Sometimes, simple shell scripts can save a lot of time. Recently, I noticed myself waiting for various unit tests to complete by surfing the web: a surefire way to be distracted for more than the time it takes for the tests to complete (or fail). Enter the following script, which I call notify:
#!/bin/sh “$@” status=$? xmessage [...]
Twitter provides RSS/Atom feeds of your posts; with these feeds, your posts can be easily tracked in news readers like Google Reader, monitored in aggregators like FriendFeed or SocialThing!, and cross-posted into other blog services such as Tumblr. This idea works fine, except for the fact that Twitter has been co-opted to be not only an ambient intimacy [...]
I recently installed DokuWiki on NearlyFreeSpeech; while I love DokuWiki’s features, I quickly noticed that I was being charged for more bandwidth than seemed necessary for the few pages I was viewing and editing.
A quick check of access logs revealed two things. First, DokuWiki does not compress its output using gzip. Second, it does not send appropriate cache [...]
I came across Performancing while browsing the various winners of the Web 2.0 awards: they are ranked second in Web Development and Design. Their description sounded interesting for a new blogger like myself so I paid them a visit. I was surprised at how hard it was to find out about Performancing’s goals and products. Inspired perhaps by Jakob Nielsen’s [...]
My hosting provider charges by the byte and so that motivates me to try and keep track of my bandwidth usage. Right now, most of my traffic comes from search engines (like MSNbot) and RSS aggregators (like Bloglines). The former could be managed probably by improving my URL structure and judicious instructions in my robots.txt; the latter ultimately [...]
One thing I spend a lot of time doing is tweaking things I use to get them the way I like. For example, this website. But today, I want to comment briefly on the physical infrastructure I have at work.
One side effect of doing yoga is that I have become very aware of how I hold [...]
My new hosting provider is Nearly Free Speech and I am now running WordPress.
One benefit of Wordpress over Typo is the maturity of its plugins and regular releases of the software itself. Even without much knowledge of php or Wordpress internals, I think I’ve been able to get my site set up to behave the way I like. I’m [...]
It seems that Typo lacks good ping/trackback integration (e.g. for pinging services like Technorati). I’m playing with moving over to Nearly Free Speech for hosting: their prices are good and their infrastructure seems more advanced than what PlanetArgon currently has. There will be some DNS cache incoherency and URL changes as I migrate [...]
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