moonlee.org

Well, after quite a number of years at Serverbeach, I think the time has come to find another solution. Chugging along happily on Fedora Core 2, my dedicated server has functioned without a hitch from Day 1. But FC2 is getting a little stale, errata updates have gone away, and so I’m looking to migrate over to Ubuntu, and I’m also looking for a new provider that can offer me more options for less money.

Enter Slicehost. If you don’t mind being on a virtual machine on a shared host (you get guaranteed memory and processor-time minimums), these guys seem like a good crew that really know what they’re doing. They don’t oversell their resources, and you get a lot at a reasonable price: decent bandwidth, a range of sizing options, choice of distro, RAID1, daily snapshot backup/restore, and even console access.

This could be the start of a beautiful friendship…

If you’re even mildly interested in web development, you’ve probably heard the hype over Ruby on Rails that’s been building over the past few years (if not, you have got to get out from under that rock :-). Being predominantly a Perl hacker, it took me a while to download it and take it out for a spin on some projects. Well, after about 3 weeks of intensive work in the framework, I can honestly say, it’s made web development fun for me again. It was so inspiring, I rewrote my blog software in Ruby just for the hell of it! (Speaking of which, if you notice anything weird with the site, please let me know). Kudos to Rails and its developers, I drank the kool-aid and you guys have blown me away.

Well it turns out that my cousin is just about as geeky as I am, so we’ve been spending our downtime in his apartment, prone on the futons and tatami, hacking away on our laptops into the wee hours of the morning. Awesome! Somehow, being in Tokyo makes the activity so much cooler… Anyway, the point of the post: I’ve taken the last few days to cobble together a new stylesheet for the site to give it an updated look – the old design served well, but after a few years, was starting to get a bit stale. I think I’ve updated all the pages, but please let me know if you notice anything weird. I’ve tested it on a few modern browsers, IE 6, Firefox 1.5 and Safari 2.

After hearing about Flickr for a few months, and being intrigued by the concept, I have decided to join their site and start experimenting with some of their features. If you don’t know, Flickr is a photo sharing site, where you can upload, store, and share your photographs with the entire Flickr community. It’s quite interesting, and I think has much promise for further innovation. I’ll keep you posted on how things go.

One cool thing about the site is that it has an XML api, so with the right tools, you can upload, retrieve, and edit your photo library on their site from your own software. So as a quick experiment, I’m displaying my photostream on this page using this mechanism. Pretty neat!

Well, one annoying thing that was getting to me (and partially prompted the rewrite endeavor of the software) was the endless comment spam that started hitting my blog in the last few months. So, I’ve implemented a comment system that will hopefully defeat the spammers while making it not too much of a pain to legit commenters to post their thoughts. It uses a dynamically generated image of numbers that you have to enter to confirm that you are, indeed a person, and not a piece of spam software. Ok, that’s it for now…

So, after a few months of letting dust gather on this thing, I’ve shaken off the cobwebs and put some sweat into the engine as I’ve never quite felt right about the Moveable Type blogging engine the site was based on for a few years. So, although it’s bare bones at the moment, I’ve written the beginnings of a weblog publishing platform using the Mind Framework I released about a year ago. While all the features are not fully there yet, it does the basics and I’ll probably be porting over the stuff from the old site to this one soon. Or maybe I won’t, I haven’t decided if it’s worth the effort yet… Maybe it’s best to start with a clean slate? Next area to work on is the photo blog capability and spam-resistant comments, which will arrive as time permits. Happy new year and hope to see you around!