A year after initially intended, I’ve moved to TechMight hosting and cancelled my hosting arrangement with MidPhase. I tried to do this move a year ago, but TechMight wasn’t extremely well set up at that point.
The main reasons for the switch are:
- TechMight is run by my old online friend.
- I’ve been paying for quite a long time now for part of a TechMight-run server for Tremulous.
- TechMight is affiliated with my good friends at The Mercenaries Guild (mercenariesguild.net)
- I’m not paying anything extra to have web hosting there while my requirements are low, so I’m in effect saving ~100$/year by not having extra external hosting.
- I know the “staff” so I get good service + ssh + whatever else.
- My requirements aren’t praticularly giant in a lot of areas, so I don’t need the high amount of bandwidth/space that I was being given at MidPhase, but I do like having SSH access and the ability to run some cool Django / RoR code on it eventually.
- It was extremely easy to switch, because MidPhase and TechMight both have CPanel. CPanel supports doing full backup/restore, so a TechMight techie just transfered the whole thing for me in about 15 minutes. Then I just had to change the DNS and victory was mine.
Anyway, so for me, TechMight made a lot of sense. More than a for a lot of people, probably. However, as a plug for my group/friends, TechMight at the moment is a fairly small not-yet-officially-running operation offering high quality hosting to those that know about it. Because the team is small with few customers, the support is high quality and willing to accomodate. If you’re looking for some off-beat probably cheaper than normal, high quality hosting supported by TechMight and The Mercenaries Guild (we have some smart people there), then I do recommend this.
Oh, also. To my surprise, TechMight e-mailed me to say that some of my software (web software) is outdated (I guess it’s an automated message) . MidPhase never did that — anyway, so I guess I’ll be making a stab at upgrading things later and hope it all goes smoothly!
There is a nice plugin that I found recently that lets me write blog posts in VIM and post them right away. I think it’s rather well done and recommend it (assuming this blog gets posted).
This plugin is called “vimblog,” but it only actually works for WordPress out of the box. I’m not really going to beat a dead horse with as stick here, though, because the author of the plugin already has installation instructions and some images.
Installation Instructions / Main Page
However, he didn’t really put up usage instructions. It’s easy enough, though, and I found some information in the source code (and cleaned it up a bit):
Usage for deleting a post:
:Blog del id
Usage for saving a draft of a post:
:Blog draft
Usage for Publishing a post:
:Blog publish
Usage for getting the list of Categories:
:Blog cl
Usage for Get Post [id]:
:Blog gp id
Usage for New Post:
:Blog np
Usage for Recent [x] Posts (defaults to last 10):
:Blog rp [x]
Usage is :Blog option [arg]
switches:
- rp [x] => show recent [x] posts
- gp id => get post with identification id
- np => create a new post
- publish => publish an edited/new post
- draft => save edited/new post as draft
- gc => get the list of categories
- del id => delete post with identification
It has some nice features, as you can see:
- Listing categories / old blog posts
- Has some nice information at the top of the page you’re editing (see below)
- Handles categories and just about everything you’d want
When working with a blog post, it has information like this:
Post : [54]
Title : Using VIM to Blog (WordPress)
Date : 04/03/2008 15:10:46 GMT
Link : http://garoth.com/?p=54
Permalink:
Author : 1
Comments : 1
Pings : 1
Categs : Website
Which is actually very nice and handy, I think.
I just started using it, but it seems to have few small flaws:
- No way to add categories? (Of course, you could log in to do this.)
- Syntax highlighting seems to get messed up a bit. (Fixable. There is a Markdown (see below) syntax file around.)
- No way to get back to a draft? (Don’t use this feature and just save your posts to your computer.)
Another thing I should mention: using this kind of thing with Vim is great especially if you have markdown installed on your website 
. Markdown simplifies post syntax for doing things like lists, etc. It’s meant to be more human-readable, and even people who have never seen it before should be able to understand what it will do.
Anyway, I’m pretty happy with this stuff.
Hello.
Long story short, I was hacked. Some news highlights:
- Forestofthought.com was down because it was redirecting to some spam site.
- Someone set up a bank phishing site in the backpages. I was notified by a kind passerby, Ken.
- My IP was blacklisted by usfamily.com because the server was mailing spam to everyone. News to me.
- My host suspended service for about half a day until I explained what was going on.
- My IP has been now greylisted. Not on the whitelist because the vulnerabilities may still exist.
- I’m not posting much because I’m in the progress of moving to a new VPS hosted by The Mercenaries
- Plutocracy is still coming along, don’t worry. I have some cool new developments to report when everything settles down (Risujin’s doing).
- Started working out. See sidebar.
Anyway, thanks. I may be too lazy to transfer this post to the new host. Hopefully everything works out.
NOTE TO YOU STUMBLERS: The most worthwhile thing I have to show on this site is Plutocracy, the game we’re building. Click the link on the sidebar for information about it.
Thanks to a flood of hits due to Stumble Upon and my link to one of my articles on someone else’s blog, I have suddenly come to the realization that my blog is ugly and needs fixing. I have made a number of improvements, and that number is X. Here is a list of what I’ve changed:
- Removed flow layout: now images will take up full width no matter what and not try to incorrectly wrap text around them, or wrap themselves around each other.
