I picked up Textmate for HTML and Rails coding a while back and have been learning about its wonders ever since. It’s a great editor for code, certainly, but it’s so much more. Witness this post being written in Textmate.

The first picture shows how to create a new document based on a template:

(If you don’t know about Textile, check it out) This gets me a pretty basic window:

Next picture shows how to set up Textmate to post to your blog. I’m using Wordpress so XML-RPC is built in, making all this a snap:

Here’s the text file to edit - it’s all pretty self explanatory:

After all that’s taken care of, I’m ready to go with the post writing. Note, by the way, that all the images for this post have been simply dragged from my desktop into the blog window. Textmate handles the upload and linking. Sweetness!

There’s a blue “cut line” in the base template – I took that out. Here’s a screen shot of the nearly complete post:

I’m going to wrap this up now. Selecting the text of this post, I convert it to HTML with the keys Control-Shift-H. Pressing Control-Command-P sends this post on its way.

Note: this process isn’t perfect. With a post that has images, you might need to monkey with the post (set widths etc.) because the image upload feature doesn’t create thumbnails and link, as Wordpress does. I went through and hand edited the page after posting to make things look a little nicer (down-scaling the full size pictures), but the user is still downloading the full images when they load this page. There are other issues as well, but the point of this post is that for normal tasks using Textmate offers an easy to use and streamlined workflow for posting to blogs. Another victory for Textmate.

Also note that the Textmate “bundles“ that do all the work behind the scenes are written in Ruby and are editable. That means that if I wanted to change it so that images were uploaded with thumbnails and linked, I could do so. Here’s how:

I’ll post the modified snippet if I a) find that nobody else has already done this and b) find enough time and motivation to do it myself.

I’ve sung the praises of Dreamhost because of the quantity and quality of features they provide. And the price is certainly right.

So it’s been frustrating to find that the performance and reliability of my Dreamhost service has left much to be desired. Noting some really show page render times on this blog, I ran “top” to see if I could find something. Observe:

What this shows is that on a machine with 4GB of memory, 3.80GB is taken. That’s a problem. With literally dozens of customers running any number of processes, that means that pages are swapping out like crazy, meaning some pretty awful performance. It’s no wonder that we’ve got page load speeds of 8+ seconds.

So what’s the alternative here? I could switch my service but that would be hugely inconvenient. I’ll be contacting Dreamhost to talk about the situation but I’ve not got a huge amount of hope that my plight will receive much concern, what with me being on the bottom floor plan.

Colts Quarterback Peyton Manning said he had never seen so many middle fingers in his life. What caused such a middle-digital display? The Colts drove their bus into Baltimore.

I remember it well. I had my official Ravens Bart Scott jersey on (I especially love it because my last name is Scott). My wife Lisa even bought “football food.” This was a very special Saturday. We were purple with pride. This would be the ultimate irony, the perfect storm, the payback of the ages.

But here’s where things get goofy: This middle-finger vendetta is—get this—23 years old. That’s right, 23. You can’t even count that high on all your fingers and toes.

But bitterness never runs out of fingers and toes.

See, decades-plus ago, then Colts owner Robert Irsay, wanted Baltimore to upgrade its stadium. But with attendance dwindling and the team playing crapily, city officials were wary of stadium spending. Relations between Irsay and the city worsened, and Irsay began to look at other cities.

So the Colts galloped off to Indy. Robert Irsay eventually died and his son Jim became the beneficiary of the once-legendary once-Baltimore team.

I know some people don’t like this, but I’m rooting for the Colts this Superbowl. If they win, it’s just a game; if they lose, it’s just a game. Whatever the outcome, I think the lesson is this: The middle fingers, not the Ravens, lost in ’07 because grudges never win in the end. Go Colts!

I like to check to see who is linking to Wi from time to time and this gem turned up recently: I hate losers with nothing to say.

Apparently somebody decided that their New Years resolution was going to be to start a blog on the Mac their parents got them for Christmas. Hurray.

If “mind filter” had done the slightest bit of delving it would be clear that I’m no Microsoft fanboy, though that seems to be the assertion. The posts I’ve written about various features of OS X that I like which should be some indication of where my loyalties lie.

Given a few years “mind filter” will grow up, move out, experience life a bit, and realize that Apple isn’t perfect (though for somebody whose perspective is limited to Steve Jobs “second coming” it might be hard).

There’s a deeper point here, though. Ever heard of “garbage in, garbage out?” Or “iron sharpens iron?” The Internet represents the garbage here, not the iron. People like “mind filter” do nothing to sharpen anybody else and I worry for the consequences that our society will face when the next generation comes of age.

I like Digg like Travis loved Old Yeller.

Digg and I are at the stage now where it’s foaming at the mouth. I can remember the good times we had together, Digg and I, but Digg needs to be put down. This is for its own good as well as the good of anybody it might hurt along the way.

