Tech Tok

Let me know what you think of the new comment system. I’ve installed if for all zero-comment posts (which includes all new posts), so old posts with comments still have the old WordPress commenting system.

This may involve you having to create a Disqus account, but the idea is that you can use that account across blogs. I am also setting up Disqus on my blog so you only have to create your account once for both places.

Leo Laporte has also set up his blog to use it. Maybe it will spread everywhere.

The idea is that your comments belong to you, and Disqus makes it easier to follow people, as opposed to blogs.

Ran across twhirl today because Seesmic bought them, and my good friend Bear is a Seesmic dev. (Hi Bear!)

It’s an Adobe Air app, which is both good and bad (Air is not open, but there are Linux and Mac versions), and seems to be the Twitter-client-du-jour.

I always do twitter-via-IM, so I’m not sure what benefits this would bring me. Perhaps Twitter IMs are a bit too interrupting, although I’ve mitigated that somewhat by setting a custom sound for twitters, by which I know I don’t have to pay attention to the IM window that has popped up.

What do other people use to Twitter? IM? Twitter-specific clients? If I was all blog-centric, I would put up a poll, but all I have are the comments below, so please add one!

Panic, the creators of “Transmit” and “Audion”, have released Coda, a new web development IDE. It has a slightly steep price at $US 79.

They’ve licensed the SubEthaEngine from the Coding Monkeys, so multiple people can collaborate easily on a web site. I think this was an excellent idea. Small developers should be helping each other out like this more often.

The IDE includes a terminal you can put into pane in the IDE. It knows how to ssh to sites and upload all your files. It looks pretty nice!

I’ve found a nice, local way to handle the RSS feeds in various sidebars. I downloaded Feed2JS, a Free Software PHP script that does the job, and now I run it locally.

Please let me know if this affects the speed with which pages load. I know it does locally, but I think that’s because of my long-running http issues.

It seems to take a VERY long time for my own web server to respond when I use fully-qualified names like tech.tnir.org. What I end up doing is creating local shortnames for everything like “tech”, which alias to the internal IP of 192.168.1.1 (and I’ve configured Apache on tnir to respond to these short names) and everything is nice and zippy.

I’ll figure it out one day. But for now that means this change really slows down page loads for anyone inside our firewall. But not outside.

You can access my copy of the script, and use it even to build your own RSS feed list.

<a href=”http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink()) ?>”>Digg this</a>

That’s it. This seems to work in at least versions 1.5 and 2.0.

Most of this is from an article on Pierre Far’s ekstreme.com. I just put in the WordPress-specific stuff.

He has a nice Javascript bookmarklet that can be dragged to the bookmark bar to digg any site you visit: Digg this

The bad thing about the bookmarklet is that if you are just reading on the main page, it won’t point to the specific story’s permanent link. So be sure to click down into the story before using the bookmarklet.

If you have a Mac and have used either of the two top packaging systems, Fink or DarwinPorts, then you have a bunch of doc you may not know about. Fink stuff lives under /sw while DarwinPorts (or simply “ports” as I like to call it) lives under /opt/local. Both install documentation under share/doc, which is not easy to get to all the time.

To expedite reading that documentation, I use a symlink to my ~/Sites directory, like this:

ln -s /sw/share/doc fink-doc
ln -s /opt/local/share/doc ports-doc

However, by default, the Apache setup for Mac OS X personal web sharing does not follow symlinks. Thus, I add “FollowSymLinks” to the “Options” line in my “.htaccess” file (note the leading period). Mine now reads:

Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks

I can’t remember if the “+ExecCGI” was there before or not.

With this in place, I can now browse such goodies as http://localhost/~rae/ports-doc/ImageMagick-6.2.4/ or http://localhost/~rae/fink-doc/gettext/gettext_toc.html (neither of which you can browse, sorry). The “localhost” part of the URL means “my local machine”, and will always work as long as Apache is running.

Now excuse me as I read over http://localhost/~rae/ports-doc/glibmm-2.4/docs/reference/html..

This Slashdot article mentioned several AJAX-powered apps, and I thought I would list them here for people to play with.

• WebNote - postit editor with RSS feed
• writely - word processor
• Num Sum - spreadsheet (req. free account)
• kiko - calendar (req. free account)
• s5 - slideshow
• Yahoo! Mail - email

Update:
More apps were mentiond in the comments of the Slashdot article.

• Zimbra - an Exchange-killer
• Jotspot Live - groupware note-taking (req. free account @ 5 pages/month; try my pages)
• Hula - another Exchange competitor
• OXLook - .. you’ll never guess.. [project page]
• FCKeditor - word processor
• gOffice - office suite
• Office Online - office suite
• openomy - office suite (private beta, more info here)
• Bindows - office suite (based on the Bindow SDK
• Gliffy - “rich internet application”
• meebo - Instant Messenger (see developer blog
• Calendarhub - calendar (req. free account)
• @mail - mail, $$$, 30-day free eval

Hm, maybe I should have done a better job of separating things out into “downloadable and free” vs “no download, free registration” vs “costs $$$”. Oh well.

The TrimJunction project is an attempt to port Rails over to JavaScript. Egad, I wasn’t aware that JavaScript had things like SQL connectivity. This is an interesting development, since many, many more sites support JavaScript than support Ruby and Rails.

Hm, trying out a Technorati tag..
tag: trimjunction

I posted an article last August about Safari supporting SVG, and someone said to try an inline object tag to view it. So I’m trying it out. It seems to work in Safari. If you are seeing “Reid News” in big black italic text to the right then it is working for you, too.

The reason I bring this up now is that there is an article on MacSlash today that talks about Safari support for inline PDFs, PSDs, and any other file format that QuickTime supports. Interesting, but ultimately it won’t go anywhere because 97% of the world is stuck with IE/Windows, which doesn’t even handle inline PNGs properly!

Magpie RSS - PHP RSS Parser looks like a useful little utility. I’m using a combination of Perl scripts (my own customized ones and some I’ve downloaded) to generate the pages on news.tnir.org, but this may be useful.

I’ll probably have to keep my own customized scripts around, though. They are more tolerant of wonky RSS feeds (plain text of full HTML for instance).