Benad's Junk List

You can look at the new blog at the temporary address http://blog2.benad.me/ . It’s on Squarespace, and I imported my full blog archive. For now I’m still using Posterous and autoposting to everything else, but this week I’ll finalize the move. I still have to clean up the page style, tweak things here and there, use Twitterfeed to auto-post links to Twitter (using s.benad.me), and so on.

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As I’m reviewing the movies made by Stanley Kubrick, I’m starting to get to the point where their visual aspect is important, actually spectacular. It just so happens that there is a collection of Kubrick movies on Blu-ray. To compare, I bought this 9-disk DVD collection in 2003.

Now, I’m normally against buying newer media, and I postponed buying a Blu-ray player for the longest time out of spite against Sony, but this time I might make an exception. My rationalization is that those Blu-rays have far more extra features than my old DVD set. In my DVD set there were no extras or commentaries whatsoever, but seemed to make it up with a feature-length documentary (that’s not available on the Blu-ray set). And the thing is that I will watch all the extras, so that may be well worth the price. So, there, they’ll get my money.

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Well, I just finished moving my blog to blog.benad.me. Kind of. It’s still hosted by Posterous, and my web site is still hosted by Fused. It seems that recently their configuration panel now supported an “Advanced DNS Zone Editor”, which let me point “blog.” to either an IP (“A” record) or another domain (“CNAME” record). Since Posterous supports custom domains, this was a breeze to set up.

Now, I’m already halfway ready to move my blog to Squarespace. Painfully (totally caused by Posterous), I finally was able to copy all my posts from Livejournal to Wordpress. I had to manually re-insert tags, remove duplicates, re-autopost missing posts, and so on.

Below is a summary of the current post migration, and the way blog.benad.me will eventually point to what’s on Squarespace. You can see the image also here.

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In the past few weeks, it seems like posting a new message to Posterous Spaces works sporadically. I’ve been trying to get in touch with tech support, and all I got was a confirmation that on certain days it can take hours for an email port to show up in Posterous.

I suspect some people are abusing of the video posting capabilities of the email interface, all the while with under-provisioned servers to handle the email queue. Yes, it’s a FIFO queue, that does not prioritize in any way short plain-text emails like mine.

Another facet that annoys me is that the web interface for posting using anything but a full-fledged web browser, meaning an iPad or Opera Mini, seems to ignore line breaks in my messages unless I wrap everything within Markdown tags. Effectively, if they drop the Markdown support, I will have absolutely no reliable way of posting style-rich messages to Posterous from my iPhone or iPad. (BTW, their app doesn’t automatically save drafts, and does only plain text, so I’m avoiding it.)

Hey. Posterous staff, if you’re reading this, what used to be your killer feature (email posting) is rapidly going downhill while you can barely compete with Google+ since your redesign. Oh, and without any proper, non-crippled backup mechanism (#1 requested feature), you’re making me regret my decision of sticking with Posterous after all those years.

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Today I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to post anything. First, my Internet connection slowed down to a halt (well, I still had the normal 3Mbps upstream, but downstream I could barely get 0.5Mbps). Also, Posterous was down for a few hours today ( https://twitter.com/#!/posterous/status/158266563584196608 ), which may explain yesterday why my post’s email seem to have been ignored, forcing me to manually post through the rather limited Posterous app for iOS. This reminded me how much I enjoy Opera Mini on my phone ( http://www.opera.com/mobile/ ) and even its desktop version when bandwidth is severely limited. Before I upgraded to a proper (6 GB per month) phone data plan, I used to have only 50 MB per month. Yet, with Opera Mini installed on my unlocked RIZR Z8 phone, I could stay connected without too much issue. Text-only mind you, but with Opera Mini’s amazing compression it wasn’t a problem. I didn’t mind much privacy-wise about the fact that this worked because the “real” browser was running on Opera’s server since I never used it for anything too personal. I still use Opera Mini from time to time on both my iPhone and iPad, when my Internet connection sucks (like today), or when I want to read some graphics-intensive web site like The Verge.

Apart from that, I finished the day listening to Jerry Goldsmith’s soundtrack for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. While I do not particularly enjoy Star Trek, the filler music used to accompany those interminable scenes are so good that the first time I saw the movie I didn’t mind those “intermissions” that much. I fully understand why they reused the movie’s theme for the entire Next Generation’s series.

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So, as I mentioned yesterday, here are the tools and process I’ll use to make it possible for me to post one blog post per day for a year. I’ll use email as my primary interface to post. This if for two reasons. First, email clients (Email in iOS and Gmail) aggressively save and synchronize automatically email drafts, this minimizing the risk that I’ll lose a post I’m writing midway. Second, if I travel and I get stuck with an horrible data plan, I can still send an email without it costing me an a and a leg.

I’ll keep using Posterous ( http://posterous.com/ ) because of its powerful cross-posting capabilities, but frankly I was more than once tempted to move to tumblr, which already mirrors my posts ( http://benad.tumblr.com/ , and also on Livejournal at http://benad.livejournal.com/ ). One negative against Posterous is that backups are difficult. They have an API, which I tried by using a script ( http://riduidel.posterous.com/posterous-backup-script-v2 ) made by Nicolas Delsaux ( http://posterous.com/users/bi092oXai ), but the rate limits on the API requests are so abysmally low that it’s too hard to make an effective backup script. Ultimately, my Sent folders of my iCloud and Gmail accounts are backed up, so if I consistently use email that won’t be a problem. I may indulge myself into using Markdown syntax from time to time, but normally for simple posts I’ll write them in plain text only.

To avoid some “blank page syndrome”, I’ll be keeping a text file in Dropbox that lists out future subject ideas and some kind of daily schedule. Hey, I still have to find 354 different subjects to talk about… I may have from time to time to split a subject into multiple (not necessarily contiguous) posts, so avoid spending more than 30 minutes a day on this. I may also preemptively to some research in advance of certain posts, and keep track of those notes in my schedule page or Evernote. I may even cross-post some of those longer subjects into proper articles for my web site. We’ll see.

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Another year, another wave of resolutions that will be broken within a month…In my case, I see that as an opportunity to embark on some short-term project that will practice my neglected writing skills. I’d often embark on writing a lengthy document for my web site (http://benad.me/) just to let it sit there for months, because A: the article deals with such “deep” matter that writing every sentence is painfully difficult, and B: because I don’t want to publish it until it is complete. Combined, that created an environment where simply not writing at all was all too easy.

All the while, I see those countless blogs (now on tumblr, a new fad I guess), that while mostly vapid are still updated more than once per day. Hey, I can do that!So I have this crazy idea: I’m going to update my blog every day for a year. With careful planning, this should be relatively easy. That’s why for now I focus on writing in plain text through an email interface on Posterous. Does that mean that I’ll have to get Internet access of some kind for each day next year? Yes, and my process will take that into account. What about the content of my posts? Well, similar to years before I’ll write on programming and technology, but this time I’ll also write up some reviews of books, movies and music. Also I’ll make sure my writings can reach a wider audience, though for sure ill sometimes “geek out” when writing about programming.

Enough for today. I’ll go on in more detail tomorrow about my process and what tools I’ll be using to make one post a day.

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