Misfed

There might be old, old entries in your feed. That's a side-effect of the switch to Blogger. Please do not read them. Quality of writing may have deteriorated as a result of the import process. Caution.

This Is Where It Is

Over here, on Blogger. Feeds may be askew. Pleasant, though!

Excising Feeds

Despite the positive comments on my poll a while back about whether on not to leave my del.icio.us links in this blog’s feed, I’ve decided to remove them. Too many irked friends.

My suggestion: add me to your network on del.icio.us and subscribe to a combined feed for all your friends. I started doing this a couple weeks back. It’s handy.

Or: subscribe directly to my del.icio.us feed.

It’s probably not even worth mentioning that, while I don’t post here all that frequently, I post a lot over at Twitter.

A del.icio.us Poll

I’ve had a couple of requests to not include my daily del.icio.us links in this blog’s feed.

Would you prefer links or no links? Please vote via comment.

In Case You Need My Code Scraps

Since rejiggering my domain recently, I’d been running code.al3x.net on Collaboa, a Rails-based Trac clone. However, the Collaboa project doesn’t seem to be going anywhere fast, despite an announcement of renewed activity. In response, a frustrated Collaboa user announced a fork called Retrospectiva, which I switched to a couple days ago.

Retrospectiva is quite full-featured for a beta release. It already goes a ways beyond Collaboa, and even Trac in some respects (the blog extension, for example). Retrospectiva isn’t production-ready, though, so for the time being code.al3x.net is simply serving up plain ol’ Apache-powered Subversion.

I’m so taken with Nginx that I decided to keep it as my public-facing HTTP server. I just run an Apache virtual host for Subversion on a high port and and tell Nginx to proxy to it like so:

server {
      listen 80;
      server_name code.al3x.net;

      location / {
        rewrite ^/ /svn/  permanent;
      }

      location /svn/ {
          proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8010;
      }
}

The rewrite bounce on / is thanks to httpd stupidness: you can’t serve up a repository index – that plain “Collection of repositories” page you’ve probably seen around – from Location / as best I can tell. Various attempts to Alias or Redirect in my Apache configuration didn’t prove fruitful, but Nginx works like a champ.

At some point I’ll move back to Retrospectiva or Trac or the like, but there’s simply not enough code there right now to worry about it.

Rails Deployments For Profit and Fun

I’ve been living, sleeping, eating, and breathing Rails deployment the past couple of weeks. It’s to the point that, once I had a breather from my professional Rails obligations, I found myself building a quick-n-dirty blog engine and doing the whole Nginx + mongrel_cluster + Capistrano deployment on my Slicehost VPS just for fun. Sick.

If I’ve been unavailable previous to this week I assure you that it was with good cause. My clients were running our web application product through focus groups, which was exciting, informative, trying, and totally frustrating all at once. At least I didn’t have to worry about was the stability of our app thanks to the swell guys at Engine Yard. I always arch a skeptical eyebrow at video testimonials and similar pimping, but after working with them over a weekend to make sure we were rock solid, I’d shill for them. There’s hosting in the “put your bits on our machines and we’ll move ‘em” sense, and then there’s the cushy red carpet that Engine Yard rolls out. Worth every penny.

Once that was settled late last week I turned my attentions to my ailing domain. Some of you may have noticed some URL breakage since I moved servers, thankyouverymuch TextPattern/PHP/Apache. Since there aren’t any good hosted blogging services I took this as an opportunity to move my blog to a homebrew Rails application, in the process improving the odds that I’ll never have to look at PHP ever again.

This site is now a minor example of the latest and greatest features of Edge Rails (soon to be Rails 1.2, mostly). If there were any brilliant tricks I’d release the source, but honestly it looks a great deal like restolog thanks to strict adherence to Rails conventions. I’m using a sessionless design and cookie-based authentication to keep things speedy, and the blog is its own admin interface once I’m logged in. I think I’ve spent maybe six hours on it, including development, migration from TextPattern, design, and deployment.

