Ronald's ScribblingsPosts
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How to fix email while still keeping email
What was intended to be a way to simply send messages back and forth and communicate like civilized humans; email has evolved into the centralized place where many people get actionable items.
MIME email includes a multipart/alternative header that allows you to send alternative versions of the same message; almost always to have an HTML and a Plain Text version of the same email; where the latter doesn’t have to be simply an HTML stripped version of the former.
To say the least, it is a brilliant idea. I can’t wait for the day where my email client is more than just a window to little pieces of notes—I want them to do something relevant depending on their individual context.
So obvious, and yet so far from reality.
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A New Beginning
After a very long hunt for the most suitable blogging engine around for this site, I have finally settled on Octopress. Previous candidates, as mentioned in my previous post, that I’ve used include Calepin.co, Pelican. In the interim, I have discovered scriptogr.am.
Scriptogr.am is everything that Calepin should be, with all the thematic flexibility that a blogger would like. However, as a Dropbox-powered solution, it is still limited by how the site can be synced from flat-files. Another annoying downside of scriptogram is that there isn’t out-of-the-box support for a commenting system. Users have to drill into the HTML section to add the required hooks.
Recently, I went for the Software Engineering for SaaS massive open online course and I picked up quite a bit on how Ruby works. Octopress which once looked alien and mysterious to me now looked familiar. Given that I had previously exported my blog from my previous blogging engine, migrating to this new Jekyll platform is complete. All I need to do is to tweak the theming a little, but that can be done at a later stage.
With Heroku and Amazon S3 offering to host static sites for almost free, this is the perfect solution. In due time, I shall redirect my old blog landings to this new subdomain.
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Alternative Blog Engines
Recently, I’ve been hunting around for a blogging engine that can replace this ageing installation of Serendipity. The reason why I went with a full-blown PHP on-the-fly dynamically generated system was that there was no other way to provide interactivity to visitors to a blog. Stuff like commenting, link tracking, and page tracking were all impossible.
However, with the rise of AJAX and JavaScript capabilities in browsers, what was once only possible on the server-side can now be delegated to the client-side. Rather than having the server operator foot the cost of running the whole infrastructure, part of it can be “outsourced” to visitors who are on similarly powerful computers.
When dealing with a handful of visitors, the processing power requirements on the server-side is low and negligible. However, when you scale up to above 150 concurrent visitors, everything starts to crumble and the load becomes asymmetrical. Distributing or outsourcing part of the site generation to visitors can save a site when under heavy loads.
With Google Analytics and Disqus, all dynamic parts of a site, once formally under the domain of dynamic server-side scripting, can now be offloaded to visitors with the use of asynchronous JavaScript. How it actually works is that the visitor’s browser fetches a static and light-weight HTML from my server, parses it and loads externally linked JavaScript files from these content providers, such as Google and Disqus, and then renders and attaches the output onto the static HTML site.
This way, a once static HTML page has become dynamic, with much of the data outsourced to content providers, and rendering to visitors’ browsers.
The upsides of managing static HTML is that it requires very little infrastructure to support and aggressive caching can be employed with the help of CDNs. If a server migration is needed, the static HTML files just need to be mirrored over and all will be well.
So now, the problem shifts to that of generating these static HTML files. Surely they all require a unified look and hence have much markup in common, manually managing this across thousands of files will be a chore. A different kind of blogging engine is thus required. One that takes a set of templates, applies it consistently to all your posts, possibly written and formatted in markdown, and outputs to a directory where a web server can serve files from it verbatim.
As part of my hunt, I’ve found 2 solutions that fit my requirements, one way or the other, with different and contrasting Pros and Cons.
The easiest solution that I’ve found is Calepin.co. It basically takes a folder of markdown formatted posts and runs it through Pelican, a python-based static blog generator, and generates a usable blog at http://username.calepin.co.
The upside is that it is easy to use and relies on Dropbox where you can access anywhere, including an iPad, with iA Writer. You blog will be generated when you click a button on the calepin site.
The downside is that there is no custom CNAME (domain) support yet and there is no customisation available for the blog layout. You can’t even have a static “About” page on the blog! These two downsides (especially the first) are an absolute deal breaker for me.
The next blogging engine that I’ve found is Octopress. It is basically a bunch of wrapper scripts and a curation of plugins around Jekyll—a no-frills static blog generator based on Ruby.
It has all the features I need, such as CNAME (via heroku or github pages), static pages, but the downside is that it requires Ruby 1.9.2 to run. Mac OS X Lion and most other distributions come only with 1.8.x version of Ruby and getting the 1.9.x branch requires the installation of RVM, which in itself is easy but it makes ugly modifications to your shell environment. Fortunately, I can work-around this downside by generating my site in a virtualised environment with RVM and Ruby 1.9.2 installed.
Given that Calepin is iterating at a rather high velocity, I’m considering holding back for a while before I decide to rule it out completely. On Twitter, the developer has indicated that CNAME is on his todo list, and he might be considering support for static pages.
Nonetheless, if for whatever reason I have to rule-out Calepin, I will consider adopting its typeface and layout cues into Octopress and write a few wrapper scripts around it to accept input from a Dropbox directory.
It looks to be an exciting time for an epic redesign for my various web-properties.
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Git Hosting
GitHub is an awesome place to host public git repositories, absolutely free of charge. However, you will need at least a $7/month plan for 5 private repositories. That’s quite expensive if the stuff you plan to host aren’t that important or propriety and you just can’t open source it.
For those of you who have no idea what git is all about, consider reading The Git Parable for a better understanding of what version control systems are all about.
In my search for a way to host my git repositories online but privately, I’ve come across this fantastic solution—gitolite. It is in short an authentication and authorisation system for multiple git repositories. It also comes bundled with many cool features, such as repo mirroring, on-the-fly repository creation, self-service permission administration, just to name a few. This system is very well documented, and you can learn about its internals without ever having to dig through its source.
I now use it for all my projects that require versioning and it increased my usage of git tremendously.
If you would like an account to host your git repositories privately, feel free to drop me a line.
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