Necessity is a Mother

I've added a couple of new features to my version1 of Infernal Icecube2:

  1. You can now select one of three upload methods. In addition to ftp, you can also do a boring old file copy to another directory, or you can disable uploading. Alas, no really cool upload methods (e.g. http or ssh) work yet.

  2. I extended the snarf command to let you select the article ID of and existing article and make the text your snarfing in the latest version of that article.

  3. I added the spew command. This writes out entire text of an article to standard output.

This is all because I've moved and no longer have a reliable Internet connection. 1) is needed (well, helpful anyway) because I moved my repository to the VPS server that also hosts my website so updating the site no longer needs to go through a network connection.

The other two items are there because I'm being a little bit clever.

Right now, my main computers are a VPS and a laptop. Because the ii repository lives on the VPS, I can only update my blog from Panera Bread.

I put a good deal of thought into how to make ii more distributed. Things like switching from rcs to svk or git or rolling my own distributed version control. But today, it occurred to me that most of what I need from distributed ii I can do using spew, snarf and ssh.

spew and snarf let me copy articles between two different repositories using ssh, like so:

ssh myvps.example.com ii real-blog spew 11 | ii draft-blog snarf - 42

and

ii draft-blog spew 42 | ssh myvps.example.com ii real-blog snarf - 11

So I set up a draft blog on the laptop, compose articles there and then upload them using ssh. This gives me version control and the ability to preview under ii without needing a net connection.

Whether that's enough is another question. Time will tell.

send me email.


  1. I.e. not the current released version. If you want a copy now, 

  2. http://www.blit.ca/ii.html 


#   Posted 2007-07-09 16:29:00 UTC; last changed 2014-05-04 17:32:13 UTC