If you’re reading this in a browser, you may have noticed that the site’s design has changed a touch. Same colors, different typography, even more minimal. No offense to Hemingway but that look is everywhere now. I had a good run with it, though, lots of compliments. Hopefully nobody will be too put off by this new design. Or, rather, hopefully there’s not enough to it to put anyone off.

The other thing that desperately needed correcting is my lack of a public code repository. This has been remedied with code.al3x.net, presently running a bleeding-edge version of Collaboa. I’ll be sorting out public svn access once I have anything there that requires pulling more than one or two files, but this should meet the needs of anyone looking for my modified TextPattern -> MT export script or my TextPattern comment count fixer-upper.

The moral of all this is that Rails deployment is addictive. Use it for your work development and everything else will feel kludgey. You’ll be up all hours, wishing you could make a quick change and rake remote:deploy, all hallucinating that James Duncan Davidson is crawling around your ceiling, Trainspotting-style. Don’t let this happen to you.

Slicey

If you see this you’re on the slice. Thanks for playing.

Burnination

I was long overdue to run this site’s feeds through FeedBurner. You can now subscribe to a feed that offers my del.icio.us links and Flickr photos (if I ever add some) alongside the usual blog posts all in one handy URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/al3x

Old feeds will still work, of course.

What You Know About That

I finally updated my about page. I’ll probably tweak it a bit more. If there’s anything you think should be on it, let me know.

Typo-Free

A friend recently said to me something to the effect of: “if there’s two things you’re never happy with, it’s blog software and jobs.” Ain’t it the truth.

I’d had just about a bloody ‘nuff of Typo, what with constant errors and crippled non-cache performance and the like. So I wrote a lil’ script that’ll export your Typo blog to the plain text Moveable Type export format, and threw the whole mess into TextPattern.

Yeah, TextPattern. Made by Dean Allen. The TextDrive guy. The “Text” in TextDrive, really. If ever there was evidence that my beef with TextDrive isn’t personal, I’d say this is it. Short of maybe a card. On nice stationary.

TextPattern is good. It’s simple, faster than WordPress, well-written for being PHP, and friendly with shared hosting environments. I took some time porting Hemingway, tweaking it and making the colors just so. I’m happy with the way the whole lot looks on your end and works on my end. Hopefully you dig the look too.

Redirects have been put in place for the feeds, and I’ll get around to doing the same for the articles.

The Usual Upgrade Ish

I tried to upgrade Typo to the latest release (2.6.0) but it refused to migrate my database from the version my old Subversion checkout was using. Oddly, a more current version from trunk was able to perform the database upgrade, albeit with the loss of comments and trackbacks. They’re still in the database but are not, for no discernable reason, being displayed. Apparently the new database migrations feature – or at least Typo’s use thereof – could use some work. I will attempt to remedy the lack of archived comments in the next couple days.

The rest of the site, meanwhile, seems to be a bit zippier. Rails applications do not perform brilliantly without much coaxing and handholding, in my experience.

I will have to be very, very bored before I bother to write yet another goddamn blog engine for myself, even as much as I’d rather this site be powered by Django.

Web Hosting Is A Losing Proposition

I’ve left TextDrive. You’re reading this on Dreamhost.

TextDrive was appealing for several reasons: a lifetime account for $399; support of open source projects; a blogger-friendly community; a web developer-friendly collection of new technologies.

But a lifetime account is only a good deal if you can depend on the service, a community is only as good as its leaders, and technologies are only as useful as they are supported.

TextDrive’s uptime has been, in a word, abhorrent. The server I was on crashed bi- and often tri-weekly. It was down each of the last three days. People I didn’t even know read this site have been complaining about never being able to reach it.

Once you’re in the door you find out that you’ll basically be watching your site 24/7 to keep it running in an unstable environment that allows careless users to bring down entire servers. TextDrive blames the users, of course, rather than questioning their own administrative skills. Users are threatened with hefty fines for causing service outages, but that hasn’t remedied the miserable quality of service, which recently included unannounced downtime of their spam filter in addition to the aforementioned frequent crashes.

