Tag: ruby

I’ve made a significant update to my app Post to Wordpress for Ulysses today.

I’ve improved it so that there’s no need to edit the Automator app or need two parts (app & code file) for everything to work. The blog information (user name, password, URL, and SSL preference) is now stored in a separate file. Also, all the posting code is now inside the app, and the user doesn’t need to create a ~/bin folder to keep the Ruby code file in.

Note: there is now a GitHub repository for this project. Get the latest code there, including a downloadable Automator app 

After sleeping on this I decided there were a few things I could do better. Having to put raw source in the document was annoying. I looked into several ways to do this, but found Ulysses had the answer.

Ulysses does a lot of things right as a writing tool. But it’s not designed to be a HTML or Markdown editor. It’s also not able to post directly to a blog.

But its export friendly nature makes it easy to build helper apps. So I wrote a Ruby script that will post to a WordPress blog. It’s also fast. It usually takes less than 5 seconds. That’s faster than the WordPress post editor loading time.

In an wonderful post, the author John Scalzi produced twelve standard responses to online stupidity. The list seems complete and covers most cases.

The list:

I saw on Twitter than someone had made a random response generating page. I decided that a local version was also in order.

The project is a ruby script that can be run from the command line. It also contains a MacOS X workflow file that can be installed as a system service.

In my continuing adventures with the PogoPlug V4, I decided to get OpenVPN working. The install was easy enough, but getting the configuration correct turned into a literal project—it has it’s own GitHub repository.

My VPN provider of choice is TunnelBear1. I started with them about a year ago because of their free service. The free accounts get 500 MB of data transfer per month. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough to get me out of a data emergency. Like the time I had to log into my bank from a supermarket’s free WiFi. They also have a promotion where sending a tweet from the app will add 1 GB of data to your account. That’s enough to get me through a usual month.

(This is a sample chapter I put together to see how I felt about writing a programming book.)

Before starting to build a more complicated program, let’s start with something simple. We’re going to hack together a short script that works. It will upload a single cat picture to a S3 bucket. We’ll learn the basics of both a ruby script and how cloud storage works.

Last week I got sucked into a small coding project. I wanted a quick way to upload files to AWS S3. S3 acts like a FTP file server. But traditional upload methods like SFTP aren’t allowed. This makes the service tricky to use from the command line.

I wanted a simple tool that I could use in three different ways:

There are several file transfer program that have a graphical interface. Filezilla doesn’t support the S3 protocol. The built-in uploader in Hazel also doesn’t speak S3. Cyberduck is able to connect to S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files. But it’s not scriptable and must be used manually.

This has been one of those weeks where I’ve done lots of stuff. I’ve also failed to accomplish anything worthwhile.

The highlight of the week was on Wednesday when the city decided to turn off the water to install new meters in the building. We got warning letters stuffed in the doorframe on Monday. So it wasn’t a surprise. I thought about toughing it out. But then I decided that having a working toilet for those six hours would be a good thing.