Inchoate Curmudgeon

Its inevitable, as things go round and round.

I came to this conclusion while fiddling with my WordPress installation, working with a single blog entry. I’m currently working on a tool set that I’d like to be small, extensible and very like the command-line UNIX tools I’ve always admired. I started this blog to have somewhere to log what I was doing with this as I go along. I was wishing I had a local copy of my blog, since my ISP is apparently bandwidth challenged for all the gyrations I’m going through.

So, I started to think about some scripts for export/import tools for WordPress, using my localhost installation to stage to the permanent blog. It turns out WordPress is releasing an XML import/export feature that will do just the trick.

Back to the tool set. The tool set I want to build should use the REST paradigm. I want to be able to wicker my scripts within a controlling web server. I’d also like to leverage curl to exercise the thing, rather than calling the scripts directly, to satisfy needs for command line interfaces. This adds a beneficial layer of abstraction and indirection. I love that stuff.

So what is a browser here? It’s just another method for turning the knobs. I beginning to think, as much as I like it, FireFox and Flock are getting too featurely. Attempting to use Flock as a blogging client doesn’t work so well for me, it needs to know too much about the blog server to work really well. I’m using the AJAX editing tool on my WordPress server. I like it.

I found my self adding all these plugins hacking scripts on my WordPress installation; the WordPress browser interface will always give more control. I just need something a bit snappier, a bit more local.

I am quite amused by the warnings on some of the buttons in Chistine’s Davis’s Ultimate Tag Warrior: Tidy Tags is a scary, scary thing and Also very scary.. back up your database first! This is the language of a working administrator of some ilk, not so much a developer. I’ll bet she’s using the scripts that she builds daily basis. These are truly great tools people are sharing and using. They are transparent, reusable and manageable in scope and complexity. You know, like UNIX scripting used to be, before we had all this wordy, cumbersome java stuff.

I’ll bet web servers conversation frequency is accelerating faster than browser to web conversations. I’ll bet as people become more comfortable with scripting their web servers, and web script hacking becomes more prevalent, it will overtake traditional scripting activities in the data center. Who wants bash alone when you can stick it on your personal web server and use it from everywhere, even through a firewall?

I think I’d rather have all that whizzbang stuff that’s bloating my FireFox and Flock browsers and that’s making them flaky implemented as some AJAX widgets on some web pages on some web servers out on the Internet somewhere; somewhere where I can always get to my favorite “browser” interface, and my tools, and my documents, and my personal gynormous aggregated email and photo store, even without my laptop and such.

I think I might need a proxy browser on my web server, rather than a bloated browser on my desktop.

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