JonWestfall.Com

Before Google+, all was grand in Jon’s world of Super Syndication (Much to Jason Dunn’s chagrin). I posted things straight to ping.fm, and it sent it everywhere I wanted. I hadn’t found a really good way to archive my ping.fm statuses, but did have a pretty awesome way to share posts from Google Reader simply by pressing the share button.

Then Google changed everything, and while I like Google+, it just didn’t fit. It lacked some basic things – no RSS feeds out, no automated posting interface, no email posting, and in no hurry to add any of these things. But It did have instant photo upload, a pretty nice client, and a few other niceties.

So I had a problem: I wanted to keep things nicely automated and easy to use, but needed some features. Principally I needed to be able to post to 1 service and have it go to all 3 big social networks (FB, Twitter, G+), I needed it to be platform independent (So no browser plug-ins), I hoped it could be easily automated, and I needed an easy way to share things out. Along the way I hoped to pick up an easy way to automate storing things I shared with others. I’ve now accomplished all of this, and will reveal the magic to you! Read the rest of this entry »

I should have learned to play the guitar… I should have learned to play them drums…

Some nice thoughts by one of my students on the end of the college experience. davidyzhu.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/the-beauty-of-last-times/

Today's the final for my JDM course. Expecting to be answering 11th hour emails shortly!

OK, last post. I'm trying to get G+ integration to FB/Twitter, and my blog, and get photo posting to work! So here's the last photo – GCT's new Apple Store (Taken around 10:45 PM!)

One Giant Fortune Cookie (My birthday "treat" from my parents!)

Notice how this Cat5 cable is $4? That's the right price. If you're thinking of paying more, and you're not in desperate need, please reconsider </PSA>

This past month many people I know have taken the time  each day on Facebook to post a status update listing something they were thankful for. In the same spirit, I figured I’d write one very long post in which I thank specific people who have made my life the enjoyable experience I have to look forward to every morning when I wake up. Since I suspect this will take some time, let’s get started… Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re like me, you like backing up things to keep them safe. This blog is a great example – including my old LiveJournal posts which I imported a few years ago, I’ve got material here from 2004 on. I like to keep it safe, however since it’s a blog running on WordPress, I can’t just backup a bunch of HTML files and call it a day. My solution is to use the following script, which downloads a SQL data dump of the full database, then creates a compressed archive (using Tar and bzip) of the blog files as well as the data dump. If worse came to worst, I could blow away the “damaged” files and database, and use these files and the database backup to get back to where I was.

Here’s the script:

#!/bin/bash
 DATE=`date +%F`
 TARFILE=$DATE.blog.tar
 /usr/bin/mysqldump --opt -h DBHOST -u DBUSER --password=DBPASS  DBNAME > `date +%F`-blog.sql
 tar -cf $TARFILE ./blogfiles ./`date +%F`-blog.sql
 bzip2 $TARFILE

To get it up and running, replace DBHOST with your database server address, DBUSER with the username for the database, DBPASS with the database password (make sure it’s right after the =, no space), and DBNAME with the database name. Then on the line that begins with “tar”, replace ./blogfiles with the path to your blog’s files. The end result should be a file with a .bz2 extension, which you can download to your computer for safe keeping.