The Random Collection

More Lulz.

parislemon • “Apple iPhone Will Fail”.

Presumed foresight in hindsight though, I don’t remember thinking Apple would be wildly successful. I’m glad they are, but I don’t think many people believed.

So everyone seems to be on this static blogging love train, including me. I’ve dabbled in getting rid of WordPress and moving over since Jekyll was publicized by GitHub. After reading many, many, posts, I’m half committed! (The number of posts out there already was inspiration for the 18 million in the URL.)

I’ve gone down this path a few times before, but never succeeded, mainly because I liked the user interface of WordPress, and the tools like MacJournal or the Android and now iOS apps. I was also new with Markdown, and it just felt strange. Now that I use Markdown in production work for other things, and there are great tools out there like iA Writer and Writing Kit, it is a lot easier for me to wrap my head around.

My current setup is to have markwalling.org hosted by a WordPress instance. I am using it as essentially a link roll: if I find cool stuff, I hit the “Press This” bookmarklet and share it. I also have it tied to IfThisThenThat and dumping in my Flickr posts, video posts on Vimeo or YouTube, public links on my Pinboard, and so on. This used to be hosted at Tumblr, but I wanted some data ownership. (Their TOS says they can delete your blog as a punitive action, which makes sense, but they don’t provide an easy way to export your data.)

So now we have this atrocity: Some Meaningless Things.

Some Meaningless Things is an Octopress powered static blog for long form writings. I’m using Writing Kit on my iPhone and iPad for idea collection and first drafts. On my desktop, I use iA Writer for editing. (think Textmate but exclusively for writing. Nothing but a text box and a cursor, until you’re done and then you can do spell check.)

In the spirit of Second Crack’s Dropbox integration, I wired Hazel into my system. If a post filename starts with the word “Publish”, it kicks off the publishing rake task, which copies the file into source/_posts/ for me. (Renaming the file like that is really easy with Writing Kit and easy enough to do with Finder.) The rest of the file name is turned into the post slug, and the title is read from the first level header found in the file. The current date is used to set up the date stamps for the filename and the published date. Categories aren’t set yet, mainly because I haven’t figured out an easy way to include that metadata without bending over backwards.

Once Octopress has generated the site, it is uploaded to my production Linode. IfThisThenThat then picks up the new RSS entry, and cross posts it to markwalling.org.

Since I’m pretty sure I only have one reader (hi Mom), this was probably way to in depth, but that’s how I roll. I may add another path that adds link posts, like Marco.org or Daring Fireball (not that I have any delusions of being as successful as them).

Update: Yeah, this didn’t last, I’m back fully on WordPress.

I’m going to walk away from markwalling.org, or maybe turn it into an aggregator of all of my other stuff (Pinboard, Twitter, Github, Flickr, this, and so on). I’ve wanted to try some writing, so a fresh start would be a good place to do it from. My hope is to have no garbage posts, just “writing” coming from my keyboard.

We’ll see how far this goes. I’ve been saving up some links and thoughts that I want to write about, so maybe I’ll be able to get something out there.

Update: I failed again. Oh well.