the single worst thing about identi.ca

I've been a passionate and regular user of identi.ca since it launched a year ago.

One of the best things IMHO about identi.ca is the community.

Unsurprisingly, the identi.ca community includes a lot of people who use, develop and evangelise about open source software. Some are advocates, some are confirmed evangelists and a small but committed element are the dreaded, bearded, 'not so secret' freedom police.

The 'not so secret' freedom police stalk the corridors looking for any mention of the following keywords:

• Google - Evil
• Apple/iPhone/ITouch - Evil
• Microsoft - Evil.
• Oracle Corporation (the lovely people who happen to pay my wages) - Evil.
• Any proprietary software service that isn't open and free (FreidnFeed, Facebook, Twtter, Posterous, Tumblr et al) - Evil.

Now that's all fine. I'm all for a little but of evangelism myself and have been guilty in my time of bordering on the 'not so secret' evangelism police for Habari and Disqus. I also love a little bit of playground banter to lighten up the mornings.

With all this evangelism and advocacy, I assumed that most of these people would be active developers on the Laconi.ca code base. Imagine my surprise when I signed up to the Laconi.ca development mailing list and scanned the Laconica source code repository. If you exclude the core team of Evan and the ControlYourself team, you can count the number of active Laconi.ca develoeprs on the fingers of two hands.

Still, you don't have to hack code in order to contribute. I don't although I try to contribute in other ways like logging bugs and spreading the word about identi.ca.

My next surprise came when I noted that a lot of open source advocates (mostly the bearded ones) also make use of the freedom hating Twitter - because 'my community is over there'. So, no problem with hypocrisy - although I no longer use Twitter, I am guilty of it myself.

So, to all the open source, freedom loving, bearded, Stasi, evangelistas, 'not so secret' police out there who immediately pounce whenever I choose to comment or evaluate services like Disqus, Tumblr, FriendFeed and even Google or whenever I dare to mention paying $2.79 for an application for my iTouch or worse, my evil borg employer - don't force me to come looking for your Twitter account because I suspect I could find it within 47 seconds,

Just look inwardly.

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A Quick and Easy Way to Back Up Posterous with Automator

One of the concerns I had with using Posterous for my blog was ensuring I had my own backup of my posts given the company is still in start-up mode and the content is hosted on their servers.  Luckily, they have an API, and if you are a Mac user it is very easy to use Automator to create a daily backup of your content.  You can set this up in about five to ten minutes and while it could be more sophisticated (see my comments at the end of this post), this probably works for a majority of the use cases.

Here's how it works:

1) Get the content from Posterous

Posterous has a simple API for reading posts from their service.  The format of the request is http://posterous.com/api/readposts?hostname=foobar.  This request will return an XML document of your 10 most recent posts.  (Note: there is a parameter called num_posts that will let you specify up to the last 50 posts).  This is easy for Automator to grab.

First, you need to create a "Get Specified URLs" action with the URL of your site, and then save the results via a "Download URLs" action to a folder of your choice.  In my example below, I've created a folder called "Posterous Backups":

2) Rename the file

If you stop here, Automator will save a file called readposts in your specified folder.  That's fine, but if you run this on consecutive days, it will overwrite the file with the same name and you will have no historical record.  Here's how you create a file that is named after the date it is saved.

The first "Rename Finder Actions" action renames readpost to file name of "YYYYMMDD-readposts".  I've chosen this format as that is how I prefer to name files.  However this action is flexible and you can customize this to whatever is best for you.  The second "Rename Finder Actions" setting just adds .xml as a file suffix.  Therefore if we ran this today (June 29, 2009), the filename would be "20090629-readposts.xml".

The last action is really for Growl users only.  It adds a Growl notification at the end so I know when the action has been completed.

That's it.  You just backed up your Posterous blog.  You can run this manually, or I'd suggest you can save it as an Automator application and schedule the action to run daily using iCal.

What are the shortcomings of this solution?  A couple:

• If you have more than 50 posts, it does not do a "full backup" of your posts each day.  Why does this matter?  If you have new comments or make any edits to posts that are greater than the last 50, you would potentially lose the comments and changes.  The good news however is the Posterous API supports pagination so you could probably design a smarter workflow to accommodate this.
• This workflow doesn't back up any media that is saved directly on Posterous servers.  I believe some media -- pictures in particular -- are hosted on Posterous depending on the method you use to post to the blog.
• If you had to "restore" from this backup and you had more than 50 posts, you would have to chain multiple files together manually to restore all of the content.

With all of that said, this is a good way to get you started backing up Posterous quickly.  I am sure we can make this workflow even "smarter" and other folks will be will be coming up with more sophisticated backup solutions for Posterous soon enough, but it's a good start.

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Christopher Baker

   

Click here to download:

Christopher_Baker.zip (73 KB)

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Tugging at emotional heartstrings: Don't go! All your friends will miss you if you deactivate from Facebook.

via collison.ie

Knowing Facebook, they must have AB tested this and found it to be massively effective. Lets show photos of the opposite gender, and tell you that they will miss you. *tears*

Hat tip Patrick Collison -- wow, what a great find. This is remarkable.

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Asaekkiga - Hilarious Korean comic strips translated

Someone has started offering translations of Asaekkiga comics, a series of Korean comics that have become popular online recently. This is by no means the funniest one of them all, but it's the one most people outside of Korean culture will get.

via booru.nanochan.org

Someone has started offering translations of Asaekkiga comics, a series of Korean comics that have become popular online recently. This is by no means the funniest one of them all, but it's the one most people outside of Korean culture will get.

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The book everybody needs to read

Bill Bryson's "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" is one of those all encompassing books that anyone who reads will have a chance to learn something new.
For around $12 you can go on a trip through the ages and the many discoveries throughout. The errata in the edition I had were minor, and have since been fixed. All in all a much better researched book than some other book about how Chinese sailors circumnavigated the globe 600+ years ago

Sent from my iPhone

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Posterous vs. Tumblr: A Head to Head

A friend of mine just called to let me know that I'm in Mashable's article about Posterous vs. Tumblr. I started using Posterous a year ago now. It's the one place where I post my work and nothing else. I enjoy the email features, tagging, autoposting to other networks, Google Analytics, and more. Overall, I give Posterous an A+ for new feature development and for the willingness to listen to the users who give it life. In this article I happened to be the latest post on Jennifer's Posterous subscription page when she took a screen capture of one of my posts. On purpose or not, Pretty cool. :) Thanks.

   

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