After reading some Digg-related articles I was reminded of why Digg makes me nervous. Before some clever chap coined the phrase “wisdom of crowds” there was the phrase “tyranny of the masses.” Digg seems to do a tremendous job of enabling the tyrants while suppressing wisdom. The sociological mess that is “Digg” affects everything, from the quality and diversity of the news to the tone and repression of debate in the comments. Getting it right in terms of what Digg is trying to do is a tough proposition but the Digg folks aren’t coming out balance positive, if you get my meaning.

Which gets to the point that I alluded to in the title of this post. Does this mean that Digg is ruined, spiraling to an ignoble death in the dusty back corners of the Internet? Not at all. Turns out, strangely enough, that people don’t care about low quality news and abusive netizens. Who knew?

Digg is a living breathing example of what people will deal with in service of a poorly understood principle. News on Digg is supposed to be “democratic”, the result of the considered discernment of many individuals - this single buzzword/concept has apparently been enough to make people overlook tremendous failings with the site. My question is, when was democratic news ever something to be sought after?

A simple majority is all it takes to advance ideas, causes or agendas and suppress the minority in a democracy. News needs to transcend this sad fact. News shouldn’t be about causes or agendas.

The concept of democratic news, however, has taken hold and people seemingly don’t see the peril. Am I the only one?

How many of you have had ideas that could change the world?

Now how many of you have followed through with them? This is not a post to make you feel bad about your lack of follow through. We’ve all at one time or another sat on something truly brilliant because we didn’t have the time or the money or the know-how or the interest to see it through. I go through a few ideas a week.

It occurred to me that perhaps I shouldn’t just sit on my ideas. Knowing that I’m not going to be able to do what I should with even half my ideas, why not let them out into the open? Perhaps given freedom, my ideas could take root in the mind of somebody who actually would know what to do with them.

That said, I’m going to start regular posts under the heading “Big Idea #x”. I’d like feedback from anybody who has an opinion or a criticism of what I propose. What’s the worst that could happen - somebody makes money off an idea I hadn’t the skills or time or ability to do anything with anyway? Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad.

Stay tuned.

The RealMetrics blog posed the question: Could Your Web Host be Missing Their Uptime SLA 37% of the Time?. They reviewed 50 web hosts over six months, measuring both availability and responsiveness and posted their results. Unfortunately they didn’t have anything from Dreamhost, the host behind this site.

There are many difficulties in measuring things like shared hosting. A positive experience with a host might be the result of chance placement with inactive accounts on the same server or could be negative for the opposite reason. I’ve had both good and bad experiences with Dreamhost since I started with them. The uptime that they’ve offered has been pretty good except for when they died right during two minor traffic surges I had a couple months back - just when you’d like your host to be up, it turns out.

In fact, those server deaths infuriated me enough to start my own uptime monitoring. My records haven’t been kept very assiduously, and it appears that since I started doing pings and regular downloads of content for test from my sites Dreamhost has been nothing if not stable.

For the curious, I just set up a super simple Perl script to ping the server every minute and output unavailability to a text file. Another script downloads a file at regular intervals throughout the day to gauge the average speed of the server.

Perl ping script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Net::Ping;
$| = 1; # sets output to unbuffered
$p = Net::Ping->new();
$host = $ARGV[0]; # takes the web host as single argument
$sequence = 0;
while ()
{
sleep(60); # run every minute
$sequence++;
next if $p->ping($host); # don't report if things are fine
my $time = localtime();
print $sequence . "\t dead \t" . $time . "\n";
}
$p->close();


Running the above code in the command line as follows:

./ping.pl whateversinteresting.com > pings.txt


writes errors to the file pings.txt (”pings” can be monitored in another terminal window with the “tail -f pings.txt” command).

I’ll add the downloads script later.

Nothing aids in understanding better than application - learning “theory” doesn’t come close. In a previous post I wrote, theoretically, about how great Open Source is. This post shows the proof.

In the other post I pointed out that I had enabled a “share this” feature on this site to enable posting of Whatever’s Interesting posts to social news sites like Digg (regardless of past issues I’ve expressed concerning Digg). I casually pointed out that there were other options to the “Share This” plugin, written by Alex King, and I chose and linked to “Digg This Reloaded” by Ankur Kothari in specific.

Not ten hours after I posted, Ankur had written a comment to point out that DTR now actually includes Alex King’s plugin, while including more features - in specific an options page in the site admin and other nifty things that Share This lacked. Awesome, and so now Wi is running DTR.

And while this shows how Open Source can work toward a positive result technically, I think the real point to make here is something I neglected to mention the first time around. Open Source software is great from a technical perspective but the people behind Open Source are greater. The actual developer. in this instance, took the time to clarify a point on a random blog, advocating for his work. How many developers at Microsoft go home at the end of the day and try to set the world straight about random features of Windows?

Maybe some do, I don’t know, but the point is that there is real enthusiasm and love for software and community in Open Source. And that’s why Open Source will win in the end.