Junk mail senders are like spammers – they don’t lack for creativity in finding ways to get you to read their material. I got fooled by today’s junk mail: a very business-y envelope, apparently sent from Singapore. Naturally, I wonder, who in Singapore would know about me? The contents, however, recommended that I send my subscription request for oil stock information to an address in the United States.
Would you be taken in?
A quick background why I wanted this: I wanted to use an editor for writing blog posts that better supported tags. I’m really not that facile at typing the < and > characters for HTML tags. Also, I prefer my nascent post to grow somewhere I can get to it wherever I reasonably might get an idea.
I could use Subversion, Unison, or similar synchronization software. It’s discomfiting to use version control software for non-versioning purposes, but the main problem I have is remembering to start the synchronization. For me, remembering to save the file was quite an accomplishment already! :)
I recalled WebDAV had something to do with shared web drives (WebDrive also came to mind). As it turns out, Apache (I’m using 2.0 on Debian) has support for WebDAV as a module; I conveniently found instructions to set up WebDAV on Debian. I then found out that Novell produces an excellent WebDAV client for Windows, NetDrive (I don’t know why Novell doesn’t provide it).
I ran into frustrating problems for awhile, and eventually discovered that it was because the instructions I used to set up WebDAV recommend using “Digest Authentication” to control access to the WebDAV location. NetDrive doesn’t know how to work with this. Switching Apache to use “Basic Authentication” (and remembering to use htpasswd2 instead of htdigest to generate the user/password pairs) solved that problem. I also went a little further and exposed the WebDAV URL via HTTPS only.
So far, everything works beautifully. My WebDAV folder shows up as a drive letter on my Windows boxes. If I had a Linux desktop, I’d have even more choices of WebDAV clients. If I’m in a pinch (e.g. foreign computer), I can still SSH to my server and edit files locally. It’s just me, so I don’t have to worry about conflicts and similar muti-user issues.
FYI, I eventually settled on NVu as my HTML editor; NVu is derived from Netscape Composer. WYSIWYG HTML editors aren’t great, but I’ll give up optimal HTML if I can concentrate on content rather than syntax.
I bumped into this friendly passerby on my way to the subway. He was on his way to the bus.
I had to get a picture – I’d never seen a dog like this. The dog walker was kind enough to hold him steady for me. I’ve seen a Great Dane or two (I stopped to stare at those, too), but this Wolfhound is bulkier – overall size vs. just height, I guess. That’s a “normal” sized dog behind him, btw.
