For instance, as cool as it is to have the ability to “ping” Twitter or Friendfeed or Facebook or whatever as soon as I post (negating using a WordPress plugin — and I have to use two, since Twitter Tools stopped tweeting my blog updates like, 6 months ago), I found out the hard way that it tweeted (or it triggered the tweet-function of one of the plugins) just by instituting a post preview. Ultimate fail.

The pros:

• The interface is slick — though I don’t absolutely love it, it is nice for stuff like dragging and dropping pictures (instant crop and whatnot)
  
• The blog-preview mechanism, though quirky with Twitter, automatically gets my template stuff intact. It isn’t a big deal to have to manually edit MarsEdit, but doing it instantly is certainly nicer.
  
• The support for ExpressionEngine is pretty hawt. I know MarsEdit does it, but it does it in kind of a kludgy way (and that’s the fault of multiple fields rather than ME itself, IMHO).
  
• Works as a Twitter or Microblog client too.
  
• Bookmarklet works with Vimeo, Flickr, YouTube, etc. for Tumblr like support.
  
• Built-in ping support for lots of other services.
  

Now the cons:

• The interface, while clean, is way more kludgy than it should be.
  
• Copied links aren’t auto-filled and changing a link is more difficult than it should be.
  
• The list mode, while attractive to look at, is annoying to use as you have to double return to get a new bullet and press the button to toggle between ordered, unordered and off.
  
• No excerpt field. That sucks
  
• Tags and keywords are on the same line and can be hard to differentiate.
  
• Said Twitter issues/conflict with other plugin.
  
• Doesn’t feel complete.
  

So ultimately, I think I’m going to give this a pass. I’ll try it again in the coming days, but right now, it isn’t as good as MarsEdit, even if some aspects have a little more exterior polish.

In April of 2001, I signed up for a LiveJournal account. For 6 years, it was something I used very frequently and it remains an artifact of sorts of my late adolescence/college life. I’m not linking to it (if you find it, you find it, but I have no desire to publicize my angst and ennui at 19 or 20, I just don’t), but it exists. It has remained dormant for the last 16 months. It is now less dormant.

Using Live+Press, I’m cross-posting my blog entries to LiveJournal, so that Ryan and anyone else who still has me on their Friends List and wants to keep up can do so.

Although I moved onto something else, as happens with technology, LiveJournal and the friendships and relationships I made there will always hold a special place in my heart. It was my first online home outside of my GeoCities websites.

Out.

Edit: Perhaps not. This doesn’t seem to be working as well as I planned.

Once again, Chris Murphy is the man…it just cannot be said enough! When I finally got off my ass nearly nine-months ago and actually started doing something with my website, I was truly fortunate to come across Chris’s amazing Lemon Twist theme. Not only does it have a look that I still really enjoy all these months later, it was so well-coded and feature rich that in the process of modifying it to fit my own needs, I learned tons about WordPress in the process.

I figured out how to successfully widgetize the first version of Lemon Twist that I used on this site, but when Chris updated it to be even better, my workaround broke (well, it worked but it was weird, I had to set the widgets in another theme first and then enable it). I really didn’t care enough to figure out WHY it wasn’t working, mostly because I was content to just create my own PHP sidebar elements to do stuff like Calendar, Twitter statuses, etc.

Well, Chris being the awesome designer/developer dude that he is DID care enough — so he widgetized the theme. It turns out that the functions file needed to be in a different directory (the main theme directory not the sub directory). Even better, he created some widgets that kept the customized sidebar elements he built before intact. You know, so that things like Categories and Bookmarks don’t look like total ass. He also made a stylized Twitter widget specifically for the theme that I want to publicly thank him for. Chris, THANK YOU! You can follow him on Twitter @farfromfearless

Chris was nice enough to send me his widgetized files before putting it live on his site (it is still amazing how many e-mails I get from people who love Chris’s theme and like what I did with it) and while I updated the CSS late last week, an emergency MacBook reinstall put updating the widgets on pause. I had a chance to do that tonight, editing the sidebar stuff that I changed to include my own brand of panache. I think that the latest version of WordPress allows variable sidebars to exist on different pages, but I’ll look into that later in the week.

Anyway, I just wanted to shout-out a huge thank you to Chris and also do my duty in promoting his awesome work. In this age of premium and paid WordPress themes (and I will say that I think Chris Pearson’s Thesis is flat-out AWESOME — Adii’s WooThemes are great too), Chris’s work more than stands-up — the fact that he has made his themes free out of his own personal goodwill is just another reason I’m so thankful I ran across his theme.

