Make it simple

My daily struggle against complexity 
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May 10, 2009

Using Heroku and Montastic creatively

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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Filed under  //   automation   email   Heroku   Montastic  

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May 10, 2009

My Posterous posting procedure

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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?

Attachment: Posterous posting procedures.pdf

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Filed under  //   haml   Heroku   markdown   posterous   Ruby on Rails   textile   workflow  

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