Mark McAulay

I was a bit gutted that I couldn't make this years SOTR conference in Edinburgh but at least Stu made sure that I wasn't missing out too much...my own personal scotch on the rocks...lovely.

So as part of my own little personal digital revolution including the building of a new personal website (launch date will follow, we're early in the process), working with more "social" services and generally changing the way I use online services, I've made the choice to run my blog on the posterous service. (I'm not sure when I first thought it acceptable to begin a paragraph with "So" and that is something I'll need to re-educate myself on, sorry!)

A little bit of background is in order.

Back in 2003 my "blog" was little more than a collection of static HTML pages that I'd lovingly hand craft whenever I had something i wanted to share online. In "getting a grip of myself", I learned the ins and outs of WordPress and went about replacing my static content with a touch of PHP/MySQL goodness. This served me well however, as a bit of a tinkerer and one who just cant leave shit alone, while getting all excited about CFML, I made the choice to port my WordPress blog to BlogCFC This made perfect sense given I had the run of a ColdFusion server and I was stretching my CFML wings...right up until I discovered Mango Blog which for a couple of reasons, I prefered the look of and so went about porting my blog over to this new system(also CFML, this one I ran on Railo). I must say that Mango Blog is awesome, I will use it for projects in future with much less hesitancy now that i've spent some considerable time with it working out what makes it tick. So that brings us right up to date where by I've made the choice to port my blog over to a hosted service.

Why on earth would I use a hosted service?

Here's the thing. I want to use my blog for...well, blogging. I need a facility that allows me to post from almost anywhere and to post as many different types of media as possible with minimum fuss. I need to know that the domain name I've associated my name with for many years will still be relevant and I need to be able to track who's looking at my blog as well as being able to use the content elsewhere for other purposes in my wee digital revolution. These are all common requirements for people with a blog. So why have I gone to posterous?

Lets take a litte look at what I'd rather not have to do while blogging.

As someone who doesn't like to leave stuff alone, the ability to alter parts of my blog, or even to redesign the whole thing on a whim was just too tempting. I need to focus on the content of what I'm posting rather than the next "buzzword" tech that I can integrate into the blog technology. WordPress was particularly distracting in this regard with an endless supply of plugins to keep you fiddling for a long time. The other thing I dont want is any sort of barrier to being able to post content. I just want a straightforward method with no logging in, no navigating around a slow and bloated UI and no other distractions. Point and shoot is what it's all about in my opinion.

And so why posterous and not tumblr?

Well, I have a tumblr account also. confused? so was I when I set both up but Ive found uses for both and I really like posterous as a straight up blogging platform. I simply email posterous or use the bookmark and my content is added ready for anyone who cares to read my stuff...no login, no distracting UI and no deviation from what I'm trying to get across. Just a simple, relevent, straight up, no frills platform to post anything that I want to say...I love it.

apt-get remove --purge xorg-driver-fglrx

This restored full graphics functionality, happy days!

I was just staring at my now defunct "windows" key on my laptop's keyboard and thought, surely I can turn that little windows icon into something useful at last...well as it turns out, there are a number of things you can do but here's what I chose....

lets map it to the applications menu giving basic cursor access to all options.

1. System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts
2. From the "desktop" category select “show the panel’s main menu”
3. With this selected, press the “windows” key on the keyboard
4. Close the window, you're done

My first aim is to aquaint myself with rails. I hear too many good
things to just ignore it so am making an effort to investigate it a
bit. I have purchased "Agile web development with rails" and started
working my way through it, so far I like it...a lot.
 
Continue the CFML education and pay special attention to railo 3.1.
CFML is my language of choice and I plan to keep getting better at it
and using it commercialy for new development work. I plan to attend
the Scotch On The Rocks conference in Edinburgh again this year as it
was my visit last year that really inspired me to get cracking with
ColdFusion "for real" in 2008.
 
Learn much more jQuery...if it can be progressively enhanced, I'll be
doing that in 2009.
 
Version control (yes shame on me, I don't currently use anything), I
am probably going to go with Git but lets see how the year pans out.
 
HTML 5 - it's time to leave my XHTML 1.0 ways behind with no hissy
fits or ranting about how the xml based syntax is clearly nicer to
work with and embrace the future of the HTML language.
 
CSS - time to learn what I dont know and start giving treats to
browsers that deserve it. Those browsers that can't handle the present
and future *cough* IE6 *cough* will continue to get the basics and as
professionals we unfortunately need to continue supporting older
browsers as long as their market share is of relatively high
proportion. How we support them is entirely a different matter though,
we can only provide what they can support right? That shouldn't mean
that the rest of the progressive world should have to suffer and be
held back so varying levels of enhancement based on capability are the
order of the day ensuring that although each site wont look identical
in every browser, the site design will remain very much recognisable
while playing to the strengths of the browser used...I heard this
referred to as progressive enrichment and I like the sound of that.
 
Open Knowledge Network - more planning, advancement of
topics/speakers, linking up with other meetups nationaly and of course
a lot more work on the website (Railo powered of course!)
 
Something more arty - Having largely left my graphic designer coat at
the door and buried my head in the code sand for a couple of years
now, I feel the need to do something creative again. Not sure what yet
but I suspect it'll involve geekery of some description.
 
oh...and of course, I WILL post a series on getting Railo up and
running with Apache/MySQL on CentOS...honest...
 
How Likely am I to do any of this?
 
Back at the start of 2008, I made the resolution to step up my CFML
knowledge and start using it in place of PHP for new development where
possible. I'm happy to report that I managed to do that. Taking things
a bit further, and in keeping with the "free" factor of PHP, I went
digging into Railo which is to be open sourced shortly. In the
meantime, I set up a VPS using CentOS 5, Railo 3 community
edition(free), Apache 2.2, MySQL 5 and started playing around with it.
I can officialy report that Railo kicks ass and that I'm looking
forward to getting my grubby hands on the OS version early this year.
My other aim for 2008 was to jump on the jQuery bandwagon and start
progressively enhancing anything I could! I now have a reasonable
grasp of jQuery and enjoy using it. Lastly I decided to get the
community going in Aberdeen by organising some kind of a meetup. I
organised 2 relatively well attended meetups in the pub and towards
the end of the year, got into bed with Peacock Visual Arts and
co-organised the Open Knowledge Network. This now runs monthly.