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.

There seems to have been a lot of gem updates and releases recently which is good to see. I’m especially happy with people addressing the problems of BlueCloth with better Markdown processors even though I’m less inclined to use Markdown these days. Anyway, these are all announcements that I think Rails developers should be aware of.

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 think Nexenta might be a good OS someday once it matures a bit and it’s development is worth following. Here are some things of note recently:

• Nexenta 1.0.1 was released recently. (Download, Announcement)
• Nexenta 1.0.1 seems to work much better under KVM in my testing.
• A Nexenta 2.0 Hackathon is underway which will sync Nexenta with Ubuntu 8.04 instead of 6.04. (Details)