a t e v a n s . c o m

Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks. Posterous Blog

I wonder if that link will be working next year? Here’s the announcement on Twitter’s Blog. I switched over to Github Pages over the last week or two, mostly out of frustration with Posterous’ overly-social features. Looks like I was just in time. I wrote my own exporter here which I never got around to adding video support to. I think the official Posterous jekyll exporter may have improved since I wrote my initial few versions.

Also, Posterous Spaces? Wasn’t there another social site about people’s spaces? That one didn’t do too well, either. Best of luck to the Posterous team, and sad to see a pretty good product get shut down like that.

The fees to use Google Maps probably aren’t what’s starting to put off companies like Foursquare and Apple — it’s probably the ever-increasing reach of Google’s advertising efforts. Digital Trends

Seems pretty reasonable to me. You wouldn’t want to go to the “Journal” tab in iPhoto to see a pretty travelogue of your photos and get spammed with divorce lawyer ads from Google. Apple, for one, would hate allowing that kind of shitty experience. It’s kind of scary that Google could screw up the experience in other people’s paid apps that way.

Whew! no shortage of posts today. While posting the Xtranormal video, I found two problems with Markdown and YouTube’s default embed codes.

1. Youtube’s embed codes aren’t valid according to Jekyll’s markdown parser. To fix, change allowfullscreen in the embed code to allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen". See here for details / example.
2. Chrome and Jekyll do something to YouTube tags such that the rest of the page fails to render in chrome after an empty iframe. The fix is to not have an empty iframe - put some text in, so you have <iframe>useless text</iframe>. See here for an example.

Thanks again, internet!

Spent the weekend trying to set up a good AMI I can use to deploy small applications. I haven’t done a real side project in way too long, and last time I tried I found myself extremely frustrated with shared hosting / passenger (don’t even), Heroku (asset pipeline?), and Engine Yard (rails 3?). In forging my own way, I took far too long to debug the following simple issues:

1. The ruby binary doesn’t change when you install ruby 1.9.2 Simple fix here, the ruby binary in /usr/bin/ruby is a symlink to /etc/alternatives/ruby which itself is a symlink to /usr/bin/ruby1.8. I changed /etc/alternatives/ruby to point to /usr/bin/ruby1.9.1
2. Thin doesn’t have any of the gems I carefully installed. That’s because thin (the one you get from apt-get install thin anyway) has an init script that uses #!/usr/bin/ruby1.8 . GRAH WHY?! Anyway, change that line to #!/usr/bin/ruby and install a 1.9.1 compatible version of thin. All should be well.
3. Make sure no two thin yaml config files point to the same ports, otherwise they will conflict. And whichever goes first alphabetically will end up snaring the port range.

Everything else was pretty obvious - whenever something was missing, install it, get users set up, authorize keys, setup Capistrano, etc.

Anyway, good luck if you’re using Ubuntu / rails 3 / etc on S3. So far so smooth from here.

I’m an instant fan of Twitter Bootstrap. I know it makes my site look kind of generic, but it’s not like I was putting days and days of effort into style and uniqueness before. And it looks less crap now. I can do a little design here and there when I really try, but I’ve learned over the years that spending tons of time on “personal”, “portfolio” or “professional” sites creates a black-hole timesink that I never escape from and am never happy with.

So, Bootstrap. Now it looks less horrible, and it was super, super easy.

I pronounce it “strafe time” – that way every time I’m formatting a timestamp I feel like I’m in an intense Quake III match.

Don’t look at me like that.

https://github.com/sunspot/sunspot/blob/master/sunspot_solr/bin/sunspot-solr

You can’t make this stuff up. Deprecate rake tasks so they no longer function and invisibly introduce a new binary to deal with managing solr instances? What the crap, guys? How about some release notes, or at least some updated documentation?

Nice function to throw in your irb shell:

def stat_analyze(n = 100)
  times = []
  n.times { t = Time.now; yield; times << Time.now - t}
  times.sum / times.count
end

Made this for myself - continually updating. Got anything to add? Feel free to fork and pull req!