It keeps changing.
I was just curious about your site and newsletter. What type of hosting do you use? Did you “handcraft” your site or use a CMS like WordPress or Squarespace? How do you create your newsletter, such as what application do you use?
Can you give us some background information?
Keep up the good work. Always look forward to your newsletters.
In the ten years since I published the first version of this article, almost everything has changed. As we know, such is technology, right?
So, let’s peek behind the curtains of today’s Ask Leo! world headquarters.
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Ask Leo!'s technology
- Ask Leo! is hosted on AWS EC2 using Ubuntu Linux and WordPress with custom plugins.
- Newsletters are crafted with custom PHP scripts and sent via Aweber.
- The Best of Ask Leo! and Tip of the Day newsletters are automated through RSS feeds and sent via Aweber.
- Questions are managed using self-hosted FreeScout.
- “World headquarters” is wherever I have an internet connection.
The website
For the past few years, askleo.com (and several other of my sites) have been hosted on virtual servers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). I believe the servers are physically somewhere in Oregon. The virtual servers are the equivalent of a complete PC that I manage and access remotely from wherever I am.
Each server runs the Ubuntu Linux operating system (currently, version 20.04.6). The server dedicated to askleo.com has an Intel Xeon 8375C CPU running at 2.90GHz with eight cores and 32GB of RAM. Hard disk space varies; I can grow or shrink it as needed. Right now it’s about 120GB.
The askleo.com website runs WordPress as its content management system. WordPress runs the GeneratePress theme, which is customized to my style. I also have a couple of custom WordPress plugins to get things just the way I want. Naturally, like most WordPress sites, I run various plugins to add or modify functionality on the site.
The newsletter
The newsletter is where things get a little more handcrafted.
The archive at newsletter.askleo.com is another WordPress site.
To generate newsletter content, I’ve written some custom PHP that my assistant or I run, usually a couple of days before the publication date. The PHP automatically picks up the appropriate content from the website and YouTube, adds a couple of items like the weekly advertisement or my additional comments, and then runs that against a template to create the final HTML.
That HTML is then copy-pasted into Aweber, my (highly recommended) newsletter-sending service, where it’s scheduled to be sent every Tuesday at 8:00 AM Pacific time.
The Best Of Ask Leo! newsletter
The Best Of Ask Leo! mailing list is a separate and completely automated newsletter.
Each week, I select a “Best of” article and mark it as such. The askleo.com website generates an RSS feed of those “Best of” entries. Aweber picks up the most recent item when it’s updated and automatically sends it to the subscribers.
The Ask Leo! Tip of the Day works similarly.
Asking a question
I get a lot of questions… so many that I have to put some structure around how they’re managed between myself and my assistants. Once upon a time, I used a custom PHP interface that I’d written myself.
I now use self-hosted FreeScout. It’s software specifically designed to handle customer support or helpdesk requests. When a customer contacts a company, a “ticket” is created that is then updated and communicated back and forth as the support request is handled.
It dawned on me that this ticketing is pretty much what happens to Ask Leo! questions. So now when you enter a question at askleo.com/ask, it automatically creates a ticket that we then track as the question is processed by one of my assistants (filtered for spam and common answers) and eventually assigned to me for review.
Not to minimize what I do, but in a way, Ask Leo! is not much more than a help desk (i.e. a question submission form) and knowledgebase (the thousands and thousands of articles already published). It makes sense that a ticketing system would work well, and it has.
A word about that “world headquarters”
I love using the phrase “world headquarters” because it’s so ironic.
Ask Leo! serves the entire planet. I get visitors from every corner of the globe. And yet “world headquarters” is wherever I happen to be that has an internet connection.
Mostly, that means here in my home in Woodinville, Washington. Ask Leo! world headquarters has been a travel trailer parked in a state park on the Washington Coast, a hotel in Maui, another hotel in The Netherlands, another hotel in Montana, the local Starbucks, and even my sister-in-law’s driveway in Bellingham, WA. You get the idea. Ask Leo! world headquarters is wherever I and my laptop happen to be.
It’s yet another reason I love what I do: I can do it just about anywhere.
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120 GB for the website. You can back it up on a medium to small-capacity flash drive.
” Ask Leo! is not much more than a help desk ” Yes and no. We field questions and answer them from our head knowledge, using a search to find relevant articles on Ask Leo!, or researching the answer on the web. A help-desk person basically works with a book or database of FAQs. No knowledge required. We use help-desk software, but the process of finding an answer is different.
Since Covid has made teleworking mainstream, many people’s offices are wherever they and their laptop happen to be.
My Ask Leo! branch office fluctuates between 2 countries and 3 US states.
You are certainly world wide as I enjoy your newsletters here in Australia. My wife’s cousin lives in Washington and has wanted us to visit for some time but our health issues stops us from getting needed travel insurance. We have the same problem visiting the wife’s sister who lives in Phoenix Arizona but we have been there once several years ago. I also know my son-in-law likes you newsletters and he lives with my daughter in southern England. Amazon has servers world wide so they are a good choice for web hosting.
You get some lovely illustrations from AI. I’d love for you to give us a peak at the prompts you use.
It varies. The ALT text of each should show the ChatGPT generated prompt, or a variation thereof. My original prompt is usually much shorter, less detailed, but similar.
You once told me you were breaking in a new search engine on Ask Leo. You said it was faster than Google. Which search engine are you using?
https://www.algolia.com/
If you update the search on the search results page you’ll see the results update as you type.
It seems to be working well.
Cool. For anyone else, in Chrome just right-click on the image and select “Inspect Accessibility Properties” to see this.
Mark Jacobs (Team Leo) said:
June 21, 2024 at 4:51 pm
“Since Covid has made teleworking mainstream, many people’s offices are wherever they and their laptop happen to be.
My Ask Leo! branch office fluctuates between 2 countries and 3 US states.”
And God help us all if the internet ever goes down. Either take out the power grid or attack bunches of name servers.