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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Tue, 07 Nov 2017

Squarespace can be your online store and website

When Dan Benjamin mentioned that his Unwound watch podcast co-host Seth Roberts' website for his Hub City Vintage business is now running on Squarespace, a bell went off for me.

Not that there's anything wrong with Shopify, but it's nice to know that there's an alternative for the small (or maybe not-so-small) business to both have a website and offer fully integrated e-commerce for a reasonable monthly fee and without a lot of development cost and hassles.

Many say Shopify is a better choice, but if you want to keep it simple, Squarespace is a viable option.

Sat, 04 Nov 2017

Top 8 Van Halen songs

The top 8 Van Halen songs:

  1. (tie) Runnin' With the Devil
  2. (tie) Jump
  3. You Really Got Me
  4. Ain't Talking 'Bout Love
  5. Panama
  6. Dance the Night Away
  7. Hot for Teacher
  8. Beautiful Girls
Mon, 30 Oct 2017

IFTTT should send this post

This is not part of the /updates directory, and IFTTT should send it to Twitter.

Wed, 25 Oct 2017

Automatic social posts - the last mile

The last piece missing from the Blog Poster app is the ability to post directly to Twitter and eliminate the dependency on third-party services like dlvr.it and IFTTT. Shouldn't be too hard.