0xDECAFBAD Bucket

You know, the early versions of Mac OS X were like that swamp castle scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

"Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em.

It sank into the swamp.

So, I built a second one.

That sank into the swamp.

So, I built a third one.

That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands."

I wonder if either Markdown or Textile would make a good format with which to author a book?

• I was thinking maybe Textile, with a few additional formatting conventions.

• If I ever did any self-publishing work, I'd want to avoid MS Word like the plague.

• I can write all my own formatting and processing code myself, probably even generate PDFs. Could use git to manage the work too.

And, since this was an active day on the bucket, I'm starting to think that maybe I should try to switch feeds to producing an item per bullet point rather than this one big blob-per-day.

So, inspired by Dave's re-release of the 2005-era OPML Editor blogging tool, I've made some tweaks to the bucket here that has made it possible to import all my old OPML blog entries just by copying the files into the proper data directory.

• One of my next steps, once I have time for another hacking sprint is to implement an OPML Community Server API endpoint here that will allow me to use the OPML Editor to upstream entries to this bucket.

• So, thus far, this bucket supports entries as single files per day or a directory of files per day—and in Markdown, Textile, HTML, and OPML formats.

• And, soon, I might have both git push and an XML-RPC API as means of publishing to this bucket. Kind of insane, but these things match a workflow I want to support.

Backing up all my Flickr photos with FlickrEdit.

A big difference between this and my old OPML Blog is that the OPML Editor tracks the datestamp of when an outline item is first created. That makes it so easy to come up with permalinks granular to the item. Trying to figure out how to do that here.

• Of course, I may eventually just go back to the OPML Editor.

• What might be interesting is to slap an OPML Community Server API in front of this bucket.

I'm trying to get a post-receive hook in git to auto-update the remote site, but without much luck yet.

• One more try, using this tip.

• HUGE SUCCESS!

The new (for me) big idea about this thing is that now I'm "publishing" entries with this thing using git push. I've got a master branch without any content, and a prod branch that holds all my entries. The master branch gets pushed to github, and the prod branch gets pushed to decafbad.com

Oh yeah, and I'm trying out Disqus instead of Haloscan for comments for the the first time.

I've also got both PHP and JS versions of Markdown and Textile on hand, so at some point I'd like to introduce some web-based editing with live previews that can also be synched back down to my laptop via git pull.

I suppose this thing is sort of like a Twitter account, but with hopefully more context. I'd like to use this for the dumping of thoughts too long for Twitter, yet too short for what I think of as a proper blog entry on decafbad.com.

I wonder if there's something like irc it for Jabber?

• That is, a daemon that maintains a directory hierarchy of FIFO pipes giving access to input and output from the network service...

vs — FIGHT!

Age of Conan looks interesting, but I think I'm not so attracted to it because it's just so damn serious and grim.

• I like to /dance in WoW.