- Removed automatic indentation at the starts of paragraphs. It mostly just destroyed the formatting because of my blog writing style.
- Removed “Archives” which sorted blog posts by date. Why the heck would anyone ever use that? Does someone visit one day and think, “Hmm… I wonder what he wrote in… August 2007!”? I doubt it.
- Removed “Metadata” and “Blogroll.” I don’t think people care too much if my blog is valid XHTML or not, and I never use the “Admin” link anyway.
- Changed Cat’s caption.
- Added a project listing to the sidebar.
- Installed PHP Markdown Extras to make my blog formatting easier Well, anyway, things should look better now. A known bug that I’m too lazy to fix is that smilies, treated as images, now take up full lines. Oh well.
- EDIT: With David Sev’s help, wrote some scripts that will make fancy thumbnails. All thumbnails on the site have been altered to use this.
About PHP Markdown: it’s a plugin for wordpress that converts easy syntax into HTML for webpage rendering. For example, surrounding a word with asterisks leads to this result. Double asterisks do this. It also makes doing lists and things easier. I can now also block quote. The syntax is a lot like a wiki.
Cheers.
As it happens, a good friend of mine runs noticiaslinux.com.br. He’s currently doing some work on it and didn’t mind if I came up with a variation on the current design. The site actually has quite a few visitors and subscribers. I’ve done a quick first draft that has only minor layout improvements and not real art.
Grab the SVG source from http://garoth.com/Images/BlogImages/noticiaslinux.svg.
Anyway, I’m certainly willing to polish up my idea and make it really shine. Hope you like it. Sorry that I didn’t end up having as much time as I hoped to work on it tonight.
Short note about the website’s growth Read the rest of this entry »
One website that I have always admired a lot is Magnatune.com. They strive to improve the grim situation that is the result of the music industry vs music pirates. What Magnatune has done is created a music download service that just simply does not suck.
Some things I hate about current/conventional music download services are: First of all, you almost always have to register and create a login. Most often, this is simply not what I want to do. I don’t care about them, I don’t care about their propaganda, and I don’t want them to track me or or send me stupid newsletters. Second of all, formats. For some reason, most of the Internet has standardized on mp3. Not only is this not a perfect format, it is also actually not free. The only reason it seems free is that every time that Microsoft sells you a copy of Windows, they charge you an extra 3 dollars for the mp3 decoder licence that they have to buy. This is garbage. Most downloading sites let get mp3s or, even worse, one of formats Apple tends to use. I am outraged about this. Finally, legal issues. The only decent popular music downloading website these days is the one that Amazon runs. The issue there is that Amazon has kindly restricted their pretty good service to USA only. This may be a temporary situation, but, obviously, it sucks for me. The other part of legal issues is DRM. Digital Rights Management. Ie: punishing people for downloading their music legally. It prevents you from copying your music files and sometimes even moving them to your music playing devices.
Anyway, amongst all these landmines and amongst all this strife, somehow, a decent service did arise. Magnatune. They are not evil. Seriously. Here is the general scoop: First of all, they let you listen to full previews of all their music. Not just select songs, not just clips, not even just once. Full songs, whenever you want, streamed to you via the Internet. Second of all, they give you about 7 formats to pick from when downloading music. Of course, you can’t download the music without paying. They are not evil, but they are a legal service and are running a legitimate business. Finally, not only do they not have DRM, they encourage you to to spread the music you buy from them, but ask you to not give it to more than 3 people. This, I think, is reasonable.
What is the catch? They don’t have popular artists. Popular artists, most likely, would not accept the terms under which Magnatune operates. However, not popular does not mean bad! The music that comes from there is actually pretty high quality. Don’t believe me? Well, listening is free, so go check it out.
Anyway, I like how Magnatune operates. Rather than beating you with a baton, they give you a free service, and then ask for, more or less, a donation. When buying their music, you get some options. You can request that they send you a CD, or you can just download their files. Furthermore, you pick how much you want to pay for the music, with a bottom limit of 5$. You may recall that Radiohead did something similar not long ago, with tremendous profit. It seems that if you give people something for free, they are willing to give you something back. Anyway, your money is then split between the artist and the website, and all are happy. I, personally, am gleeful in supporting such a correctly-minded service. If all companies on the planet worked under this kind of mentality, this would be a better planet.
I’m posting this message now, despite having known about Magnatune for a long time. The reason for that is that I finally became un-lazy and bought something from them. I meant to buy their Brad Sucks album earlier, but as it happens, I actually got to see him live in Waterloo, Canada. Instead, though, I bought Ammonite’s CD, which is called Reconnection. Here is an outline of the purchasing process (very painless): You navigate to the artist, select a CD, and hit the “BUY” link. They make you fill out the least amount of information possible, which amounts to how much you’re paying, your credit card number (PayPal works too), your name and your e-mail. Then, they give you a link where to download your music, and a username/password that can be used to do so. (They also mirror all this info in an e-mail they send you for your records and to pass on to friends.) Go, download, done. No obligations, no registrations, no newsletter spam if you opt out. Ironically, this is actually the kind of website that I would like to have an account on… oh well 
Anyway, as a brief mention, Ammonite is an electronic/soothing artist with an angelic female singer. I like it, but I listen to rather a wide range of music.
Have a good time.
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