Random

  • It's kind of weird starting work for a company where almost everything I'm starting to learn, install, and work on are all already open source.

  • I have a list of things brewing in my head that guy I want to be when I grow up would be doing interesting things with:

    • Here are a few off the top:
      • Inform 7
      • Jabber
      • Podcasting
      • Storytelling and fiction writing
    • What's keeping me?
      • That's an interesting question.

  • Just when I was thinking I wish I had a command-line tool to look at what Time Machine was doing, behold it appears!

  • If ever I turn this thing into a web app, I'll think about making a textarea work like Vim

Metabucket

So I'm just going to start writing this blog on my laptop using Blosxom and see if I actually manage to capture some ideas, even if only I'm reading them for now.

This thing isn't going to be solved by software - at least not at first and not ever entirely. To get it going, I'm going to just open a Vim window and start spewing into a text file and let Blosxom feed from the directory.

Is "bucket" a good name for this thing? I keep thinking I want to come up with some coffee-based pun for it that's not yet been used by a Java project.

Inspirations:

Some goals for this thing:

  • Turn the page daily.
  • Keep the page one hotkey or Quicksilver access away.
  • No structure, titles, or anything decided up front.
  • Must be as quick and easy as tweeting to Twitter.
  • Must be dead simpler than WordPress.
  • Must absorb a day's worth of dithering before bothering feed subscribers.
  • Should capture ideas and lend itself toward the shaping of more proper long-play blog entries.
  • Should make it easy for me to occasionally pull in and comment upon items I've shared / bookmarked / gathered using other services.
  • Develop a style that could evolve naturally into microcontent.
  • Develop some creative constraints ala Twitter's 140 or Ficlet's 1024 characters.
  • Accumulate features a bit at a time, but just start writing.

TODO

  • Feed-to-Markdown script
    • Fuels cut-n-paste link palettes
  • Pre-filter for Markdown
    • Omit /* */ comments
    • Quick notation for anchors
    • Anchors for H1-H6
    • Anchors for HR
    • Discuss / Haloscan comments for each anchor
  • Post-filter for Markdown
    • Convert some links into embeds
      • ie. YouTube videos

Code so far, in a midnight crontab:

BASE=$HOME/Documents/bucket/entries; 
NOW=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
NOW_FN=$BASE/`date +%Y/%m/%d-%H_%M_%S.txt`; 
NOW_DIR=`dirname $NOW_FN`; 

mkdir -p $NOW_DIR; 
mv $BASE/now.txt $NOW_FN; 
echo "bucket for $NOW"  > $BASE/now.txt
echo "" >> $BASE/now.txt

/* vim: set formatoptions=l lbr syntax=mkd columns=94 lines=64: */