fettig.net

I have a growing interest in del.icio.us. An increasing number of people are using it (based on my referrer logs), and John Udell in particular seems to be a fan. Now, that may be a passing fad: it seems many web-community-social-networking-type sites come on the scene, build up a fan base, and then fade. But since the goal of Hep is to let everything on the internet talk to everything else, I feel like I need to be up on the services people are using.

For a while now I’ve been meaning to set up a link blog (similar to those of Kottke, Les Orchard, Simon Willison, etc.). Initially, I planned on simply creating another MT weblog to manage it. This would have gone along with my DYI sensibilites. I manage my own web server, mail server, spam filtering, subversion repository, weblog software, and backups. I enjoy learning how to set these things up, and I like having control over my systems. But with all the “web as platform” talk going around, I’ve been thinking that maybe I should relax a little and take more advantage of the interesting free services available.

So today I created a del.icio.us account, added a couple of test bookmarks… and just like that the del.icio.us server slowed to a crawl, and eventually stopped working altogether. Four hours later, it’s still not back up (Update: I checked again after posting this, and it’s back). Bad timing on my part, I’m sure, but it was a reminder of the perils of keeping my data in other people’s systems.

I’m not giving up on del.icio.us (it’s still in alpha, after all), and I’m still planning to use it to manage my links (as long as these outages don’t happen regularly). But having this experience made me think more about the software-vs.-service decision. There are obviously pros and cons to managing your own software vs. using a service. I like running my own software, and that preference has been reflected in my decision to develop Hep as a user-installable application. But Hep could just as easily be an online service, and some people would probably prefer that. Hmm.

I’ve started playing with Flickr this week. They have a new set of
APIs, which I’m using to add Flickr support for Yarn. And that in turn
is giving me a chance to add support for attachments to the Message class.

I really need to write up some docs for Yarn, because there are so many
protocols and formats and APIs I’d like to get in there, and I could use
some help.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

My next major initiative for Hep is building some native install
packages.  I want to have binary installs for Debian, Windows, and OS
X, at a minimum - Debian and OS X because that’s what the majority of
Python/Twisted/RSS/Atom/Weblog developers seem to be using, and Windows
because, well, it’s Windows.  (Users of RPM-based Linux distros: I care
about you, but I have to draw the line somewhere, and all this
packaging work is hard.  More on that in a minute).

I’m focusing on packaging because I want more people to try out Hep,
and right now it’s pretty hard to get running if you’re not already
familiar with Twisted’s mktap, twistd, and friends.  I want it to be
possible to ‘apt-get install hep’, (or run an installer) and have a
working Hep installation. 

At this point I should mention that the Windows installer for Hep 0.6
was broken (thanks to John Kastler
for bringing this to my attention), so I’ve taken it down for now. 
I’ll have a new installer up soon; for now, savvy Windows Python users
can install the tarball.

Anyway, I’m working on putting together these native packages, and it’s
turning out to be a lot of work.  I suppose this shouldn’t be a
suprise; Fred Brooks href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%229+times+the+effort%22">famously
said that developing a packaged, documented software system was up
to 9 times as much work as simply creating software that worked for
your own purposes.  That’s certainly true in this case. 

Here’s the minimum you need to know to develop a cross-platform
application in Python:

• Python

And here’s the minimum you need to know to distribute native standalone
packages for Debian, OS X, and Windows:

• Python Distutils
• make
• how to make a
  Debian Package
• href="http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/repository-howto/repository-howto.html">how
  to set up an Apt repository
• href="http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/SoftwareDistribution/index.html">OS
  X Package Maker
• Py2Exe
• InnoSetup

That second list represents something like a whole day’s worth of
reading just to get started, followed by actually figuring out how to
use the tools in question, each of which includes at least one special
file format/configuration language.  So I’m a little overwhelmed at the
moment.  But I’ve begun the process.  First up: debs.  Stay tuned.

