Peter's Blog

I'm not using the Iphone wordpress client any more. On more than one occasion it has lost a post that I spent precious time composing. If the communications aren't perfect when sending the post it vanishes.

I've beefed up my email submission stuff and am back to using iPhone email. The iPhone makes it difficult to edit posts by editing old email and sending it again, especially with embedded photos so this solution is still not ideal.

One advantage of using email is that submission is near instant: I don't have to wait for a cron job to import the new post from Wordpress.

My new One and One server is all set up now so I thought I'd summarise what my current preferred server setup is.

• Apache2 web server.
• Phusion Passenger mod_rails apache mod for running Rails web apps. Passenger makes this so easy compared with the nginx+mongrel approach that is so last year.
• postfix mail for notifications: postfix seems less hassle than exim and is more likely to Just Work. Exim would be great if the online docs were a bit less academic.
• openssh of course
• mysql for older websites (including Peter's Blog), sqlite for newer (low traffic)
• a bash script does full/incremental tgz backups of /var/www, /etc and /home. The tars are then synced to Amazon's S3 cloud storage. I chose tgz as it is an open format so the data is accessible without special tools (even on windows) and restores are a doddle. I only backup data, not stuff that can be reinstalled. Transfers from the server to S3 are very fast: two gigabytes takes under two minutes. I use s3 rather than one and one's included FTP backup space as that is only accessible from the server itself meaning data + backups would both be dependent on one company.
• iptables firewall blocking most ports, tested with a web-based tool.
• openvpn gateway for development. Love openvpn, a bit fiddly to set up first time but once done its rock solid and much easier than messing with ssh tunnels. Only downside of openvpn I can think of: iPhone says no. Much easier to set up than that horrible IPSec crap.

I think that's it. Cron does mysqldumps which are backed up, freebie monitoring site emails me if server dies.

Setting this up only takes a couple of hours, most config is just copied from old server. This is why backing up /etc is a good thing.

My 1and1 dedicated server has had an annoying tendancy to freeze about once every two weeks. This has continually annoyed me and resolving it has been on my todo list. The freeze is sudden and total: no clues in the logs. I suspect dodgy hardware. I haven't contacted 1and1 about this as their customer service is notoriously poor and I suspect it would take me months to convince them I even had a problem.

I'd go for another provider in an instant except for one big problem: 1and1 are very cheap. The hangs are annoying but do I really want to spend £20 a month for more reliable hardware? I have monitoring in place and can reboot the server from my iPhone.

1and1 recently changed all their prices and I was able to upgrade to better hardware for the same money. For £30 a month I get the following improvements:

• dual core 64 bit AMD
• 2*160 g disks in raid 1
• unlimited traffic

This is running on the same chipset as the previous server (Nvidia C51) so fingers crossed that the hangs were not related to that (can't be as poor as Via?). I'd prefer an intel CPU if only because i've never seen problems with intel chipsets.

This is the crunch: the server you get from 1and1 compares very favourably to VPS's from other vendors. It's cheap because it is four or five year old technology: they are making money from their old racks (new hard disks I would hope).

I've invested in the £50 setup fee rather than be locked into a 24 month contract

Now to find the time to migrate everything over

I installed wordpress on my server to act as a formal staging post between the iPhone wordpress client and petersblogger. I tried installing the ubuntu package but the instructions were vague as the thing had been debianised and /use/share/doc/wordpress/README.debian assumed I already knew what i was doing.

I gave up on the ubuntu packsge and downloaded wordpress directly from wordpress.org and followed the ‘five minute install' and indeed had it running in five minutes.

Previously I had been using a free blog on wordpress.com but I decided to install it on my own server for three reasons:

• it won't be upgraded outside my knowledge and break the rss feed
• I can hit the rss feed every five minutes from cron without guilt
• ultimately I can bypass the rss and hit the database directly

One problem with the iPhone wordpress app: haven't found a way to delete a post.

I feel inspired by my new WordPress/iPhone setup to develop a new blogging format, something that is a compromise between the quick, terse, stream-of-consciousness Twitter posts and wordy, formal and time-consuming blog posts. This can be the first example of this amalgum of a blog and a tweet, let's call it a bleet as that is quite apt.

Unlike a regular blog article and like a tweet this bleet doesn't need a conclusion but can hang in the air.

If you can read this then I can do Moblog posts direct to petersblog (not blogger) from my iPhone via email. I have done similar things on the past but my previous phones were quite painful to compose messages with. The ways things are at the moment with protracted putting-kids-to-bed duties, this will make it possible for me to post more.

Blogging from iPhone

An example of the iphones mediocre camera.

Yeah, sure.

Blog*Spot/Blogger/whatever it is has a neat feature to specify your own domain name for your blog. Using this I have set up a new url for my moblog at http://moblog.petersblog.org in addition to http://petersmoblog.blogspot.com.

"Why bother" I hear you scream? Well, if I publish that url and it builds up any kind of readership (we live in hope) then I am free, should the whim take me, to change my hosting to some other platform without losing my audience.

I do care about you.

The big news could be the launch of Peter's Moblog. I got a new phone, a Sony Ericsson k800i as I wanted something with a better camera than my old K750i. This one is 3.2 megapixel and has a proper flash, albeit weedy. When I take pictures with the flash the background tends to be black. As a camera it is obviously not a patch on my Nikon D80 but the D80 doesn't fit in my pocket (I carry it in a backpack camera bag that I bought in Lidl). The k800i is a 'Cyberhot' i.e. branded as more camera focussed than a W series walkman phone.

