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The Third Coast Int. Audio Fest Website Code and notes
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Account Management (WSM Domains, AWS, APIs, etc.) #29

Open TCEmkenn opened 4 years ago

TCEmkenn commented 4 years ago

This issue outlines some spring-cleaning-esque tasks to start mulling over.

Currently, there are 4 registrars/hosts: WSM domains (most of TCF domain registrations and DNS services), GoDaddy (the fest registrar), SquareSpace (hosts the fest) and Amazon Web Services, which hosts the website, and all of the media (images and audio).

This could be streamlined into one or two accounts, most likely AWS, as the media storage is a behemoth and likely to stay. Everything has a redic product name, and the service is called Route53, and it is does all things domain related.

Changing Registrars

In order to transfer from WSM to anything else, a couple of things have to be fixed, in order, which involve quite a bit of back and forth, some delays in processing, and a lot of administrative oversight:

  1. Registrant contact info (called WHOIS) must be reassigned to an email in TCF's control
  2. Domain names must be transferred between registrars using a specified process and confirmed via registrant contact info in previous
  3. All DNS records must be reentered, especially the MX records for email and the A records that tell the domain which server the website is on

API integrations

APIs are systems that allow one piece of computer software to speak to another (over the internet). The reason for their existence is to allow distinct services, say a website and a newsletter system, to be integrated so that they appear as one service to users—often admins trying to avoid duplication of data in two platforms.

When considering podcasts and newsletters and data collection forms, etc., it is worth looking at the byzantine array of products and see if they are amenable to being combined into looking like one product. Or, if not, allowing a product like air table to automatically be made aware of the goings on of multiple products into one interface for management.

A compelling example would be to use GitHub's API to login (much like the 'login with facebook' or 'login with google' seen around). When, for example, these platforms are integrated, a service can be designed to allow a user to open/close or comment on an issue directly from the website. Teams could be managed so if someone needed access to something temporarily, they could be assigned/revoked through github without making any changes to the site or it's data, which really need not track user management.