s3

pb is going off the Flickr grid
I kind of want to have my photos on a justagwailo.com subdomain too. (I'd even use Flickr if they let me point to their servers, for the community features pb describes.)

Which As a Side-Effect Means Learning Python

The great Amazon S3 experiment continues, hacking someone elses code to solve my own problem, which as a side-effect means learning Python (which, it turns out, was exactly the same way I learned PHP). My mundane videos didn't load correctly in Safari. Thanks to Djun Kim for pointing that out, though it took Firefox's Live HTTP Headers extension to figure which Content-Type header Amazon S3 was sending out, which was text/plain. S3 evidently can't figure out on its own side that I was uploading MP4 files, so I had to hack Adrian Hovolaty's script to hard-code video/mp4 in and re-upload all the video.

Astute Drupal reverse-engineering types will note that my mundane SkyTrain video appears under my Video "book" page as well as under the SkyTrain Explorer "book" page (that last part not being technically true, since I use custom PHP to expand an outline on a page). How I put one child underneath multiple parent pages will have to wait until I write it up, but Moshe Weitzman provided a clue in an old Drupal.org issue.

Fenchurch

My site is broken: after upgrading to Drupal 4.7, Aggregator2 stopped taking in the tags from my various bootleg RSS feeds. So while the community tries to figure out a solution, I experimented with CCK, Views and Content Template with something that would do essentially the same thing with my del.icio.us links without actually posting them to del.icio.us. So it would lose the social aspect, though I could publish them here first then manually syndicate it to del.icio.us. Or write a module that does it automatically.

Recent now uses the Views module instead of the Tracker module. Boris' email on the Drupal development list spurred me into action.

At least it would continue Just a Gwai Lo's proud hackish and unmaintainable tradition. The site now runs on a dedicated virtual private server, which I've named Fenchurch, after a minor character in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so I can hack and unmaintain Just a Gwai Lo (and the other sites that now run on it) at root-access level.

(All my computer technology is named after references to the Douglas Adams series of books: my iPod has Ford Prefect, my computer's hard drive gets Zaphod (but not his full name, Zaphod Beeblebrox), the two partitions get Oolon and Colluphid. I'm reserving Arthur Dent and Marvin for some as yet determined future hardware purchases.)

I also finally got S3 working (using Adrian Holovaty's scripts which might force me to finally break down and learn Python) after trying and failing with JungleDisk and Interachy. Some recent video taken aboard SkyTrain are hosted on Amazon's servers.

Finally, I run a staging site where I try things out before unleashing them. Not that it will prevent me from breaking things every now and then.