τεχνοσοφια

On Monday I woke up with a very mild and very annoying bronchial infection. Doctor Me prescribed two days of rest, relaxation, and chicken soup. Where “chicken soup” is “finally dropping the unreasonably expensive and embarrassingly outdated web hosting package at Speakeasy and transferring all of my domains and content to Dreamhost,” that is. I am now paying less than a third of what I had been for a hell of a lot more features. And, I must say, administering DNS records, transferring files, and upgrading long-neglected software is rather amusing when you’re loopy and feverish.

My experiences thus far with Dreamhost are very promising. I’m impressed but perhaps that’s because I’ve been in the web hosting ghetto for so long. I understand there will very likely be downtime and sluggishness — that I can deal with. Being shackled to 1999 technologies for $30/mth, while my e-mails go unanswered, not so much.

I upgraded both Technosophia and my wife’s blog to the latest WordPress release (2.3) from something ridiculous like 2.0.3. In doing so, I also switched to the svn upgrade configuration Ryan Eby detailed a while back.

I crossed my fingers and it turns out the unAPI server plug-in still works in WP2.3. Huzzah! Not sure if it works in the 2.1 or 2.2 branches, but I suspect it does.

It would be an understatement to say I’ve been enthusiastic about Ruby on Rails for a while now. Okay, I am downright fanatic — just look at that shrine to DHH in my closet; it’s plain to see that I’ve drunk the (ruby red) Kool-Aid.

This is the first post in a series in which I hope to share my enthusiasm and explain just what it is that I love about Ruby on Rails. Not many folks in the library world seem to be using RoR — with a few notable exceptions — and so I thought it might be of interest to folks unfamiliar with or curious about Ruby and Rails to hear some impressions from a bright-eyed newbie.

Stay tuned, folks.

New year, new theme. Technosophia is now comin’ atcha in day-glo green.

Drop me a comment if you notice any problems.

Since my staff.washington.edu account will soon go away, I’ve moved the site to my personal domain for the time being.  If you have bookmarked the old hard-coded URLs, you’ll need to change your bookmarks.  The persistent URL for Technosophia is http://purl.org/net/leftwing/blog, and the feed link is http://feeds.feedburner.com/technosophia. 

It’s likely that I’ve missed some links and broken some others.  If you notice any problems, drop me a line.  Hopefully this shift will not affect my small and strange audience.

The title makes this post sound rather more interesting than it is.

In light of my recent announcement, I figured I would make sure that the three of you who are reading this — assuming my mother and wife are still following along — have bookmarked the durable URLs.  (Durable, at least, to the extent that they will live on after my 9/20 resignation date at UW.)  The persistent URL for Technosophia is http://purl.org/net/leftwing/blog.  The URL for Technosophia’s feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/technosophia.

I’ll be moving Technosophia and my CV (which is of great and obvious value to the internet tubes) to a new server in the coming weeks, hopefully with very little disruption (especially for those who’ve bookmarked the durable URLs).