
DAEMONMODE="-B"
LOGFILE=/var/log/$WPA.log

function start() {

# TODO: Support multiple interfaces and drivers
OPTIONS="-c $CONF -i $INTERFACE -D $DRIVER $DAEMONMODE"

## You can remove this if you are running 8.10 and up.
# Ubuntu 8.10 and up doesn't need the -w anymore..
# And the logfile option is not valid on 8.04 and lower
local ver=$(lsb_release -sr | sed -e 's/\.//g');
[ $ver -lt 810 ] && OPTIONS="$OPTIONS -w" && LOGFILE=""
##

# Log to a file
[ -n "$LOGFILE" ] && OPTIONS="$OPTIONS -f $LOGFILE"

echo " * Starting wpa supplicant"
eval $PROGRAM $OPTIONS
}

function stop() {
echo " * Stopping wpa supplicant"
pkill $PROGRAM
}

function debug() {
stop
DAEMONMODE="-ddd"
start
}

function restart() {
stop
start
}

function status() {
pgrep -lf $PROGRAM
}

function usage() {
echo "Usage: $SELF <start|stop|status|debug>"
return 2
}

case $1 in
start|stop|debug|status) $1 ;;
*) usage ;;
esac

That’s it. At least it was a Saturday so no one saw…

Convert Numbers from Base 16 to Base 64 in Python

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 14:38:51 +0000

The Problem

A web app that I built for a client uses tokens to keep track of user activity. We email URLs to users with links that have these tokens in the query string. They look like this:

https://super-long-domain.com/a-long-file-name.html?token=54410e10571a4a067e624293

The problem is that older versions of Outlook wrap long URLs like this to a new line, but don’t include any of the characters on the 2nd line in the hyperlink. So when a user clicks on the link, the wrapped text is not included. Obviously this breaks the web app. Grr.

The Solution

Microsoft recommends that you educate your users on how to repair the broken link themselves. This is not a great solution. Another option would be to send full HTML messages, but that seems like overkill and we like plain text just fine.

Instead we want to shorten the URL so it will fit on a single line in most email clients. There are a couple places we can attack it:

The HTML File Name

This web app is running on an Nginx web server so we can define a custom location for this file that has a shorter path. Now when we enter this in the browser:

https://super-long-domain.com/at/

We will be redirected automatically to here:

https://super-long-domain.com/a-long-file-name.html

The Token

Next we need to deal with the token itself. Again we can employ URL rewriting in Nginx to get started. We rewrite this:

https://super-long-domain.com/at/54410e10571a4a067e624293

We will be redirected automatically to here:

https://super-long-domain.com/a-long-file-name.html?token=54410e10571a4a067e624293

Shortening the length of the token itself would be even better. My first though was to convert the Token, which is a Hexadecimal number, to a base64 representation of the same number. I found a lot of examples of how to change encoding formats for text strings, but that doesn’t help. We need to convert the Hex number to a binary format and then to base16 to get a shorter result. In Python that looks like this:

base64.urlsafe_b64encode(bytes.fromhex('54410e10571a4a067e624293')).decode()

Then instead of a 24 character token you have a nice 16 character token:

VEEOEFcaSgZ-YkKT

The Result

Now the links look like this:

https://super-long-domain.com/at/VEEOEFcaSgZ-YkKT

Hopefully that will make super old versions of Outlook happier.

Lifeproof iPhone 5s Nüüd Case Review

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 02:13:28 +0000

I held off on purchasing another Lifeproof case because of some of the issues I had with my previous Lifeproof case. You can read about my experience with that case in my Lifeproof iPhone 5 Case Review. I decided to take the plunge with a the Nüüd case because it removes the barrier between my finger and the touch screen.

Lifeproof Nüüd Case

The Nüüd case comes with an assortment of things in the box, including a block of plastic shaped like an iPhone so you can leak test the case without putting your phone in it first. That’s nice.

contents of the box

As you can see from the picture of the front and back of the case, there is no screen protector built into the front half of the case. Lifeproof does include a stick-on screen protector that you can apply if you want, but that sort of defeats the purpose. If you want to cover your screen, maybe you should consider the Lifeproof Frē instead.

front and back of the Nüüd

Just like other Lifeproof cases, there is a door covering the Lightning port.

close up of the back

I had a really hard time getting the camera cover clean. It is a very stretchy bit of plastic that seems to love little specs of dust. I tried to use the cloth that came with the case, but I think that made it worse.

