Today in the Habari IRC channel, while fighting with the LESS framework and using rgb, rgba, and HEX color values, I lamented

this is my problem with getting anything completed. I wind up on these tangents learning about other semi-related stuff, and never get the original project I started done

As if on cue, Owen replied

You need focus. We all need focus. We need people to stand behind us and remind us to stay on target so we can blow up the death star.

Indeed. Where’s Ben when you need him? Where do you find your Ben?

I have been struggling with this blogging vs Twitter thing too long. I’ve put my proverbial foot down. If I can’t fit it into 140 characters without editing punctuation, shortening words, cutting out context, it’s going into a blog post. Period.

Ironically, the blog does auto-tweet new blog posts, which is kinda like a self hosted twit-longer kinda thing, no?

Perhaps I should hack the plugin to able to add a #longread tag to, well, long winded rant so as to warn those who prefer the tiny digests of inane thoughts and links.

I’m also looking to add a linklog section, just need to coerce one of my Habari folks better versed in atom feeds help me update a plugin (I’m looking at you michaeltwofish ).

I am in the process of moving from another server, so things might look a little wonky for a bit. In addition, I’m switching to using Amazon Cloudfront/S3 to serve my images/files, so I’m waiting for DNS to propagate on that as well.

Should be all sorted out by tomorrow evening.

I am in the process of moving my sites from Slicehost to Linode, as most are aware Slicehost is being phased out for Rackspace Cloud. Anyway, I upgraded my VPS at Linode last night to Debian “Squeeze” and installed APC, which created a problem with the WordPress installations I had there. Basically, I couldn’t access the admin. Through the power of Twitter and the invaluable help of Mark Jaquith, I learned that by default APC doesn’t play nice with files that are checked out via Subversion. I think the root of my problem was a stray apc config for overriding include once, but certainly the subversion issue could have been at play too.

Anyway, a little Googling on the subject, I discovered there’s a configuration option for APC to use ctime instead of the default mtime. Adding apc.stat_ctime=1 is all that is required.

While I’m on the subject of migrating from Slicehost to Linode, Andrew RIley pointed out that someone had written a ruby script to migrate the DNS information for you.

Addendum To be clear, I install WordPress using Subversion and the appropriate tag. My Habari installs are also all Subversion checkouts from trunk.

I’ve been really enjoying both the Civil War Day By Day Blog, as well as the Disunion series in the Opininator from the NY Times. Earlier this week Disunion had an article, Morse, The Telegraph & Civil War. The gist of the article is that the advent of the Telegraph allowed for quicker and faster communication, and coupled with advances of the printing press, allowed for more newspapers to take hold, each with their own partisan orientation.

This speed of communication allowed for the schism between North and South to broaden.

Instead, of course, national unity unraveled as antagonistic North-South stereotypes hardened during the 1850s. The dominant modern narrative of mid-19th century American history suggests that North and South began to see each other more clearly — and that each discovered how genuinely different the other had become. While a fast-changing North embraced progress and improvement, the South remained wedded to an archaic, retrogressive labor system. Under the circumstances, Northern and Southern outlooks and values necessarily diverged.

What struck me most though about this article is how it parallels today’s current events and how the advances in technology and the internet can be directly attributed to the uprising in the Middle East, as well as to some degree the political discourse in our own country. The 24 hour news cycle, and the fact that anyone can start a blog/website to argue their stance has really changed the way politics is done in the United States. We just had our first presidential candidate announce his candidacy via Twitter. A politician was run out of Washington due to his use of Craigslist and the ability of a website to get a hold of the email exchange and image to quickly get it out, being picked up by mainstream media, resulting in his resignation within days of the story hitting the web.

Guess it goes to prove the old adage, The more things change, the more they stay the same.