In fact, Atlanta is so frequently left-out of the Web Conference mix, I didn’t even KNOW that Webmaster Jam Session 2008 was going to be in my own backyard until like two weeks ago!

But thanks to CoffeeCup’s J. Cornelius, I not only KNOW about it, I’m also going to be speaking on a panel about web visibility! I’m so excited!

So many genuinely cool and awe-inspiring superstars are going to be there, Jeff Croft, Dan Rubin, Nathan Smith — my Austin roadtrip hombre Keith Robinson — I’m really, really thrilled about the whole event.

If you’re going to be in Atlanta (or want to be!) on October 3rd and 4th, and you are interested in web technologies, design, SEO or social media, this should be a fantastic conference! Spots are limited, so register now — oh, and if you use the code “REDCAT” when registering, you’ll save 20%!

If you’re going to be in town or are interested — give me a heads up via e-mail or Twitter — I’d love to meet up with you!

Nothing has made me more sad than the total lack of a blogging application for the BlackBerry. Within two weeks of launching the App Store, both TypePad and WordPress. Meanwhile, I’ve spent like 4 and a half months trying to find a decent WordPress or other blogging app for BlackBerry, with no luck.

Thanks to the always wonderful Twitter, I was alerted to the fact that SixApart actually released a TypePad app for BlackBerry back in May. So close, yet so far (if it were 2003 and I were looking to migrate from LiveJournal to a hosted service, I would have probably gone to TypePad — but it is 2008 and I want my own software installation — I’m sticking with WordPress unless Expression Engine 2.0 blows me away or I decide to roll my own Django thing). Fortunately, I decided to try Google again for BlackBerry blogging apps. Although the BlackBerry market of good third-party software is woefully underdeveloped, I am excited to say I have discovered a workable MetaWeblog API solution.

The program is called BBMetaBlog and as best I can tell, it was developed as a blogging tool for the Lotus Note and Lotus Domino servers/platforms. As such, things like categories and tagging is all handled by a different application that is designed to run on Lotus Domino servers. However, because Domino/Notes uses the MetaWeblog API for its blogging engine, any XML-RPC capable platform, meaning WordPress, can take advantage.

Neato. There are a few caveats:

• Because this was developed to work with a pre-existing blog system, tags and categories don’t work. I haven’t messed around with it enough to find out if you create a default category if that will pass through or not. If it will, I might just make my default category “BlackBerry Mobile” or “Mobile Posts” to help keep things clean.
• While it appears as if you CAN edit past entries, those entries don’t actually show up to be able to see them to edit.

Still, it’s better than nothing.

To get this to work (and I’m running everything off of a BlackBerry 8320 running 4.2.2 (they haven’t updated to 4.5 in the States yet, at least not at T-Mobile)), download the program using the OTA link above. Run the application and click on the “Configure” button. Enter in the username and password for you WordPress blog (or other MetaWeblog API blog software) and leave Location and Category at their defaults. On the line that says access URL, for WordPress users, enter in: http://www.yourblogdomain.com/xmlrpc.php — other MetaWeblog API programs might have a slightly different syntax, so check with your software.

That’s it.

Now you can create new posts and send them straight from your BlackBerry!

Note about WordPress 2.6 and later If your first installation of WordPress was version 2.6 or later and you have never used a third-party blog client before, you need to enable Remote Blogging from the Settings –> Writing tab:

Just make sure you select XML-RPC.

If I knew anything about programming for BlackBerry, I’d try to take on this thing (since it is Open Source) and modify it to work better. Until then (or until a better option becomes available), this will suffice.

Stupid web tech…

And as usual, this was probably not my fault (or WordPress’s for that matter), it was Comcast or somebody. It’s working now.

Funny how right after my ISP issue gets sorted out, my website works again.

In the comments of that entry, Patrick was running into some problems — it seemed like maybe he had missed a step. It occurred to me that it might be really beneficial to have the entire process documented in a screencast, because some people do better with a visual guide, and for anyone unfamiliar with their command line, seeing what you are supposed to do can be really, really helpful.

So I whipped up a video tutorial on Thursday. I wanted to have it posted earlier, but I wanted to stream it as a QuickTime file (for optimum quality/performance) and I had to tweak the settings of the QTSS server I’m using and then figure out the best way to embed the content. I was out all day yesterday and I didn’t really get a chance to look seriously at embed options until this morning. The solution I ended up using is Shadowbox, a JavaScript AJAXy media player.

You need QuickTime or VLC or something to view the file. If you need it in another format, I can try to acquiesce

For the demo, I’m assuming you are using my backup_server.sh script, but the steps are the same even if you are using your own.

