NanoBlogger Was Killing Me
NanoBlogger really looked cool to me (my postings about why I liked it):
- Small
- Most functionality provided via plugins
- CLI only
- It is FOSS.
- Produced a static site (ie: only serves static pages)
- It was built on Bash – I thought this was the coolest
I liked it so much that I wrote a CLI for it that was better suited to my personal workflow. I also spent some time integrating it with Emacs. But it had endless problems.
It was slow, it did not do anything automatically, frequently required rebuilding of the entire blog, was hard to view on my local machine, isn’t really being maintained, doesn’t have a real templating system, breaks the RSS feed on special characters such as etc…
Where Next
Over the past few weeks I’ve been looking around for a new blogging system. The only real contender seemed to be Jekyll. It is written in Ruby and used by Github to power Github Pages. It has so many contributors to it that its Github repository has, at the moment, 50+ pull requests.
I had nearly chosen Jekyll when I moved to NanoBlogger. I found that the discussion about moving to Jekyll on the 0xdecafbad.com blog really aligned with my thoughts.
But, after playing with it a bit, I found that Jekyll was difficult to configure. And I just so liked the Bash thing that NanoBlogger had that I decided to go with NanoBlogger. But now I’m wasting too much of my time fighting with Nanoblogger and I should reconsider Jekyll.
SparkleShare Doesn’t Sparkle
Based on a LifeHacker posting, I previously blogged about giving SparkleShare a try.. It was cool. A free Dropbox with private hosting. So I installed, configured, and started using SparkleShare. While I was quite excited when I embarked upon my journey using SparkleShare, things didn’t work out as well as I had hoped.
I quickly found out that SparkleShare doesn’t handle symbolic links. Not at all. There’s no workaround. The problem is that SparkleShare relies on Git for synchronization and Git doesn’t support symbolic links. At least for me, this rendered SparkleShare useless.
When I moved to Dropbox directory, what I had been using for synchronization before SparkleShare, had no files in it, just a bunch of symbolic links. But with SparkleShare, you have to move all your directories into your SparkleShare directory and then scatter symbolic links around your system where the you want the directories to be. This caused a variety of minor but really annoying problems.
But SparkleShare totally fails if you want to synchronize a directory that has symbolic links in it. SparkleShare’s forum was covered with complaints about the symbolic link problem.
I am currently using the following scheme for file distribution/backups:
- I’m using rsync to keep my media, bin directory, dot-files, and the like in sync on all my computers.
- For actual backups, I’ve been using Crashplan for years and couldn’t be happier.
- And, in the past week or two, I’ve put Dropbox synchronization back into the mix to manage synchronization between Org Mode files on my computers and MobileOrg files on my Android. Despite the strong cult following that Dropbox has, synching with my mobile seems to be the only effective use I can find for it.
Blackberry’s Manufacturer RIM Nearly RIP
RIM No Longer A Viable Company
RIM, arguably the manufacturer of the first successful smartphone, the Blackberry, has not only lost its market lead, but is facing a rather unpredictable future. RIM’s new CEO, Thorsten Heins, has stated that RIM is open to acquisition. At least for the short-term, his statements have led to a one-day, 5% bounce back of the stock price which was down 70% in the 12 months.
RIM’s History
For those of you that are unaware of RIM’s history, it got its start in Canada as a 2-way pager provider. In 1999, RIM moved into the smartphone market with its first Blackberry and immediately achieved market dominance.