I'm constantly looking at situations where a bevy of services like Ping.fm, dlvr.it, Hootsuite, Shoutlet, RSS Graffiti and who knows what else are sending updates to various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca and Diaspora.

And often the social networks themselves are interconnected and exchanging feeds and posts.

It can get confusing.

The primary purpose of this post is to see if I've successfully untangled things for this particular blog.

I'm always wondering about people who forget to spring forward or fall back when daylight saving time begins or ends.

Now I'm one of them.

I have a 10 a.m. conference call today, and looking at the clock on my GNOME desktop in Debian Squeeze, my operating system on this laptop since late 2010, I dial into the call.

There's nobody there.

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The missing piece from my OwnCloud installation has been a secure connection over SSL, which means an encrypted session over the Web.

I finally figured out how to use the shared SSL certificate from my hosting provide, Hostgator. Here are the instructions for all Hostgator shared-hosting users who want an https:// connection to their site(s).

I set up the secure https:// connection in my browser bookmarks and in my WebDAV configuration. (Here's how to set up WebDAV for OwnCloud from the project's how-to pages.)

Now I'm a lot more confident in using OwnCloud as my own personal document/file access/sharing service knowing that my data isn't being sent in the clear.

To know Markdown is to love it.

Markdown is baked into Ode and makes writing things tour need to end up as HTML faster, easier, less broken and nicer to read on the back end, too.

When HTML was created in the early 1990s, it was envisioned (in my hazy opinion) as something that would be applied to text by a computer program, not laboriously typed out (and inevitably messed up).

But type it out we do. Or at least I do. All (the live-long) day.

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I've been with Hostgator for a few years now. I have a shared-hosting account that I use to run a few small web sites and experiment with anything for which I need access to an Apache web server.

The experience has been a good one. The service is extremely solid, the Cpanel interface helpful, and overall it's been easier to deploy services on Hostgator than on the other servers and shared-hosting services I've used.

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In order to figure out exactly how to use the shared SSL certificate that Hostgator provides to non-static-IP users of its shared-hosting service to get an https:// connection, begin here to figure out the right URL (it's different than your usual one).

I've been trying to make this work on the Ode site in my account for months without success. My problem was that I could only get the SSL to "stick" in the "root" portions of the file hierarchy where my Ode site lives, not deeper in the directories where I access Ode -- both normally and with EditEdit.

I finally figured out what I was doing wrong: Hostgator's shared SSL doesn't work with .htaccess redirects (which I use on this Ode site).

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I haven't distro-hopped in quite awhile. I lost my taste for it.

Once I started really using Linux and BSD to do my work, I needed a stable system that had all the applications I needed with all the data in the right places and formats. Everything needs to work. All the time.

That has generally meant, for me anyway, running Debian Stable. I've used Debian Squeeze on my main "production" laptop since late 2010.

About a year before that, I spent six months running OpenBSD 4.4 as my main OS when I couldn't figure out how to get the CD drive to work in an old laptop. OpenBSD was the only system I could install from a floppy disk. I learned a whole lot in those six months and was very productive.

Since then I've pretty much stuck with Linux. Almost exclusively with Debian.

I did some FreeBSD tests. I check in on OpenBSD via live images every once in a while. But I haven't actually installed anything other than Debian over the past year and an half.

Until now.

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I'm still playing with OwnCloud.

My big idea was running it on http://devio.us, since this excellent OpenBSD shell/webspace provider supports PHP and offers SSL connections (the latter of which will make me much more comfortable using OwnCloud).

However, it turns out that OwnCloud requires the PHP Zip extension (or is it Zip PHP extension?), and Devio.us doesn't offer it.

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I didn't think installing ownCloud would be so easy, but it was.

My continuing reliance on Google Docs, which is cheerfully offered up for free in exchange for Google's searching through your files and marketing to you based on what it finds, plus the plethora of similar privacy-sapping services, has me very interested in personal-cloud services such as ownCloud and the early-days Freedom Box project. The Freedom Box will happen eventually.

OwnCloud is here now, and while there is certainly a commercial component to the whole thing, it is basically a free software project with code that anybody can download and use.

And so I did.

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Why would I do such a thing -- go back to Icedove (aka the Mozilla-coded Thunderbird e-mail client) version 3.0.11, which shipped with the now-aging Debian Squeeze, after months of using version 5.0 from the Debian Mozilla team APT archive?

A number of things -- some pertaining only to me and my workflow, others more general -- made me revert to the older Icedove on my main Debian Squeeze laptop.

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