Small Player

Medium Player

Super Huge Player

Enjoy! If you have any more questions, just leave them here and I’ll try my best to answer them.

Update: I posted a video tutorial that walks through all of these steps here. I still recommend reading through this page because the video tutorial assumes that you will be following these steps.

This a tutorial for creating an automated back-up system for (mt) Media Temple’s (gs) Grid Service. Although it will almost certainly work on other servers and configurations, this is written for users who are on the Grid who want an easy way to do automated backups. I personally feel most comfortable having my most important files backed-up offsite, so I use Amazon’s S3 service. S3 is fast, super cheap (you only pay for what you use) and reliable. I use S3 to store my website backups and my most important computer files. I spend about $1.50 a month, and that is for nearly 10 GBs of storage.

You can alter the script to simply store the data in a separate location on your server (where you can then just FTP or SSH in and download the compressed archive), but this process is assuming that you are using both the (gs) and S3.

This tutorial assumes that you know how to login to your (gs) via SSH using either the Terminal in OS X or Linux or PuTTY for Windows. If SSH is still confusing, check out (mt)‘s Knowledge Base article and take a deep breath. It looks more scary than it really is.

Acknowledgements

I would be remiss if I didn’t give a GIGANTIC shout-out to David at Stress Free Zone and Paul Stamatiou (I met Paul at the Tweet-up in March) who both wrote great guides to backing stuff up server side to S3. I blatantly stole from both of them and rolled my own script that is a combination of the two. Seriously, thank you both for your awesome articles.

Furthermore, none of this would even be possible without the brilliant S3Sync Ruby utility.

Installing S3Sync

Although PHP and Perl script exist to connect with the S3 servers, the Ruby solution that the S3Sync dudes created is much, much better.

The (gs) already has Ruby on it (version 1.8.5 as of this writing), which is up-to-date enough for S3Sync.

OK, so log-in to your (gs) via SSH. My settings (and the defaults for (gs), I assume) are to place you in the .home directory as soon as you login to SSH.

Once you are at the command line, type in the following command:

wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/ServEdge_pub/s3sync/s3sync.tar.gz

This will download the latest S3Sync tarball to your .home folder

tar xvzf s3sync.tar.gz

This uncompresses the archive to its own directory.

rm s3sync.tar.gz</p>

<p>cd s3sync</p>

<p>mkdir certs</p>

<p>cd certs</p>

<p>wget http://mirbsd.mirsolutions.de/cvs.cgi/~checkout~/src/etc/ssl.certs.shar</p>

<p>sh ssl.certs.shar</p>

<p>cd ..</p>

<p>mkdir s3backup

That will delete the compressed archive, make a directory for certificates (certs), download an SSL certificate generator script, execute that script and create a backup directory within the s3sync directory called “s3backup.”

Now, all you need to do is edit two files in your newly created s3sync folder. You can use TextEdit, TextMate, NotePad or any other text editor to edit these files. You are only going to be changing a few of the values.

I edited the files via Transmit, but you can use vi straight from the command line if you are comfortable.

The first file you want to edit is called s3config.yml.sample

You want to edit that file so that the aws_access_key and aws_secret_access_key fields correspond to those from your S3 account. You can find those in the Access Information area after logging into Amazon.com’s Web Services page.

Make sure that the ssl_cert_dir: has the following value (if you created your s3sync folder in the .home directory): /home/xxxxx/users/.home/s3sync/certs were xxxxx is the name of your server.

You can get your entire access path by typing in

pwd

Save that file as s3config.yml

The next step is something I had to do in order to get the s3 part of the script to connect, but it may not be required for all server set-ups, but it was for the (gs).

Edit the s3config.rb file so that the area that says

confpath = [xxxxx]

looks like this

confpath = ["./", "#{ENV['S3CONF']}", "#{ENV['HOME']}/.s3conf", "/etc/s3conf"]

Writing the backup script (or editing mine)

OK, that was the hard part. The rest is pretty simple.

I created the following backup script called, “backup_server.sh” This script will backup the content of the domain directories you specify (because if you are like me, some of your domain folders are really just symlinks) and all of your MySQL databases. It will then upload each directory and database in its own compressed archive to the S3 Bucket of your choice. Buckets are unique, so create a Bucket using either the S3Fox tool or Transmit or another S3 manager that is specific for your website.

