I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with markup languages that try to make inputting formatted text on the web easier. I had long tried to incorporate Markdown in most of my projects but lately I find it not much easier than straight HTML. So I began thinking about what would constitute “Humane HTML” text input. I began with some research and went from there.

I've been investigating web payment systems and merchant accounts and felt obliged to try PayPal. I've never been happy as a user of PayPal in the past so I'm not entirely sure why I even bothered. PayPal tries to push people into creating accounts. Interestingly a user can sometimes pay with a credit card, but other times must create an account in order to pay. However, if a person does create an account they can no longer pay with their credit card until their account is verified. From a business perspective this is simply unacceptable. And while I'm sure PayPal feels the need to take precautions I can't figure out why this makes any sense. I also found that when creating an account until your account is verified (by jumping through multiple hoops) you cannot close your account nor use the credit card for any PayPal purchases. Given these limitations I cannot imagine how PayPal has survived but for its integration with Ebay.

I’ve been looking at trying to get some threaded discussion boards going. The requirement of a threaded display eliminates a large number of sites. Of course it’s also important for the software to be free and open source. With so many forum applications available I had to try and pick a few that looked good for further testing while keeping track of other possible alternatives as well as those programs which did not meet my needs.

Ok, although I think the name is terrible (try using a search engine to find any information about “Discount”), the project seems pretty cool. Though I have my gripes with Markdown it is well suited for a number of applications:

• discount (markdown in C) announcement

I setup a virtual server for a client to host a Rails application on an Ubuntu 7.10 system. Here I have documented the steps to install all the necessary pieces of software. This is a MySQL5.0/Rails2.0/Mongrel1.1/Apache2.2 setup with Subversion for source code management. I realize that Apache is not the most popular frontend but for this client security and maturity are important. I also realize that their are alternatives to Mongrel, MySQL, and Subversion as well that are well worth considering. So rather than this being THE Rails stack I think of it as A Rails stack suited for a particular customer.

I’ve been using DTC but I’m not particularly satisfied with it. Unfortunately nothing else looks good enough to switch to. Still I did the rounds to see which projects were still active and here’s what I found:

• DTC - http://www.gplhost.com/software-dtc.html
• RavenCore - http://www.ravencore.com/
• GNUPanel - http://www.gnupanel.org/
• ISPConfig - http://www.ispconfig.org/
• SysCP - https://www.syscp.org/
• vhffs - http://www.vhffs.org/

Or perhaps it should be “Yet Another Rails-Like Framework”… In any case Ruby Waves was released today. I read through the tutorial and liked some of the things I saw. Ultimately Rails not being thread-safe is a huge problem that needs to be resolved if it is going to remain a viable framework compared with the other Ruby frameworks such as Merb and Waves. Waves is heavy on magic and in that sense I suppose it is taking Rails to it’s logical extension. I find it interesting that it uses Sequel instead of ActiveRecord as an ORM. I also wonder if any of these frameworks will work on development tools. That’s one area that Rails has been successful and a reason to stick with it and hope that Rails becomes thread-safe (especially in time for Ruby 1.9).

I came across these icons which have friendly licensing:

http://dryicons.com/free-icons/

I think I may try some of these in a project or 2.

These names are all suboptimal in my opinion: Apache, Cherokee, Internet Information Server, AOL Web Server, lighttpd, thttpd, dhttpd, micro-httpd, mini-httpd, mathopd, bozohttpd.

I guess I have an objection to "httpd" being in the name because it is too many syllables.

While I'm not sure of the value of page counts I tend to enable them in Drupal. To do so I set "Administration - Logs - Access log settings - Count content views" to "enabled".

While this is no means an exhaustive list it is a point of reference for what tags to consider allowing on a website that allows user contributions in html.

<a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <b> <i> <tt> <big> <small> <ins> <del> <blockquote> <q> <img> <pre> <table> <tr> <th> <td> <p> <br>