I just put up a *ton* of screenshots of Ravelry. For all of you who have been wondering what Jess and I have been working on for the past few months...

http://www.ravelry.com/tour/peek

Enjoy!

The secret is out! For the last few months, Jess and I have been busy building a really cool (in my humble opinion ;) site for knitters and crocheters. We aren't open to the public yet, but we are sending out plenty of beta tester invitations.

Ravelry's current front page includes a sneak peek and an invitation request form. Also, Rachel from licketyknit wrote up cool post and included a coupla screenshots.

I *really* want to write a proper post about all of this but there is SO MUCH that I want to say.

Hey all Comcast customers in the Northeast - it's not just you: something is not quite right. Flickr is among the afflicted.

Max just joined the club. Everybody say "Hello, Max!". I sent him my list of essential Mac apps:

• Growl : SO ESSENTIAL! Unobtrusive status messages, Supported by many apps. See screenshots.
• iTerm : Tabbed terminal. Woohoo!
• Textmate : Awesome text editor for all languages. Costs $$.
• Gimp.app : You know.
• Adium X : Great IM client
• Boot Camp or Parallels : Dual boot or awesome virtual machine software?
• Handbrake : Rip DVDs
• Quicksilver : It's a cult. Start here: http://www.43folders.com/category/quicksilver
• Fink : I tend to just ./configure ; make ; make install instead.
• Transmission : No frills Bittorrent

• Coding in Ruby is fun (lots of smiles when I see thoughtful design and guessable APIs) and the code just looks nice
• Working with Rails is fun for the same reasons - there are lots of little features that make me smile
• Useful and enjoyable little libraries like hpricot
• ActiveRecord takes care of the monkey brain SQL so that I don't have to
• Prototype and Scriptaculous helpers - rich user interfaces with less mess and drudgery
• Haml markup is clean and pretty
• Capistrano! Deployment is a breeze (with a little help from ActiveRecord migrations)

Here is a little Javascript-only application that I was playing with. It's a one-page + javascript deal that lets you search for Amazon wish lists by name and view them. Saying it has "no server-side" is fun but not really true - it's just Amazon's server and not mine. I have no idea if it will work in Internet Explorer.

Jess made fun of me when she saw this, but there is at least one person out there who will think this is cool. (Max, that's you)

Here is the recipe:

• Amazon Web Services
• xml2json
• FlashXMLHttpRequest for cross domain AJAX
• Trimpath Javascript templates
• a little prototype.js to make Javascript programming more fun

I just installed Windows Vista RC1 on my Macbook and was suprised to find that it went off without a hitch. The Vista pre-release is free and will work until June 2007.

1. Download Vista and burn a DVD
2. Install Apple's Boot Camp
3. Insert DVD and install

So I got a Macbook Pro. I *really* thought that I was going to miss my Gentoo Linux machine but I'm coping pretty well so far. Here are the applications that I am running at the moment (maybe the other Mac people out there will care). All are available for Intel and PPC machines.

• iTerm - I needs my command prompt
• Camino - purportedly the best Mac browser
• Adium X - because iChat isn't good enough
• Seashore - not Photoshop (Gimp for Mac)
• Vienna - free RSS/Atom reader
• OmniGraffle - one of my favorite Mac apps
• OpenOffice - sometimes I need to work on Word and Excel docs
• Sizzling Keys - create keyboard shortcuts that control iTunes. I love this thing.
• Growl - more unified notifications from my various apps
• Fink - because my command line needs dircolors, subversion, and pine.
• Mac the Ripper - for backing up (ahem) my DVDs
• CoverFlow - pretty cool eye candy for your music library (use Corripio to get missing album art
• Parallels - lets me run Windows in a window. A little slower than I thought it would be.
• Eclipse - programmery stuff

Last night we cut over to Jess' redesigned site We had fun working on this new design... (Boy, I hope that it looks right under IE, we didn't do to much testing on Windows) In addition to the new look, we upgraded from Movable Type to Wordpress 2.0 and moved her to a new web host. The host change will probably take a little while to trickle down but I set up her old site to redirect traffic to the new place in the meantime.

I was up kind of late trying to make sure that all of her old Movable Type links would redirect to the correct new place in Wordpress. I'll try to update this post later with a little bit of information about what I did.

Update, Thursday night: Okay, so migrating from Movable Type to Wordpress is easy with the provided tools. If if you want to make sure that all of your old links (in Google, on people's sites, wherever) direct people to the proper place then it is a little trickier. Here is what I did. It's doubt that it's the best way, but it worked:

• I read the Preserving Permalinks section of the Wordpress/MT migration page and decided that maintaining the same post ids across systems was the best way to go. Please, do not go with the "use a template to generate a huge .htaccess file" method. That's crazy. Munging your Wordpress permalinks to better fit the old MT way is also yuck.
• I couldn't find any instructions for patching Wordpress 2.0 so that it would do the above. I ended up using Kathy's MT-Numeric-Id Importer. This comes with instructions and it successfully imported everything while maintaining the post IDs.
• The importer left out a few things (probably because of Wordpress 2.0 differences).
  • You need to update the comment counts (inside each post record). Drop this tiny php page in wp-admin, point your browser to it, wait, and delete it when you are done.
  • You need to update the post modification times so that your feeds don't show "0000-00-00 00:00" dates and times. I forget the exact column names but a query like "update wp_posts set post_mod_time = post_time" does the trick.
• Add rewrite rules in .htaccess for feeds, posts, date archives, and category archives. Something like this (the redirects should probably be set to permanent) :
  • RewriteRule ^index\.rdf$ /blog/feed [R,L] (and so on for other feeds)
  • RewriteRule ^archives/cat_categoryname.php /blog/category/categoryname [R,L]
  • RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{6}).php /blog/?p=$1 [R,L] (posts)
  • RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{2}).php /blog/$1/$2 [R,L] (date archive)