Silas Snider, Blogger

One Project to Rule Them All

I need to move from Facebook Events to something custom, for several reasons: I turn out to have friends that won’t use facebook, I have repeating events, I want to be able to integrate my data more easily than writing a facebook app, and I want to learn something new.

Towards that vein, I’m going to try coding this site in Rails, to see what happens. I already know that I’ll definitely be using Haml/Sassy for the templating language unless something better comes up, and I’ll probably deploy using Phusion’s Passenger (though feel free to chime in below).

Huh

Just took a look at my Google Analytics dashboard for the first time in a long time, and when I look at the data from the traffic generated by my recent flurry of posts, the most interesting thing to me is that my top referrer by far is facebook. At first I thought this was probably due to the Networked Blogs app I use inserting my posts into my facebook news feed, but then I realized that, no, I have tumblr tweet my blogs for me, which end up as facebook status changes.

So basically, my friends still pay a lot more attention to logging into and checking facebook compulsively than they do to checking twitter.

Huh.

Life Update

As a lot of you already know, I’ve been working for ShowClix, a startup operating out of Oakmont, PA which does online ticketing (main competitor: ticketmaster). It’s been hilariously fun, and I’m getting to do those things I actually enjoy. In fact, I look forward to going to work every day in the same way I used to look forward to attending college. I’ve updated my header to acknowledge that I’m now working for them as opposed to Sonya Labs.

Current Projects

(In no particular order)

• A website where you can enter lead sheets in some format (it’s becoming a abc+ hybrid), storing them in a database accessible to the general public, who can browse the music and mark particular pieces as ones they know. They can also define groups (i.e. their band, etc.), and see those pieces that everyone knows, create setlists, etc. Current Roadblock: I’m going to have to learn music typesetting theory, it looks like — no language seems to exist that is as easy as ABC, yet with the ability to easily export to some sort of image/doc format
• (more of a thought-project) Network-infrastructure-in-a-box. Create some sort of kit for myself or anyone else that allows the quick and easy setup of enough network infrastructure to create a functioning LAN in any environment (especially ones that lack things like electrical outlets, etc).
• A Google AppEngine web framework to abstract out all the functionality that I tend to copy from other projects when I start writing an AppEngine app.
• A templating language for the web that mixes the amazing syntax of Haml with the amazing language design of StringTemplate
• Grant administration software
• My long-term project to replace SCT Banner with free software
• A hoodwink’d replacement
• A webapp so that my family can keep better in touch over distance — sort of like a social network, but without a lot of the uneccesary-since-we-all-know-each-other features.
• A smooth identity management webapp for OpenLDAP.

MySQL dumb error of the day!

If, when connecting to a MySQL server, you get the error “Lost connection to MySQL server at ‘reading initial communication packet’, system error: 61”, check your port number — it’s possible that your MySQL port is non-standard, especially if you’re running MAMP.