Folks in the blogging/Web 2.0 sphere have adopted TextDrive as their host of choice, and the TextDrive forums are bursting with Apple-grade loyalists and apologists. Get on the wrong side of their wildly arrogant admins, however, and you’ll be roundly insulted by the people who’s salaries you’re helping to pay. I’m not sure I’ve yet had a more singularly unpleasant hosting experience.

But others have. Web hosting is still a nightmare landscape of con artists, incompetents, and faceless server farms. The consumer almost always loses, as ever-cheaper prices rarely coincide with good service. It all makes hosting co-ops or more radical solutions like distributed hosting seem worth serious consideration.

Think twice before you find your next host. Do some research. Weigh the competition. And, for the love, don’t sign up with TextDrive.

Moblog No More

As I’ve moved from engine to engine and host to host, I’ve quietly ignored the fact that my moblog archive was missing many photos. Seeing as how there was nothing of particular artistic or sentimental value in that category, I’ve removed all moblog posts.

Upgrade

I haven’t killed the blog. In fact, I upgraded to a newer version of Typo this evening. I’m not crazy about Typo, but now’s not the time to write yet another DIY blog engine.

The stylesheet included in Typo’s default theme was an absolute mess, and 90% of the time spent upgrading was cleaning it up to make my own “theme.” The site should look mostly like it did before. Let me know if stuff’s broken for you.

Comments and trackbacks are both enabled, as Typo claims to have excellent comment spam protection.

The best advice I got on whether or not to ditch the blog was:

“you don’t seem to have any cause or focus (music, media, politics, dc culture) that any other blogs cover, and if you don’t have time to find one, why torture yourself?

“you don’t allow comments, which makes it harder to create a community around yours and the writings/rants of your friends on their blogs (if they do such a thing).

“so either write about things you want (music, technology, etc etc) and let people discuss them, link to relevant discussions, and foster the community that I know you like the theory of, or just create another vanity webpage.”

I haven’t really decided what to do with said advice, but there it is.

Firefox Fix

Apparently readers using Firefox haven’t been seeing the CSS-styled version of this site since I moved to Typo. My server was sending the stylesheet as an octet stream and Firefox don’t play that way. Safari didn’t mind, so I didn’t notice.

It’s fixed. Just had to set the css MIME type in lighttpd.

Typo

I moved this lot over to Typo because the My First Rails Blog Engine™ I wrote months ago was apparently leaving hung processes all over my host’s machine. Which puzzles me, as it doesn’t do anything, but whatever. Typo has all these “features” and “tests” is a far better system overall.

Things might look a little bit different and your feeds may be broken. New feed links are listed on the right as usual. Dig the “Live Search.”

On Rails, On TextDrive

A few minutes ago I kicked the DNS for this domain over to TextDrive, where the Rails blog engine I’ve been working on has eagerly been waiting to send this right here your way. Which is to say, I got the new shiz working and if you don’t care about the geeky details, be happy that I’ll be back to regular posting and other projects shortly.

For those who do care about the geeky details, here’s the specs on the new engine, less-than-creatively dubbed engin3 threengine:

• compatible with the latest Rails release as of this writing, 0.10.1


• borrows liberally from Typo and EliteJournal


• like Typo, implements only XML-RPC for posting/editing.


• unlike Typo, only implements the MetaWeblog API, and then via the new Rails ActionWebServices (as ganked from EliteJournal)


• fulltext search


• RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds


• routes for compatibility with WordPress fancy URLs (email me if you want the c0de for this – a lovely kludge)


• Markdown formatting for posts and comments


• Trackback


• probably some more junk I forgot

There’s some stuff that still needs cleaning up, but I went out of my way to make sure that, by and large, you my dear reader should be able to go about using this site pretty much as you did previously, right down to any URLs you may have linked to here. Too often do bloggers sail from one engine to the next only to leave a sea of dead links in their wake.

If you see something seriously broken please let me know. If something just looks a little out of place, that probably means I have yet to get to it. If there’s a feature or navigational aid you’d like to see implemented here please don’t hesitate to ask. I no longer have the excuse of “aww, I have to sift through someone else’s lousy code to implement that!”

Now I only have to sift through my own lousy code.

