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...)

I don't know if there's an official announcement or documentation on it but I realized yesterday, while making Tweaky, that Twitter for Mac supports the same protocol handlers as Twitter for iPhone. The only thing you have to change is the tweetie:// protocol to twitter://.

Check out the protocol reference here.

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In March of this year, I created a Twitter library called XAuthTwitterEngine based on Matt Gemmell's awesome MGTwitterEngine library and the excellent work (and with the assistance) of a number of great developers (including Ben Gottlieb, Jon Crosby, Chris Kimpton, and Isaiah Carew, Steve Reynolds, and Norio Nomura). Back then, MGTwitterEngine didn't have oAuth/xAuth support and I built XAuthTwitterEngine as a stop-gap, with the intension of back-porting to MGTwitterEngine at some point.

Well, MGTwitterEngine has had excellent oAuth/xAuth for some time now and I finally got round to checking it out today only to realize just how much progress they've made. It's definitely time to deprecate XAuthTwitterEngine and start using MGTwitterEngine again (so I am back-porting Feathers to MGTwitterEngine at the moment).

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tree is a command-line utility that displays a graphical (well, ASCII-art) directory tree. I saw Scott Chacon using it in his GitCasts and tried it in Terminal on OS X only to see that it wasn't installed. One quick sudo port install tree with MacPorts later, it was.

It's really useful for getting a quick idea of the state of a folder hierarchy. Highly recommended!