This is the content of the script:

#!/bin/sh</p>

<h1>A list of website directories to back up</h1>

<p>websites="site1.com site2.com site3.com"</p>

<h1>The destination directory to backup the files to</h1>

<p>destdir=/home/xxxxx/users/.home/s3sync/s3backup</p>

<h1>The directory where all website domain directories reside</h1>

<p>domaindir=/home/xxxxx/users/.home/domains</p>

<h1>The MySQL database hostname</h1>

<p>dbhost=internal-db.sxxxxx.gridserver.com</p>

<h1>The MySQL database username - requires read access to databases</h1>

<p>dbuser=dbxxxxx</p>

<h1>The MySQL database password</h1>

<p>dbpassword=xxxxxxx</p>

<p>echo <code>date</code> ": Beginning backup process..." > $destdir/backup.log</p>

<h1>remove old backups</h1>

<p>rm $destdir/*.tar.gz</p>

<h1>backup databases</h1>

<p>for dbname in <code>echo 'show databases;' | /usr/bin/mysql -h $dbhost -u$dbuser -p$dbpassword</code>
do
if [ $dbname != "Database" ];
then
echo <code>date</code> ": Backing up database $dbname..." >> $destdir/backup.log
/usr/bin/mysqldump --opt -h $dbhost -u$dbuser -p$dbpassword $dbname > $destdir/$dbname.sql
tar -czf $destdir/$dbname.sql.tar.gz $destdir/$dbname.sql
rm $destdir/$dbname.sql
fi
done</p>

<h1>backup web content</h1>

<p>echo <code>date</code> ": Backing up web content..." >> $destdir/backup.log
for website in $websites
do
echo <code>date</code> ": Backing up website $website..." >> $destdir/backup.log
tar -czf $destdir/$website.tar.gz $domaindir/$website
done</p>

<p>echo <code>date</code> ": Backup process complete." >> $destdir/backup.log</p>

<h1>The directory where s3sync is installed</h1>

<p>s3syncdir=/home/xxxxx/users/.home/s3sync</p>

<h1>The directory where the backup archives are stored</h1>

<p>backupdir=/home/xxxxx/users/.home/s3sync/s3backup</p>

<h1>The S3 bucket a.k.a. directory to upload the backups into</h1>

<p>s3bucket=BUCKET-NAME</p>

<p>cd $s3syncdir
./s3sync.rb $backupdir/ $s3bucket:

For (mt) Media Temple (gs) Grid Server users, you just need to change the “site1.com” values to your own domains (you can do as many as you want) and substitute all the places where marked “xxxxx” with your server number (again, you can find this by entering “pwd” at the command line) and with your database password (which is visible in the (mt) control panel under the “Database” module.

Make sure you change the value at the end of the script that says “BUCKET-NAME” to the name of the S3 Bucket you want to store you backups in.

Now that you have edited the script, upload it to your /data directory.

Change the permissions (you can do this either via SSH

chmod a+x backup_server.sh

Now, test the script.

In the command line type this in:

cd data</p>

<p>./backup_server.sh</p>

<p>

And watch the magic. Assuming everything was correctly input, an archived version of all your domain directories and all of your MySQL databases will be put in a folder called “s3backup” and then uploaded directly to your S3 server. Next time you run the script, the backup files will be replaced.

Check to make sure that the script is working the way you want it to work.

Automate the script

You can either run the script manually from the command line or set it to run automatically. I’ve set mine to run each night at midnight. To set up the cron job, just click on the Cron Jobs button in the (mt) Admin area:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

and set you parameters. The path for your script is: /home/xxxxx/data/backup_server.sh.

Enjoy your backups!

One note: The compressed domain archives retain their entire directory structure, as such, there is a .home directory that may not appear in Finder or Windows Explorer unless you have invisible or hidden files turned on. Don’t worry, all your data is still retained in those archives.

Update (7/27/2008): If you are getting an error that says something like Permanent redirect received. Try setting AWS_CALLING_FORMAT to SUBDOMAIN

Add the following array to your s3config.yml file AWS_CALLING_FORMAT: SUBDOMAIN

The error is either because your bucket is in the EU or there is something else funky with its URL structure. Changing that value should allow the script to perform as intended.

Edit: OK — That worked just fine. I’m on an Intel Mac, Leopard 10.5.2 — using the latest version of Flash and I just inserted the image from the Post page in WordPress. I selected the image, added the parameters I wanted and clicked “insert into post” — then I set-up my formatting.

Update 2: The AWESOME Mark Jaquith just added a comment — apparently this is either a Bad Behavior plugin incompatibility (so use Akismet or Defensio and disable BB for now) or something with the mod_security Apache module — which may be falsely marking WP 2.5 as malicious code. If you have Apache access, I guess you could try whitelisting WordPress (not sure how to do that — anyone smarter, chime in), but this is probably something you’ll want to bitch to your host about.

Thanks Mark!!