Moved From Posterous to Octopress + p.ostero.us

Mar 23rd, 2012

I’ve been a long term posterous.com user, but since they started messing with the core concept of posterous by introducting ‘groups’ and then pivoting to be ‘spaces’ I’ve had an uneasy feeling being hosted with them. What are these guys up to? What happend to the posterous I used to love using?

The last straw was the purchase of posterous by twitter as a ‘talent acquistion’ - basically meaning posterous will now be in maintenane mode - no further development

I’ve kept a close eye on the progress of jekyll and octopress and have finally made the move. This blog is now built using octopress

Migration

My main conern about the migration was to maintain the urls for all my previous posts, the currentl posterous->jekyll doesnt maintain the url slugs.

To make this work I edited the posterous import script - refer new version below

Also the octopress permalinks format needed to change to just :title. Now any links to my old posterous hosted blog will auto forward to this blog. Below is the updated import and config script

require 'rubygems' require 'jekyll' require 'fileutils' require 'net/http' require 'uri' require "json" # ruby -r './lib/jekyll/migrators/posterous.rb' -e 'Jekyll::Posterous.process(email, pass, api_key, blog)' module Jekyll module Posterous def self.fetch(uri_str, limit = 10) # You should choose better exception. raise ArgumentError, 'Stuck in a redirect loop. Please double check your email and password' if limit == 0 response = nil Net::HTTP.start('posterous.com') do |http| req = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri_str) req.basic_auth @email, @pass response = http.request(req) end case response when Net::HTTPSuccess then response when Net::HTTPRedirection then fetch(response['location'], limit - 1) when Net::HTTPForbidden then retry_after = response.to_hash['retry-after'][0] puts "We have been told to try again after #{retry_after} seconds" sleep(retry_after.to_i + 1) fetch(uri_str, limit - 1) else response.error! end end def self.process(email, pass, api_token, blog = 'primary', tags_key = 'categories') @email, @pass, @api_token = email, pass, api_token FileUtils.mkdir_p "_posts" posts = JSON.parse(self.fetch("/api/2/sites/#{blog}/posts?api_token=#{@api_token}").body) page = 1 while posts.any? posts.each do |post| title = post["title"] # slug = title.gsub(/[^[:alnum:]]+/, '-').gsub(/^-+|-+$/, '').downcase posterous_slug = post["slug"] slug = posterous_slug[0..44] date = Date.parse(post["display_date"]) content = post["body_html"] published = !post["is_private"] name = "%02d-%02d-%02d-%s.html" % [date.year, date.month, date.day, slug] #name = "%s.html" % [slug] tags = [] post["tags"].each do |tag| tags.push(tag["name"]) end # Get the relevant fields as a hash, delete empty fields and convert # to YAML for the header data = { 'layout' => 'post', 'title' => title.to_s, 'published' => published, 'date' => date, tags_key => tags, 'posterous_url' => post["full_url"], 'posterous_slug' => posterous_slug }.delete_if { |k,v| v.nil? || v == ''}.to_yaml # Write out the data and content to file File.open("_posts/#{name}", "w") do |f| puts name f.puts data f.puts "---" f.puts content end end page += 1 posts = JSON.parse(self.fetch("/api/2/sites/#{blog}/posts?api_token=#{@api_token}&page=#{page}").body) end end end end

p.ostero.us

My http://blog.justin.kelly.org.au blog is now hosted with octopress at p.ostero.us

p.ostero.us is a new service that I’ve setup specially designed to help posterous.com users to move to octopress. Octopress is an amazing blog engine but unless your comfortable using the commandline and messing with ruby got its not ganna work out for you.

This is where p.ostero.us comes in. I’m bringing the beauty and simplicity of the original posterous back combined with the awesomeness of octopress. You can email your posts in (all in markdown), add and update posts via our minimal web ui or hook p.ostero.us up to pull markdown formatted posts from your github repo

GitHub

Currently you can easily enought host an octopress blog on github but you still have to mess with ruby/rake to create posts. With p.ostero.us you just point it at a repo folder that contents your posts - no need to run rake commands . Just use the normal octopress blog template and its all good to go

No lock in

I always had the uneasy feeling of being locked into posterous - even though they have a good api - i can’t just grab the how blog (theme included) and host of my own server..

With p.ostero.us you can 1 click export/download your site - full octopress install and happily self host your blog any time you want

Money

Another problem with posterous.com was that there was no way to actually pay for the service.
Theres a great post over at pinboard.in that details whats wrong with this.