camera cover

The same sort of stretchy film covers the home button (as near as I can tell). Be careful that you don’t trap any air under the film when you put the case together, otherwise it cause a bubble that doesn’t go away.

home button cover

The speaker cover was another area that I had a little trouble with on the Frē because sometimes it would vibrate like a kazoo with certain frequencies of sound. I haven’t experienced that yet with this case, but I’ll update the post if I hear it happen.

inside speaker cover

My very favorite improvement to this case is the tether for the headphone plug cover. I could never keep track of those little plugs on the older case and they always fell out of the little holder on the extension cable. Losing one of those plugs was the worst. This tether is the best!

headphone plug tether

how-i-know-im-getting-older

Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:23:09 +0000

My favorite thing in my office is my very fancy chair.

It’s an Embody Chair from Herman Miller. Yes that means that many interns could be equipped with perfectly serviceable chairs for what a single Embody chair costs. But now, after nearly six months of writing code while sitting in one I can confidently say that this chair has nearly ruined my ability to sit in any other chair.

To me it also shows that I’m not a kid anymore. In earlier days, having the fastest CPU or the most Memory would have been much more important than a chair. But now, the most important things are the chair, the display, the display arm, the keyboard, and the mouse. Basically anything I touch or have to look at for long periods of time.

Chromebook to Ubuntubook with help from Codestarter.org

Sun, 10 Aug 2014 00:18:56 +0000

I came across Tom Preston-Werner’s blog post about installing Ubuntu on a Chromebook the other day while reading Hacker News and since I happen to have an Acer C720

and some kids who might enjoy it, I took the plunge and used Codestarter‘s installation scripts to install Ubuntu on my Chromebook.

I had thought of installing linux on the chromebook before reading Preseton-Werner’s blog post, but I didn’t take the plunge before because…

the Linux kernel does not support the trackpad.

The thought of compiling a customer kernel with the trackpad driver’s didn’t sound like very much fun. The Arch Linux Wiki I read suggested some instructions to patch the kernel. Anyway, I never really got to the point where I wanted to do all that to get Linux running on the chromebook.

Looking at the codestarter.org script I wondered how many hours they must have spent trying to get it exactly right. Despite the relative brevity of the scripts, it looks like a lot of time went into them.

The first step

involved making a backup of ChromeOS because there is a non-zero chance that this sort of hacking around in the internals of the c720 will result in a device that will no longer boot. I’ve mostly stopped using removable media in the past few years so after considerable searching I found an SD card that could function as the backup media. After making the backup image I read the next instruction which said to download the installation script to some other removable media. :/

Much later

I found an old USB stick that would work and loaded the installer onto the USB drive. Following the instructions provided, I activated Developer Mode on the c720.

Next I plugged in the thumb drive, and executed the command sudo bash main.sh kicked off the installation process.

The installer did somethings, which I think included formatting the hard drive and then rebooted the c720. The same sudo bash main.sh is run again and this time it installs Ubuntu in the space it formatted.

Overall I think the installation process is very smooth, but there are a few areas where it might have been made more clear. I’ve modified the instructions to reflect this:

I kept thinking this is too easy

while installing Ubuntu. Then My c720 froze the first time I attempted to boot into linux. Given how long some of the other steps took, I thought this too was just taking a long time.

Eventually I ran out of patience, and rebooted to try again. Here we go, I thought. Now it will take hours to get it working again.

Boom.

This time it booted right up into Ubuntu. After settings my timezones I was presented with the desktop.

I’m still more than a little shocked it was that easy. I was certain that it would take longer, and be crazy difficult to get this working. The script from Codestarter.org make a huge difference and in the end it was pretty easy to get Ubuntu installed on the chromebook.

How does it all fit together?

Now that the little chromebook is running Ubunutu, I’ll right the rest of this post using the chromebook itself.

It is not a fast computer. My primary computer is a quad-core MacBook Pro, so to say I’m a little spoiled is an understatement, but opening the Chrome browser for the first time under Ubuntu was certainly an exercise in patience. I think it’s safe to say that the c720 isn’t any sort of speed demon, but that isn’t what Codestarter.org was aiming for.

They were aiming for a developer laptop.

There are other things that are important to developers, like a good keyboard which the c720 certainly has. The keys have a decent amount of travel, and are spaced widely enough that I didn’t find myself hitting the wrong key very much.

