One Man’s Walk in work

At least when I do it…

Every since my hard drive died on my server and my site went down, I’ve been looking for alternatives to self hosting. Fact is, I’ve learned everything I set out to learn from running my own server and it’s a pain in the ass. This blog for example is now hosted on TextDrive – and I’m totally happy with their service.

However, I still had to find some place to put all my pictures. If y’all remember my “Shimmer” project, I had them all accessible from the web through my own self hosted portal. I really liked that. I had been thinking about Flickr and ShutterFly, and even using Amazon’s S3 through my own custom frontend.

I think for now I’m going to go with Flickr. Why?

h3.Good

• Great UI - as of today, some of the best AJAX stuff I’ve seen anywhere
• $24 / year
• unlimited storage
• even if you default on your account they don’t delete anything

h3.Bad

• They won’t store video – I store video that my camera takes along with my pictures

So even though they don’t have video, I think I want to go with them for photos. I’m gonna have to keep looking for a solution for my videos.

Here’s a link

It had to happen sometime.

I finally got fed up with maintaining my own handrolled blog software. In the end, it was the spammers that did it, I just couldn’t be bothered to add all the features that were necessary to handle them correctly.

And then, a couple weeks ago, I did a Ruby on Rails presentation, and someone pointed me to Typo as an example app.
Typo

Typo is awesome. It has tons of features I want, tons more that I can play with (it’s like christmas), it’s fairly user friendly, all ajaxed up, and it’s on rails, so I can hack into it to my hearts content.

If you’re self hosting a blog and are at all familiar with rails, I give it several thumbs up. Shame I only have 2…

I feel like my priorities have changed as well. Using a 3rd party tool like typo will help me focus more on the content of my blog and less on the technology behind it. Though I will say I’ve already learned a lot by seeing how the Typo team has done things.
Shimmer
After looking into it a bit, I decided I still didn’t want to use Shutterfly or Flickr. So I’m starting a new project called shimmer that is yet another photo gallery on rails. I coded up a couple plugins for typo so that I can natively have code like :


<typo:shimmer img="2003/January/Europe/IMG300.JPG" float="right"/>


in my posts and typo just does the right thing.

More to come on Shimmer as I polish it a little.

I hate spammers…

You’ve probably noticed, lately this blog has been getting hit by spammers. I’m disabling write for now till I have a second to spam proof it.

Seriously, I’m usually against capital punishment, but if I had a few spammers strapped to electric chairs and a switch in my hand…well, I wouldn’t hesitate very long before pulling it.

The idea of this site was a world writeable wiki / blog. That’s super simple, no users, no permissions, and it works great if people aren’t jerks. I like to believe the best of people. Guess this time I lost the bet.

Until I get adding comments back up, please e-mail them to me.

So it may look like the old site, but you are looking at brand spanking rewrite.

OneMansWalk now sits on top of RubyOnRails. And it’s nice. Very, very nice. For the first time I could actually see Ruby as something that I would actually ask a client to consider for a web application.

It still is file based which lets me use cvs as a way to work in a disconnected fashion. However, I’ve started separating content from logic, so the site is now a project on RubyForge at http://rubyforge.org/projects/blinki/ and doesn’t include any content :).

I’ve had a lot of requests to get a site like this up and running for my friends, so next up I’m going to try to install it on one of their machines and then work on packaging it for non programmers. I want to create a windows installer that installs apache, ruby, imagemagick, and this source code. We’ll see how that goes. It will be successful when my mom can install it

One note : if you have a link to my rss feed, you’ll need to update it, the new link is

http://www.onemanswalk.com/wiki/rss

Well, here it is, a weird combination of Fowler’s bliki, Dave Thomas’s rublog, and my
own eclectic tastes. Thanks Martin and Dave.

Features it has:

*Wiki formatting – like WhatAboutAcceptanceTesting

*Static site gen

*Offline via CVS - not really part of the bliki engine, but I have a cron job that wakes up, does a cvs update on the web server, then runs the site gen code – gives me the benefit of dave thomas’s cvs support

*Test First – Unlike most blog software out there it seems hehe – just kidding, guys

*Bunch of bugs and unimplemented features since I insisted on rolling my own – let me know if you see one

Here’s the source as of 7/31/2003:

http://jeremystell-smith.com/jss.com.tar.gz

if you want a newer drop, just ask me

Hi you can actually edit this blog

Here are the InstallationInstructions.