Eventfully they are going to have to make a return for their investor and with no real income fomr users this means getting purchased.

p.ostero.us is a user pays site with a model similar to pinboard.in, so you know the service is going to be around in the future and not goign to just get ‘turned off’ by twitter

Conclusion

If your a posterous.com user looking to move now twitter is about to kill it off check out p.ostero.us

Install Git in Your Home Directory :: How To

Jan 24th, 2012

If you every need to install Git on a server but don’t have root access, follow the below steps to install Git in your home directory

check that you can run gcc – if you get errors then you got to figure something else out

gcc --version

prep your home folder

mkdir ~/src
cd ~/src

make the ~/opt directory – this is where we will install git into

mkdir ~/opt

Get the git source from google code 1.7.8.4 is the latest at the moment and untar

wget http://git-core.googlecode.com/files/git-1.7.8.4.tar.gz
tar -xvzf git-1.7.8.4.tar.gz
cd git-1.7.8.4

run ./configure and tell it to use ~/opt

./configure --prefix=$HOME/opt

now do the install

make install

check git is happy

~/opt/bin/git --version

If it prints out ‘git version 1.7.8.4’ then its all good to go – git is now installed in your home folder

Simple PHP Function to Generate a Random Apha-numeric Code With Only Readable Characters :: How To

Jan 22nd, 2012

I needed to create simple codes for a webapp that had unreadable/possibly confusing characters like 0,O, etc.. removed. If you have any improvements to the below code let me know.

Exclude File/directories/urls From Apache .htaccess Password Protection :: How To

Jan 5th, 2012

I've a Apache .htaccess password protected site I'm working on but need certain pages to be accessible without a password

Took awhile but finally got it figured out - refer my .htaccess file below for the details

Simple MySQL Db Refresh Script

Dec 29th, 2011

If you need to drop the contents of a MySQL database and reimport base data alot (such as a webapp demo or development site) below is a very simple script to make your life easier

Just edit the configs, create the import.sql add it to your cron jobs

How to: Rotate a Video in Linux

Dec 14th, 2011

For the life of me I can’t figure out how to flip/rotate a video in linux using any GUI apps

Here’s the commandline way to do it

mencoder -ovc lavc -vf rotate=2 -oac copy INPUT.AVI -o OUTPUT.AVI

The rotate=2 can be replaced with whatever option best suits your needs. Rotating video options are below:

0 Rotate by 90 degrees clockwise and flip (default).
1 Rotate by 90 degrees clockwise.
2 Rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise.
3 Rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise and flip.

Simple Invoices 2011.1 Released

Nov 25th, 2011

Hi Guys,

Simple Invoices 2011.1 has been released

You can grab the download from:

* Webapp version: http://simpleinvoices.googlecode.com/files/simpleinvoices.2011.1.zip

* Windows version: https://simpleinvoices.googlecode.com/files/simpleinvoices_for_windows.2011.1.zip

Whats new:

* This releases fixes the issue where recurring invoices failed to create all the invoices

** https://code.google.com/p/simpleinvoices/issues/detail?id=146

Documentation:

* Installing Simple Invoices: http://www.simpleinvoices.org/install

* Upgrading Simple Invoices: http://www.simpleinvoices.org/wiki/upgrade

* Simple Invoices help: http://www.simpleinvoices.org/help

* Frequently Asked Questions: http://www.simpleinvoices.org/wiki/faqs

* Simple Invoices config file options: http://www.simpleinvoices.org/config

* ChangeLog: http://code.google.com/p/simpleinvoices/wiki/done

If you have any issues or queries please post here in the forum

* http://www.simpleinvoices.org/forum/discussion/2037

Cheers

Justin

Using Page Content Stored in Wordpress in Another PHP/HTML Page : How To

Nov 17th, 2011

Sometimes I've needed to have page content stored in Wordpress so the users/client can easily edit the html content but display it in another non-Wordpress php/html website

Below is a simple way to gran Wordpress content and add it to your site

Get the Largest Key in an Array With PHP : How To

Sep 19th, 2011

Get the Number of Seconds Since Jan 1, 0001 in PHP : How To

Sep 18th, 2011

If you need to get the number of seconds since Jan 1, 0001 in PHP you can't use the normal date or time functions as they are based around Jan 1, 1970

Here is a simple function to get the number of seconds since Jan 1, 0001 (or any other date)

This date calc is required if you are using the ACH PaymentsGateway.com API

Requires PHP 5.3 and above

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Justin Kelly

various ramblings