Additionally, SublimeText works well. It started up quickly and stayed responsive.

Solarized, the one true color scheme.

Over all the c720 with Linux is a heck of a deal. I only paid $200 for this little computer and it feels like I could use it in largely the same way I used my MacBook Pro. That’s high praise.

I think some kids are going to have the time of their lives learning to build with these chromebooks! I would have loved a computer like this when I was young.

I don’t mind iterating

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 05:00:30 +0000

One of the things I like best about running a start-up business is that I am often given the opportunity to iterate. By that, I mean I often screw something up so badly that I am forced to change how I do it in order to get the result I was looking for.

I don’t mind it. I don’t mind making changes. I’ll change if I need to in order to win.

But, what I find and endlessly frustrating is failing and not understanding what I did wrong. How can I improve if I don’t understand what I did wrong?

Can You Deal With That Much Frustration?

Mon, 05 May 2014 10:36:36 +0000

I have an experience that always surprises me is when someone sits down with me to watch me write some code. Most of the time the person will turn to me after a few minutes and say something to the effect of,

I can’t believe that you sit here all day just Googling how to do things on the Internet. I thought you were actually like really smart or something. You do everything wrong four or five times before you get it right.

And just like that the magic is gone…

I had this experience again just the other day after spending some time with someone who wanted to learn how to program. We wrote a few simple programs together and during the course of our time, I Googled “how to do something” every few minutes. I watched for the “ah-ha” moment when they would realize how easy it is. After about twenty minutes I saw the expression I was watching for. What my previously eager guest said surprised me at first,

Maybe I’m just not a computer person…

Huh? I didn’t understand so I said,

But I just showed you how easy it is to figure out how to do anything!

And they responded,

I don’t think I can deal with that much frustration.

Then I realized that it wasn’t the process of writing the code that kept this person from being a developer. It was the experience of the code not working 100 or 1000 times before you got it right. Each of those “failures” can be an extremely painful experience for some folks. My guest then said,

In my mind you sit at your computer and just write out this program. That’s where you spend most of your time, typing the actual code. Then you spend 5 or 10 minutes fixing any bugs. But, in reality, you spend 1% of the time writing the program and 99% of the time fixing the bugs. I could never deal with that much failure.

It made me sad, but I think this is not a particularly uncommon scenario.

Has anyone else had this experience?

Boring is Best

Thu, 17 Apr 2014 10:56:03 +0000

I really like this blog post by Matt Jaynes about building solid business on proven technologies:

https://devopsu.com/blog/boring-systems-build-badass-businesses/

I struggle with this myself, the desire to use the latest and greatest tech in our systems at MaaSive.net, but fortunately I have some really smart people around that help me realize when that’s not the best idea for the business.

It Requires Super Human Discipline to Write Readable Code in Callbacks

Sat, 01 Feb 2014 00:35:12 +0000

Callbacks can be messy, as Guido Van Rossum said in his recent asyncio talk (@ 56:27 in the YouTube video):

“It requires super human discipline to write readable code in callbacks and if you don’t believe me look at any piece of JavaScript code.” ~ Guido Van Rossum

Fortunately you don’t have to write callbacks if you don’t want to. You need only look to Tornado and Motor

Python has some neat features that let allow generators to be used as coroutines. The Tornado Web Framework includes decorators to make this dead simple. For me, the biggest drawback to using Tornado was the lack of a good asynchronous db driver. Using a blocking db driver sort of defeats the purpose of a non-blocking web server. Fortunately for those of us who don’t love writing callbacks, now there is a good solution.

Motor is a first class asynchronous MongoDB driver written by Jesse Jiryu Davis from MongoDB that will soon take advantage of Futures to present an easy to use, but still asynchronous, interface with MongoDB.

Jesse announced some changes that make using Motor even easier by incorporating Futures into the syntax, just like recent versions of Tornado. We are waiting on MongoDB v2.6 RC, which roadmap indicates will be released on 2/11/14 and the associated version of PyMongo.

In anticipation of this release, I thought it would be fun to look at just how far asynchronous db drivers for Tornado have come. Despite Jesse’s warnings that we should wait until the changes are official, we’ve been using these techniques at MaaSive.net to supercharge developer productivity and increase clarity in our asynchronous code.

