Make it simple

Big ideas for tough times, if you can't afford a summer villa, just bring the swimming pool for picnic. This setup happens to be part of a TV commercial, but could soon be a real hit!

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It's pretty difficult to get a decent iPhone selfportrait done:
 
1. You have to be good looking (not my case)
2. The shutter button is on the rear (when you shoot yourself) and it's so small you always have a hard time pressing it. You need extra software if you want it bigger or need a timed shutter.
3. You can't email the self masterpice at high res unless you buy extra software.
4. If you need any exposure adjustments you also have to buy extra stuff.
 
All in all, not very functional, because, extra software aside, you find yourself switching from one pice of software to the other, at least 3 times before you get the job done. Can't we, humans, do it better and easier?

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The problem with closed doors is not being able to get in, but being able to GET OUT! A couple of days ago, a fellow coworker asked for a duplicate of his access card because it had been deteriorated with daily use. When he received the email stating that he had his duplicate ready at the entrance, he rushed to get his new card, but soon he realiced that his old card wasn't working any more because he got trapped in the middle of the stairs. His old card had been cancelled beforehand. He had to wait in the stairway for almost 15 minutes before someone else, with a functioning card, could help him out. And NO! , he could not use his cell phone because there is no cellular signal in that stairway. Morale: always leave doors open behind you.

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Are you prepared for a Google blackout? I mean a permanent one, not a temporary one like that in the screenshot. Let me extend the question a bit, are we prepared for an IT blackout? Digital information is useless without IT infraestructure in place. Humm ... To be continued.

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Well, complexity comes in again ... Montastic is not working as expected. It does not probe the Heroku website every 10 minutes. It takes 2 hours on average for the site to get probed, so it's useless as a substitute for a cron job. Never mind, I keep searching for a free tool to handle the task.

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Heroku is a Ruby on Rails cloud deployment service that allows for free Rails instances, as long as they consume few resources. As I mentioned before, I use Heroku to format my Posterous emails vi haml markup language. The process is pretty complex already, as I explained in a previous post. Let's make it even a bit more complex. Heroku allows a free cron job every hour, but that's too long a wait for a pending message to be processed. Fortunately, there comes Montastic web monitoring service to the rescue. Montastic allows you to "ping" a URL, at least, every 10 minutes. Voilà, you now have a way to check email every minute also for free and, as a bonus, you have your service properly monitored all the time. Am I going to far with my posting mania?

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Click here to download:

Posterous posting procedures.pdf (40 KB)

After a few hours of tedious programming, I'm now able to compose a message in Gmail using haml markup language and have it delivered to Posterous by a Ruby on RAILS application hosted at Heroku. Please take a look at the attached image showing the actual workflow.

All tools are free, a paramount condition if one takes into account that this blog won't ever pay for itself. The problem is that the whole process is COMPLEX. Will it become simpler when Garry Tan implements markup language posting via email at Posterous? Yes indeed, but he'll have a hard time implementing it because:

1. Implementing haml is pretty easy, but dangerous because you can insert arbitrary ruby code inside the text.
2. implementing textile is hard because email servers tend to cut lines that are too long, and there is no easy way to revert that by the parsing engine.
3. markdown markup language doesn't suffer that much from line reformatting policies, but it's not as expressive as textile or haml.

You see? Whatever I do, wherever I go, I always end up messing with complex stuff. Who is the complex guy: me or the world?

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As I wrote in my previous post, I'll try to sum up why I've chosen to use English language in this blog. Complexity is a global issue, so my target audience is a broad one. My language choice should take that into account. Next I'll try to summarize the pros and cons of using different languages:

All in all, I've decided to steak to English language even though it's not my mother tongue because of the broad reader base and in spite the stated contras.

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I’ve decided to host my “make it simple” blog at Posterous because it is a simple yet powerful blogging engine with an enthusiastic user base.
I love the idea of using email to post messages to the blog and the way Posterous handles multimedia items.

But complexity always makes it’s appearance. How can I use markup languages like textile or markdown via email? Gary Tan, cofounder of Posterous, has promised to implement it one month ago. Meanwhile I’ll have to roll out my own solution (more on this in a future post).

Why having a markup language is so important to me? The response is, as always, simplicity. The next post will be about why I’ve chosen English as the language for this blog. When I’ve tried to write down the pros and cons of this decision in a table using standard email tools or even sophisticated pieces of software like Keynote, I’ve end up expending most of the time formatting the table instead of writing the actual contents and finally discarding the result because it didn’t match what I had in mind. To solve the problem it’s probably better to split it in smaller parts. First deal with the content and after take care of the form. HTML+CSS is a perfect example of this approach, but it’s too verbose to use it straight as a blog posting language. This is where textile, markdown or the powerful but unsafe haml come in to help.

I know I’ll have to explain it better if I want anyone to believe me when I say that it’s much simpler and efficient to write this post with textile inside haml, like I am doing right now, than using an ubiquitous email client with HTML formatting capabilities. But you’ll have to keep reading this blog if you want to find out why :-)

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This blog is so simple that it has had several visits without even having a single sentence written in. Now I will try to put some stuff in it, just a chronicle of my everyday struggle against complexity. Let's see if I'm able to keep it simple enought.

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