After a year of semi-regular blogging with Octopress, though, I was just kind of...bored with it. Blogging with vim and banging out a static site and pushing it via rsync was cool, but ultimately it just wasn't as convenient as I'd wanted it to be.…
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I don't know what normal people do on days off from work, but I do things that are too esoteric even to write about for Ars Technica because...because I think there's something wrong with me. So, last Friday I spent a few hours setting up a vanity URL shortening service and custom image uploading service for Twitter, so I can, I don't know, be cooler than everyone else. It was surprisingly fun! First, though, the annoying caveat: Twitter already shortens every link with its t.co service, and you can't opt out. The reasons they give are mostly marginal and downplay the fact that aggregate click…
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I've gotten along fine with Octopress for the Bigdino blog for a couple of years now; I enjoy the speed of a blog made entirely of static files, and I enjoy Octopress's responsive design (courtesy of its Jekyll underpinnings). But there are two constants in the world of blogging: "Sorry I haven't updated in so long" posts, and "I've change my blogging platform!" posts. This is both the former and the latter. Sorry I haven't updated in so long. I've changed my blogging platform. This is Ghost. Adding images is hella sweet, too! Discuss this post on the BigDinosaur forums…
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This is an old post. It may contain broken links and outdated information. In the previous post, I walked through setting up Discourse, a Ruby-based web forum. I'm in the process of shifting this blog's comment system from Disqus, which I've never been wholly comfortable with, over to using Discourse instead. There is being done via a plug-in for Octopress currently under development by one of the posters over at the main Discourse development forum. Why ditch Disqus? There are several reasons, but the biggest is the privacy concerns. Disqus tracks users' movement across Disqus-enabled web sit…
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This is an old post. It may contain broken links and outdated information. Hi there, visitors from Google! The procedure outlined here will work to get Discourse up and running, but you are way, way better off following the official Discourse installation guide and utilizing the Discourse Docker image. Proceed below at your own risk! I like fiddling with new software and seeing if I can make it workâthat's what most of this blog is about, in fact. Most of the web-based apps I've walked through deploying have been written with PHP, but there's a fancy new bit of Ruby-based forum software that I…
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