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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.

Mon, 12 Oct 2015

I removed the social-sharing buttons from this blog

I just removed the social-sharing buttons for Google Plus and Twitter from this site.

Even though almost every http request for content on this Ode-powered blog is done via Perl CGI on shared hosting, the site is extremely quick.

And these two social-sharing buttons, which appear on every entry, were really slowing things down. (Instead of a third-party social-button service, I used embed code provided by Google and Twitter, respectively).

The question/dilemma I face: Is the reduced "performance"/speed of the site a fair tradeoff for what the social buttons have to offer?

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Fri, 10 Jul 2015

Using dlvr.it to split my regular and 'social' posts out of Ode

I've been playing with the idea of using Ode as both a traditional blogging system as well as a social-media platform generating exactly the kinds of posts that I normally would originate on sites like Twitter.

With the help of dlvr.it, this is entirely possible not just with Ode but pretty much any blogging platform.

The key to this concept is that my social-media updates should originate on my system, where they will continue to live. They are mine. Twitter will have a copy, but I will have the "original."

And now I can tell you how easy it is to do this. And it doesn't just work for Ode but can be done on any blogging platform (including WordPress) that allows you to post to categories (or directories or folders) and tap into RSS for that specific category (or directory or folder).

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Tue, 16 Dec 2014

This is an Ode Markdown formatting test

This paragraph is set off with tabs and has a Markdown-generated link:

This is my Ode site, [which lives here](http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog).

This paragraph uses "blockquote" HTML tagging and an HTML link:

This is my Ode site, which lives here.

This paragraph is set off with tabs and has an HTML-tagged link:

This is my Ode site, <a href="http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog">which lives here</a>.

None of this text uses the "code" tag.

So my question is, how do you call "blockquote" without "code" in Markdown?

Later: I have the answer. Set off every line with the > character:

> This text will be set off in blockquote style.

With the proper Markdown, this becomes:

This text will be set off in blockquote style.