Minor Downtime

Host had some brief downtime today but all should be resolved. All relating to the host’s downtime, anyway. Not, like, the Middle East crisis, the economy, and your chilly passive-agressive relationship with your mother. Just the host.

Not The End

Hello again.

I was getting the blogging itch again (I hear Pfizer is working on an ointment), but figured my archives lost to the ages. As it turns out the contents of my blog laid intact in a previous hosts’ MySQL database, ripe for the exporting. A few scp’s later and here we are like I never abandoned the bloody thing, and leaving you wondering just how I reconcile reinstating this blog with the denouncements in my outgoing post way back in June. It’s like this:

I still can’t talk about work. I still don’t feel qualified talking about politics and world events, nor entirely confident posting personal thoughts, but I’ll do both anyway. I’m still unconvinced of any universal worth in blogging but I don’t much care about all that as long as I’m having fun writing – which I wasn’t when last I left you, but I think I can now. I still intend to keep nifty links and web-memery to del.icio.us, and I’ll provide a view of those here.

Archived posts are at the same location they used to be, so Googlers can once again revel in my years of dedicated bullshitting. Comments have been disabled for all old posts, mostly for anti-spam purposes but also as some minor attempt to start anew. Posts on music will be made at a group music blog I’m starting with several friends, which I will of course announce here when it’s live (soon, guys, sorry).

And that’s it. Away we go.

Is This The End?

I haven’t posted much more than recycled links lately because I’ve been singularly uninspired to blog. I’m thinking about just winding this thing down.

Amongst my circle of close friends (Phil, Brittany, and Craig) we’ve talked a fair bit over the past few weeks about the state of blogs. Britt thinks they’re lacking compared to traditional media outlets, and though I put up a mighty defense at the time, I’m coming to prefer a well-research article in the Economist or Financial Times over unfounded personal opinion and ramblings. Craig and Phil have taken to just reading a few very specialized blogs: music production, MoCo design, irreverent beverage reviews, that sort of thing. I’m still sifting through ~150 blogs per day, but I’m nixing more and more out of my feed reader. Blogs are, increasingly, over in my little intellectual space.

When I took my last job I expected to blog about what we did more, particularly since we were doing something in the social software space where buzz and blog publicity are mere sentences away, but busyness and other circumstances kept me from it. This new job will not allow for much of any outside discussion of my work, however, and that’s just fine with me.

I don’t want to recycle the links that other people do a great job of scouting out. If I felt like there were areas that weren’t being adequately covered I’d stick around and cover them, but there are plenty of blogs and media outlets for information security, technology and politics, gadgets, Mac stuff, and all the rest I’ve been known to write about here. I prefer to find and share neat links via sites like Del.icio.us and Pants Factory; the latter, particularly, reminds me of my old hyouden.net and the pleasant reprieve from solitary blogging that a small, well-groomed community site can offer.

I also don’t really have the desire to write long commentaries, either on world events and politics or otherwise. There are a few things I know fairly in-depth, and those I don’t hesitate to speak on. I’m beginning to agree with Brittany that there is a great deal of hubris in much of the blog world. Journals like Live Journal and Xanga may be festering pools of teen angst but at least their communities encourage personal, from-the-heart postings. There is something that feels illegitimate about the specialist poseurism of many bloggers; a handful are useful intellectual resources that otherwise wouldn’t have a voice, but many probably should not have a voice.

But before descending much further into a zero-sum criticism of blogging it’s worth realizing the beauty of media: if you don’t like it, don’t consume it. And for that matter, don’t write it. So I’m thinking about doing (or perhaps more aptly, not doing) just that.

I know the contents of this blog are a useful resource for a surprising number of people. I will, of course, leave the archives intact. And if enough people really want me to keep writing here I’m happy to accommodate them. As a interim between blogging regularly and totally disappearing off the radar I’ve had the idea of publishing (both on this page and in RSS) a sort of terse “al3x status report” that states the bare bones need-to-know about where I am, what I’m into, what I’m up to, and where I’m gonna be. No archives, no guarantee of regular posting, just a little sum-sumthin’ for those of you who like to keep up with me via this site and/or your feed reader.

Let me know what you want. And, prospectively, goodbye for now.