Brain on Fire » Blog Tim McCormack, distilled

I am writing a web app that hides much of its inner workings, as any good web app should. (Why? future-proofing, security, simplicity of user experience, etc.) I chose to route all requests that involve server-side scripting through a single file, capture.php. But somewhere along the way, form POSTs stopped working! Why?

Update: I haven't really been using this, since the bandwidth required is a bit... excessive. I think I'll stick to duplicity + external hard drive.

Duplicity is a backup program that only backs up the files (and parts of files) that have been modified since the last backup. Built on FLOSS (rsync, GnuPG, tar, and rdiff), it allows efficient, locally encrypted, remote backups.

Amazon S3 is a web service that provides cheap, distributed, redundant, web-accessible storage. S3 currently charges only $0.15 per GB-month storage and $0.10 per GB upload. The API is based on HTTP requests such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.

The following is a description of how I made use of these to back up my laptop, which runs Ubuntu Feisty Fawn.

The existing comment-tracking systems that I know of just aren't enough. CoComment is buggy and fails to properly parse out comments for a number of blogs, and is missing a number of important features. (Float unread to top of list, for example, or track a URL without visiting it.) Co.mments.com has a much nicer interface and tracks better, but lacks a Firefox extension and some of the advanced features of CoComment.

Rather than simply whining about the lack of excellent trackers, I want to help the existing ones improve. Here I present most of algorithm to parse out comments from an unfamiliar blog template.

When Firefox updates to a new version, some extensions are disabled. However, you can easily edit the extensions to make Firefox re-enable them -- no particular expertise required.

When I'm making a web page at home on my laptop (a Linux machine), I test it on Firefox and IE 7. (I only test on IE7 now, because it will be distributed to Windows users as a high-priority update.) Unfortunately, IE 7 will not install under Wine, which is annoying because that's how I run Windows programs on my Linux machine. However, there is a way to get the layout engine of IE 7 working under Wine -- and that's all I need.