“Surely,” I thought, “there already exists an App.net sidebar for Octopress.”

[Edit: Well, there is, officially.]

Well, there is, sorta. But She’s a Girl posted about her work at getting it integrated with her site, but its artifacts are mostly bound up in the commit messages for her blog. Additionally, there’s no longer a real need to offload the fetching of your App.net content to cron, you can get perfectly serviceable JSON directly from App.net’s API. So, I opted to tweak it, the results of which you can see in my sidebar.

It’s that time again. Time for you to buy my bag. I’ve got a 2011 Tom Bihn Ristretto for 13” MacBook Pro (same structure as their Original Style Ristretto, but larger). It’s Cocoa with Cayenne interior, and it has the Absolute Shoulder Strap. It’s in fabulous condition, and it really, really wants to live at your house. One solitary Benjamin is all that separates you from this beautiful bag.

“ExternalEditor: Because no one should have to use <textarea>”

Long ago, Casey Duncan wrote a Zope 2 product called ExternalEditor. It let users of Linux and Windows designate local apps to edit Zope-hosted content. As a budding OS X developer, and a user of Zope, I ported it to OS X using the PyObjC framework and called it ZopeEditManager. Periodically, as OS X versions came along, ZopeEditManager needed to be patched and resuscitated.

As it happens, I’m now doing some contract work with Zope, and found it needed another update for Mountain Lion, so I’ve rolled out another version. And since it doesn’t seem to be on the Zope Foundation list of a million GitHub repositories, I’ll be hosting it again under my Orangutango repositories.

The Itch

It started innocuously enough. It started with a tweet:

Since some of you have asked, I love these wallpapers: simoncpage.co.uk/blog/

— Craig Hockenberry (@chockenberry) February 14, 2013

I followed the link and Simon’s art made an immediate impression on me. In an instant, I knew how I might go about riffing on his designs. A long time ago, there was an app called NodeBox (and before that was DrawBot), which was made for generating programmatic art. I set about creating a simple NodeBox script to start making circles, hexagons, lines, and filling them in with various colors.