This is a simple idea for every web development company (small or large) that owes its existence to open source software. I’m going to use Ruby on Rails as an example, but this is just as applicable to all of the other frameworks and tools we use daily.
On the first Wednesday of every month all of your developers work on bugs or needed features in one of the frameworks or tools that your company can’t live without.
Where you spend your time developing is an important decision for an open source developer. Partly we do it for personal satisfaction, partly we do it to give us a tool we want, but there’s always a part of us that wants others to use and enjoy our work. I want to talk about that, and I want to talk about the frustrations that people who use those open source projects have, but first I need to set the stage.
At our house, you go to the bathroom armed, or you don’t go at all. At least, once the sun goes down. There’s a pistol wedged between couch cushions with handle raised for easy access as we watch TV. You think I’m joking, that maybe the gun is metaphorical, or that this is the start of some fictional story. It’s not. Every word is true.
It all started a month or two ago.
The idea is that it can be very useful to base64 encode an image directly into your css file instead of referencing a separate file, but doing so usually involves dropping to the command line, calling openssl, copy-pasting the output, specifying the mime-type, etc… Bret’s Terpstra distilled all of that into one drag-and-drop command for Textmate.The following is simply a generalization and instructions for using the drag and drop in MacVim / GVim
There are a few problems with Jekyll / Octopress though that would, realistically, make me less inclined to use it. First, you need to have your entire blog checked out on whatever box you’re posting from, and that is simply not something I’m willing to do on a work computer, and not something I necessarily can do when on a borrowed computer. Secondly, the user interface sucks. Well, there really isn’t one.
[Some perspective][] [What’s good][] [What could be better][] [Bugs][] [Would I recommend it?][] Some perspective I purchased Byword because I think Markdown is a spectacular way to write and was looking for an app that would allow me to create new documents, easily preview them and grab either the formatted preview text or the generated HTML.
Until now, I’d been using Marked for previews while I typed in Vim. Now, Vim’s great.
Listen, you are an intelligent person, but someone has led you astray, and it is driving me nuts.
When you blog some information for the world to see, what you have created is a “post” more specifically, it is a “blog post”. Sometimes they’re “entries” but that’s more commonly associated with diary style blogs. In some cases a post could be considered an “article”, but those posts are never, ever, a “blog”.
Anyone who’s been following my Twitter feed lately knows that I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Lo-Fi camera apps on the iPhone, and I had a post all written up about them, but then my friend Kirk tweeted:
Gotta admit I hope the whole instagram thing is kind of a fad. Makes all [the pictures look] like those b+w “dress up like Bonnie and Clyde”
I think he’s not alone in this opinion, and he’s definitely got a point.
The other day the Googlebot swung by to check my site for updates and found Malware. Almost immediately, it seemed, people’s browsers were warning them off from my sites. Malware! Bad Things (TM)! There be Dragons here! and so on. Fortunately a friend dropped me a Tweet shortly after it started and thus the hunt began with one clue:
Malicious software is hosted on 1 domain(s), including globalpoweringgathering.com/.
Sadly, that was ALL I had to go on, and when I told the browser I was ok with the risk (Windows malware can’t hurt us Mac folks) I was unable to find any calls to JavaScript to files on my blog.
Tomorrow morning Dachary and I will be climbing on our motorcycles and setting off for an epic adventure lasting nearly four months and over 17,000 miles. The goal is to drive south from Boston MA, USA until we reach the most southerly city on the planet: Ushuaia Tierra Del Fuego, Argentina. I can’t wait. Usually when we tell people their first reaction is “Be careful in Mexico.” Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, rebels living in the jungle… not a concern.
