Since I installed the JDK instead of the JRE, I didn't know if automatic Java updates would come at all and would cover the development portion of the tools.

I got the update today, and as you can see from the image above of my Windows command line, all is updated.

I'm actually doing it. I'm writing a blog-posting program that will take an http link, extract the remote page's title and create a social-media-style blog post (title, body text and link) that can be easily uploaded to my flat-file blogging system's server.

The idea is to make it as easy to post a "social"-style update to my own blog as it is to post to Twitter (or Facebook or Google+).

(I use IFTTT -- and formerly dlvr.it -- to post these social entries on Twitter, but I could see this program taking over that task as well.)

Back to my application. I could have gone several different ways from a conceptual standpoint.

• I could have done this idea as a web app, but in order to get the files to upload to the blog, I'd either have to write a server component on that side, or create a backend service -- with some measure of security -- to handle the upload (I'm using FTP, but it doesn't have to be that).

• I thought about a desktop GUI. I want this to be a true cross-platform app. I seriously considered using the now-ancient Tk framework with Ruby. I less-seriously considered Java FX, though I did successfully hack together code to upload via FTP using Java. (At least it was a worthwhile programming exercise.) I could have gone with QT. Maybe I could have done the whole thing with QML.

I'm not ruling out any of these GUI solutions, but I needed to start coding, and the easiest, quickest thing for me to do (or so I thought) is a menu-driven console app. I could have gone with Java, JavaScript, Ruby, even Perl. I did tests of various components in three of those languages.

I'm writing the app for the console with an eye toward re-using the code in a future GUI app, and for that reason maybe I should have used JavaScript.

But I really wanted to use Ruby. I'm trying to grasp object-orientated programming, and there is a whole lot of web-based help for Ruby programmers that often acknowledges that there are beginners out there who need a helping hand.

And I really would love to eventually port this code to Tk, or even as a Sinatra or Rails app. I should want to do it in JavaScript. But Ruby is so friendly, and it's made for use in the console.

So I'm writing it in Ruby. And I have some 190 lines of code that do the following:

• Display a menu of tasks and wait for input
• When a URL is entered, grab the HTML title
• Create a simple document with a title and text derived from the remote HTML title
• Add a Markdown-formatted link back to the original HTML page
• Save all as a text file with an auto-generated file name incorporating the current date and text derived from the title
• Allow user to enter different text for the title or body
• Let user choose not to include the source site's URL
• Save all to a text file
• Upload to website via FTP and "tell" blog to index the new entry

I have all of these features working, and while the app is very far from perfect, it is functional. The code isn't ready for public consumption -- it needs lots of cleanup before I publish it, and it's really meant more for Ode users and blogs that work in a similar way (files are uploaded to a server, from which the blog software renders them for the reader) than it is for flat-file systems such as Hugo, where a dedicated program builds the blog locally and sends files on their way, but the concepts and code used in this app can certainly be modified for that workflow -- and I'm not at all above doing that in the future.

Aside from adding more features, primarily the ability to edit elements instead of re-typing them (maybe by invoking the vi editor), I want to make the code more modular. Right how it's a huge procedural hack, and modularity (and object orientation) will make it cleaner and more flexible. That's the idea anyway.

Before that I need to clean up the configuration, which is all over the place.

Still, I wanted to make an app, I used the skills I had (and Googled and read plenty), and now I have something that works, however ugly it may look on the back end.

From The Meteor Chef:

• Building a Twitter clone with Meteor: Part One

• Building a Twitter clone with Meteor: Part Two

• Building a Twitter clone with Meteor: Part Three

I want to create a program that helps me quickly write up a blog post -- especially a "social" blog post based on a link -- and upload that post as a file to a flat-file-driven blogging system.

In case it isn't obvious, I'm not a professional developer. The whole "hey, let's learn to code just because" thing doesn't work so well for me. Tutorials aren't my thing. I need a project. Then I'm compelled to learn what I need to make that project happen, at least in some fashion. The first thing to do is come up with something doable and not so difficult that I can't even get close.

Hence my idea: a flat-file blog posting machine. It's not too complicated. It would be geared mostly for "social" posts, which I stash in a dedicated category directory-driven category on my blog and let IFTTT (and formerly dlvr.it scrape and then send to Twitter. Why do I do this? Because I feel better about "giving" Twitter my free content to promote their business when I have that same content on my website that is wholly owned and operated by me and not them.

Back to the program: I want to be able to enter a URL from a post/story/page that interests me into a box and then have that box generate a title, post body, file name and actual file with the ability to make changes in any of these fields -- all with as little required input from me as a "regular" Twitter post. The program would then upload the file it creates to my web server, also taking care of whatever back-end housekeeping is needed to make that post appear on the blog. And if I could figure out the Twitter API, I could also trigger the social post itself and eliminate the need for IFTTT or dlvr.it.

Read the rest of this post

I just heard about "The JavaScript Way," a book by http://www.bpesquet.com/ that is https://github.com/bpesquet/thejsway/ and a minimum of https://leanpub.com/thejsway.

It bills itself as beginner-friendly yet written to ES2015 standards. I took a quick look, and so far I like it.