Signs of Palm Mojo
Update – It turns out Blast Radius--an interactive agency that worked on the Palm web site--also has an in-house toolkit called Mojo. The toolkit described below is the Blast Radius tookit and doesn’t seem to be related to webOS. The new Palm Pre will be the first phone to use Palm’s new webOS operating system and the Palm Mojo framework. Apparently the SDK is in private beta at the moment, and there’s not a whole lot of information on Palm’s developer site. However, it looks like Palm has rolled out parts of Mojo on their site. If you visit the Palm Pre CES launch video page at Palm.com, and check out the source, you’ll notice they’re already including mojo.js...
Cleaning House
The year end break finally gave me the time and motivation to take care of something that’s been nagging me for some time. For the past five or ten years, I’ve been hosting a dozen or so random little sites for friends and family. If you’re reading this, you might just be in the same situation: the friend whose theater production needed a site, your family member’s band, another friend’s pre-Flickr site for publishing kid pictures.
Each one of these sites was a quick little side project, and a great excuse to try out [insert neat new technology]. In my case I’ve accumlated a standalone Perl CGI site, a Gallery photo site, a Mason site for a band, not to mention my own WordPress blog. Of course web hosting has evolved quite a bit in the past decade, so each of these sites was originally built on a different host. MSEN back in Michigan, Aimnet here in the Bay Area, then stints on Lunarpages, Bluehost, and most recently MediaTemple’s GridService. Different sites on different servers, MX records pointing all over the place, a mix of registrars…it was ugly.
So to start off the new year, it’s time to start fresh. All the sites have been consolidated, refreshed, archived, backed-up, validated, and otherwise cleaned up. In the process, I replaced a number of services and tools that just weren’t working for me the way they used to. Here’s what’s in my toolbox at this point:
- GoDaddy – I can’t stand GoDaddy. Their DNS management UI was probably down literally 50% of the time I tried to access it. They’re relegated to registrar duties only at this point, but only because they’re cheap enough it’s not worth the time to transfer to someone marginally cheaper.
- linode – MediaTemple’s GridService was pretty slick, however for low traffic sites there always seems to be an initial lag that feels like they’re spinning the site up or something. I took a look at both linode and slicehost, both of which offer ~$20/mo packages with root access, your choice of Linux distributions, and nice management tools. Slicehost almost had my business, but their full-instance backup feature lost out in the end to linode’s DNS management and monitoring tool. Slicehosts’s DNS UI was particularly painful, requiring you to enter each record manually in an old-style web form vs. linode’s much more robust UI.
- jekyll – As I’ve described, I’m using git (with repositories hosted at github) and jekyll for revision control and site generation respectively. None of these small projects really requires a database back end or dynamically generated content, so a simple site generation tool like jekyll and the use of markdown/textile makes things easy.
- lighttpd – I’m a long time Apache user, lighttpd really does just feel lighter and cleaner, particularly for these small static sites.
- postfix – I suffered with sendmail long enough, editing one config file then converting it over into a format the app actually read. Sendmail is out, postfix is in. One config file, logical config options, and logs that seem slightly easier to monitor/mine.
- Ruby & Python – Perl and PHP are out. Ruby and Python are in. Life is better now.
OK, I’m old school. I was sold on straight LAMP, sendmail, RedHat derivatives (CentOS/Fedora), vi, etc. almost ten years ago, they’ve worked for me, and I had better things to do than reconsider those choices. But I was really just stuck in a rut. Times change, tools evolve, the web isn’t what it was 10 years ago, and now is as good a time as any to re-examine what’s in your tool box.
Trying out Jekyll
As Tom Preston-Werner (author of Jekyll) describes it:
Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server. Visit http://tom.preston-werner.com to see an example of a Jekyll generated blog.
Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which is where I first heard about it.
The thought of maintaining a site via a text editor (vi, in my case) and pushing changes out from the command line gave me some major ‘90s deja vu, but WordPress has always seemed a bit to “heavy” for me, so I thought I’d give Jekyll a shot. Plus Jack Moffit and Dustin Sallings were both talking about Jekyll, and in fact Jack had already moved his site over from Movable Type to Jekyll. Plus I just want to be one of the cool kids, so here we are.
With the git/jekyll combo, a little CGI script that does a git pull and calls Jekyll, and the web hook feature of github, I can edit pages locally, commit them to a git repo, and when I’m ready to make changes on the live site I can just do a “git push”. My changes are uploaded to github, they hit the CGI script on kensheppardson.com, and the site is rebuilt.
I have a feeling this system will encourage me to post a bit more often. We’ll see.
Update 3/1/2009 – I’m back on WordPress, primarily to test out some add-ins, but I also miss WYSIWYG a bit.
They're just making this up, aren't they?
Over on FriendFeed Louis Gray mentioned that his Twitterank is #1, and his Tweetvalue is $1034. My Tweetvalue is $241, and I couldn't really care less what my Twitterank is, as it seems they're just making this stuff up. Here's how twitterank relates to tweetvalue for the top 50. I think I'm going to have to assign a value of $0 to Twitterank and a rank of last to Tweetvalue.
TWiT Army
Leo Laporte has launched an instance of Laconi.ca, the open source microblogging platform that powers Identi.ca. Given that Leo has 53,810 followers on Twitter at the moment, the TWiT Army could have a pretty significant impact on the microblogging landscape.
More Identi.ca Stats - The Long Tail
This chart is based on statistics collected from the Identi.ca public feed. It's simply a quick look at the number of notices posted per user between 7/26 and 8/5. (The service came online on 7/1.) There's a pretty typical long tail of usage. A total of 4,459 users have posted at least once. 1,109 of them have only posted once. 2,164 have posted 5 or more times. There's a core group of users who are basically using the service like IRC or group chat. Either using XMPP clients or Twhirl, they're conducting real time conversations in the same way others use IM for 1-to-1 chat. Some might consider it interesting that Evan Prodromou, Identi.ca founder, is hovering at #10 on the list.
Snapshot - More Identi.ca Conversations
Updating the network graph I posted the other day, this is a map of the ~2,500 notices sent that included @user references pulled from the past 10,000 or so notices. In this snapshot the arrows indicate the directionality of the dent. As with the last graph, you'll need to "Download full size" in order to read the user names. Enjoy. P.S. Someone mentioned that there might be duplicated user names. If you happen to see any, could you please leave a comment or dent me with the name? Thanks!
One Night on Identi.ca
Here's a snapshot of one night's worth of conversation on Identi.ca, courtesy of Creative Commons, XMPP, and the open-source network visualization software Cytoscape. See anyone you know?