In the Beginning

When I started using Motor v0.1 about a year ago this is what trivial DB access looked like for a simple handler that returns some JSON:

If I only ever had to make one db call, and only had to write one callback handler this would not be so bad. The problem is that in reality I need to make several db calls, and may need to wait until two or more are complete to do anything useful. The callbacks get out of hand quickly.

The worst problem is that debugging becomes a nightmare of epic proportions. The entire reason we use Tornado is to enable long-polling with lots of connections at the same time, and it becomes very hard to tell exactly where the problems are when lots of connections are active at the same time. Most developers (myself included) rely on stack-traces to debug our programs, but with callbacks like this you can kiss that nice stack-trace goodbye.

The Present

Motor v0.1.2 has come a long way since that time. Today a trivial DB access looks like this:

Technically you could also write it like this using motor.Op:

This is much, much better than before. Tornado’s tornado.gen module does a great job putting together a “stack-trace” when an exception is thrown and while this is certainly acceptable and useable, it still feels a little clunky. Why do we have to write motor.Op for example?

The motor.Op class exists because motor has a forward looking maintainer who was planning for the Future.

The Future(s)

disclaimer – this api is not released for Motor yet. It will come out with Motor v0.2 along with MongoDB 2.6 RC0 and PyMongo 2.7.

With Futures, we get to write the same thing like this:

The cursor.to_list method returns a Future directly and yielding the Future blocks this coroutine, returning control to the event loop, until the result is ready. It does not get any easier than that.

Developer Cycles are Precious

For many projects the most expensive component is the time put in by the developers, or as I prefer to call them, developer cycles. One of the main reasons we use Python is for the expressiveness of the language. In my experience we can ship more features that our customers want, more quickly by developing in Python than we can in any other language.

Tornado and Motor are making it much easier to deploy asynchronous web servers than it has been in the past. The new AsyncIO library will likely continue to accelerate that trend and that’s a good thing because I really don’t have time to write a bunch of callbacks.

What business needs are you solving with asynchronous web servers?

Markdown 2 HTML Helper

Sun, 06 Oct 2013 02:17:40 +0000

Sometimes I think I love markdown to much. Here is a handlebars helper for loading markdown files with AJAX and rendering them as HTML in the browser.

How-To Setup DNSMadeEasy Dynamic DNS on a Synology

Sat, 21 Sep 2013 19:27:06 +0000

I had a lot of trouble finding any help to get Dynamic DNS (DDNS) set up between a Synology NAS (a great product!) and DNSMadeEasy.com DDNS service so I thought I would post the solution that I worked out in case anyone else was looking.

1. Set up your DDNS domain on DNSMadeEasy.com

The wrinkle that DNSMadeEasy.com throws in the mix is that instead of the domain being updated, they use a unique ID number that’s generated when you save a record with the “Dynamic DNS” box checked.

After creating the record keep track of the password and the ID. You’ll need them later.

2. Add the DDNS provider for DNSMadeEasy.com on your Synology NAS

If you open the DDNS control panel on your Synology (Control Panel > ezCloud > DDNS) you will notice that there is no DNSMadeEasy.com option on the service provider menu.

To add the Service Provider you need to SSH into the terminal. If you need help setting up terminal access check out this tutorial on the Synology wiki.

Once you have terminal access use vi to edit the /etc.defaults/ddns_provider.conf file with this command.

$ sudo vi /etc.defaults/ddns_provider.conf

The vi editor can be found on almost every POSIX system. It can be confusing for people who have never used it before, so if you need help with vi check out this cheat-sheet and tutorial.

Add the DNSMadeEasy.com entry to the end of your ddns_provider.conf file as shown in the following Gist on Github:

We are actually using the same provider as DynDNS and only using the “hostname” variable to support DNSMadeEasy.com’s “id” variable. I was a little concerned that the Synology would do some sort of validation on the HostName field and bounce the string of numbers as invalid. But fortunately they don’t and we can use that field to supply the ID without any further customization.

Save the file and reopen the DDNS control panel on the Synology.

3. Setup DDNS on your Synology NAS

Now you should have the DNSMadeEasy.com option in the “Service Provider” field. Put your “Dynamic DNS ID” from DNSMadeEasy.com into the “Hostname” field. Use the email address associated with your DNSMadeEasy.com account for the “Username” field, and the “Dynamic DNS Password” from the DNSMadeEasy.com record in the “Password” field and “Confirm password” field. Hit apply and if your status says “success” you are in business!