In my quest to move away from WordPress (and PHP/MySQL, which reminds me far too much of 1999 for my comfort), I'm evaluating several static site blog solutions to migrate this blog to and to use for a couple of other blogs that I want to set up for next year. As part of the process, I wanted to give Octopress a shot. Octopress is a static site blogging solution built on mojombo/jekyll – the solution that powers GitHub Pages. The beauty of it is that you can simply deploy your blog to GitHub Pages, and even use a custom domain, simply by pushing to your repository (GitHub will pass your repository through Jekyll automatically–simples!)

The problem is that there are apparently issues with installing the dependencies on a box running Lion with Xcode 4.2. The following solution worked for me. I hacked it together from that StackOverflow thread as well as the Octopress Setup Guide:

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I was working through a tutorial on Bogart and CouchDB and decided to implement the examples in CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript as I've been meaning to play with CoffeeScript for a while now.

One of the files in the tutorial is the package.json file for managing dependencies in the (absolutely lovely) package manager npm. When I wrote the data structure out in CoffeeScript, however, the compiled data structure wasn't valid JSON according to JSONLint (it was nested between parentheses, had unquoted keys, and a trailing semi-colon, as you can see in the code snippet.) (more...)

So what do you do if you lose a public battle to change the face of JavaScript?

If you're Google, you decide to go it alone, implement what you want to anyway, and then tell the world that it is going to replace JavaScript.

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I just put a new iteration of the Update conference web site live, inspired by and in collaboration with designer Clare Sutcliffe. About a week or so ago, Clare – quite out of the blue – sent me an iteration on the Update site design that I absolutely adored. In organizing Update I'm wearing lots of hats at once and I couldn't do it all without the frankly humbling support and help I've been receiving from my friends.

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File this under Ultra-Niche. If you happen to be one of the three people in the world using Adobe's easy-to-use and powerful ExtendScript to script the CS*-series of tools (e.g., Photoshop) and you're using the FIle object to write out files manually, read on.

Under Snow Leopard, the following code would work (you'll find variants of this code floating around the Internets):

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