Jason Kottke on
connecting web sites and services:

I should mention that as part of reworking the site I spent some time
investigating Wordpress.  I have a
WordPress weblog set up on my laptop for Hep testing, and I like the
admin interface a lot.  Plus, I’ve been reading href="http://photomatt.net/">PhotoMatt lately… and, let’s face
it, WP is what all the cool kids are using (I’m resisting the
temptation to make each word of “all the cool kids are using” link to a
different cool WP-powered weblog).

I actually got to the point of having all my Movable Type entries
imported, and custom templates created to make it work the way I
wanted.  But when it came time to make the switch, I got cold feet.  I
run fettig.net on a tummy.net
virtual server, which (while wonderful and inexpensive) is a little
short in the memory department, and I have lots of things running on
it.  So I have to keep the overhead of my site down to a minumum.  The
thought of firing up PHP and MySQL for every page load, especially my
RSS feed, seems like a huge waste of resources.

I tried the staticize
plugin, and while that did improve things, it still felt noticably
slower than with static HTML pages.  At that point I almost started
working on a new wordpress plugin that generated PHP-less static output
(I think you could use mod_rewrite and wordpress to create a good href="http://philringnalda.com/blog/2002/11/halfbaked_and_a_little_fried.php">half-baked
system), but I realized that would take a bunch of time and not give me
any advantages over my current setup with Movable Type.  So I’m
sticking with MT for now.

My fettig.net redesign is mostly complete.  I’ve got a new stylesheet
applied to all pages except the search
page (which I’m neglecting until I have time to give it some
attention).

The biggest change is that I’ve made the site less weblog-centric.  For
the past three years I’ve had my weblog as the home page of fettig.net,
because there wasn’t much else to see here.  Now I’m anticipating (and
hoping) that there will be more visitors coming specifically to check
out Hep, who may or may not be interested in the weblog.  So I’ve
demoted the weblog to a /weblog folder.

Since the last redesign I’ve been managing the whole site in Movable
Type, but now I’m also writing some static HTML files and Wiki pages. 
So I tried to build a stylesheet that would make it easy to put a
unified look on pages without a lot of markup.  It’s working really
well so far - it only took about half an hour to write a PmWiki skin
that worked with the rest of the site.

Speaking of which, I have a Wiki
now.  I’m planning to use it for Hep documentation, and maybe other
things.  Many thanks to metafeather, who href="http://www.fettig.net/weblog/2004/08/where_to_wiki#comments">suggested
PmWiki.  It’s exactly what I was looking for: super easy to set up,
support for sub-sections, easily modified templates.

If you read this weblog through an RSS reader, drop by href="http://fettig.net/">fettig.net and take a look around. (And
don’t forget to force-reload to pick up the latest stylesheet.) 
Comments welcome!

I’m making some changes to fettig.net, starting tonight. I’ll try not to break anything, but there may be some downtime here and there.

So it’s been five days since I announced Hep 0.6 and wrote “More on this tomorrow”. How time flies. I’ve lapsed into a habit of not updating this weblog. Time to start it up again!

A lot of the Hep-related information I need to write about doesn’t feel like a good fit for this weblog, though - it’s not announcements as much as documentation. I think it may be time to start a Hep Wiki. A question, though, for those of you with Wiki experience: Is it better to have a single wiki, which mixes Hep-related pages with all kinds of other things, or is it better to have dedicated Wikis for each project? I’m leaning toward the single Wiki at the moment, as it would facilitate linking between projects, but I’d be interested to hear about your experiences.

I’ve released a new Hep build, version 0.6 (and corresponding update to
Yarn).  Changes in this release:

• SMTP support! (It’s what I’m using to post this message).
• Much nicer web interface
• Runs on standard ports by default (except web server)
• Bug fixes

I’ve posted some screenshots on href="http://www.fettig.net/projects/hep/">the project page.  If
you haven’t tried Hep yet, take a look - hopefully the pictures will
give you an idea of what you’re missing.

More on this tomorrow, right now I’ve got to go to bed.