The latest camera-phones are five megapixel but much more expensive and for me good lenses and low-noise electronics are more important than high resolution.

The flash pictures are a little noisy and the backgrounds are dark but they are ok, much better than the blurry efforts of the K750i. It has a feature that allows it to take nine shots at once, four before the shutter is pressed and four after so you can choose the best one. Problem is this doesn't work with the flash. It shares with the k750i an annoying long delay between pressing the trigger and getting a picture so a pose has to be held extra long. Thats something I love about the D80, photos are INSTANT.

The lens on the phone is very wide angle and one wonders why they bother with an autofocus mechanism. You have to get the phone quite close to the subject to fill the frame and it borders on fish-eye.

Anyway the phone has a built-in facilty to upload photo's as blog posts to blogger so I couldn't resist setting this up. I hate to think what my phone bill is going to be but I hope the moblog can be a non-techy slice of life, mainly watching my daughters grow. I really like the idea that I can update it anywhere there is a phone signal. The main problem with it is getting the portrait/landscape orientation right.

Sometime I may try to integrate the blogs by pulling the moblog posts into this blog.

UPDATE: if any blogspot veterans can let me know why some photos on the blog are disappearing then I'd be grateful.

UPDATE2: according to online billing, each picture post costs about 15p. Not too bad unless I do more than one a day when investing £6/month in a bundle may be better. It seems much faster for browsing so I may be using more data anyhow. Turns out phone is 3G and I could get Sky TV on it if only I didn't live in the back of beyond that is rural Kent. I think one of the G's get lost the other side of Maidstone.

UPDATE3: More notes:

• I like the ringtone I've chosen. The phone is a good music player, quite loud even if it isn't a walkman: perfect for annoying people on long train journeys. It can play CD tracks I've ripped in iTunes.
• Much less interference when talking close to a computer.

If you are really bored, you might like to check out my new Archive Page.

I thought about putting it in the sidebar but I didn't for a few reasons:

• it's ugly
• it takes time to generate the page and I didn't want the rendering of every url that wasn't already cached to require this hit.
• who cares anyway? It's mainly there to open up the older posts to search bots without them having to go through page/next 100 times.

On a more technical level, it uses the following route to give 'nice urls' for the year/month combinations:

map.connect 'post/on/:year/:month', :controller => 'post', :action => 'listbyyearmonth'
map.connect 'post/on/:year', :controller => 'post', :action => 'listbyyearmonth'

so March 2005 would be '/post/on/2005/3' which is cool.

I've missed blogging while I've been working on PetersBlogger. My old drupal blog was limping along: while administering the site it kept logging me out. I can admit now that I was running an old version of drupal (4.7?) which I couldn't upgrade due to module dependencies (mainly awtags). The old code wasn't running that smoothly under php5 despite initial appearancies.

I'm happy with my new blog platform, it's running really nicely on my slicehost slice and I've learnt an awful lot about rails while developing it. I will try to do a braindump of rails experiencies in forthcoming posts (cross fingers).

Drupal is a fine CMS and I'm using Drupal 5 on my company intranet. My thoughts on a drupal vs ruby on rails debate would be:

• drupal/php/apache is easier to deploy than a rails/ruby/mongrel/nginx deploy: I moved my drupal site between about four different hosts and did it each time in less than an hour. A rails setup is more convoluted (especially mongrel_cluster). However, this site is running much faster under rails than it was under drupal. The difference is probably down to php and apache being more mainstream and slightly more refined and hence easy to set up. I'm not saying rails is a total pain, just that if I only had ten minutes in which to deploy a site I would be reaching for drupal. If I only wanted to install the source and a few modules and never touch any coding then I would be happy with drupal.
• I love ruby and rails development. There is no comparison, php seems to me as much a bastard language as visual basic 6. Ruby was cleanly developed as an object orientated language, php is having object orientation grafted on as an afterthough.
• If I look through my drupal source I see no unit testing. Ruby/Rails has unit testing built in and I'm completely sold on it. I don't think I will ever trust any code (especially code I write) if it hasn't been unit tested. Some interesting aspects of unit testing:
  • I understand now the 'test driven' approach to development where you design a module's api by first roughing out how the tests will work: the unit test is your first experience of using the new api. It's during testing that you learn how nice an api will be.
  • If the documentation of a new ruby/rails tool is dubious, look in the unit tests to see how the author intended it to be used. If there are no tests then run.
  • If I run into a tricky bug, it's better to first reproduce it in unit tests, fix it there and then be happy that the bug will never recur. It's easier to debug code in a unit test (essentially a command line application) than on a live website.
• all ruby on rails applications follow basically the same architecture. It is fairly easy to figure out how a new application works. Every php application is different. I know I'm comparing a web framework to a programming language but none of the php applications (drupal, phpmyadmin) or am familiar with (wordpress) share a common architecture. New php application to maintain? New learning curve.
• my new site is being hammered with attempts to post to /comments/reply, even though it doesn't use that url for comment submission. The comment spammers know drupal and know where to test the locks. If any of them ever bother to try to find my comment submission url they will only find the same captcha that protected my drupal site (which was much easier to implement in rails, simply as a validation on the model).

This blog is now running on my new rails based blogging platform which I have called PetersBlogger (I'm not good at names).

It's mostly complete. Features:

• post articles (or you wouldn't be reading this)
• wilki formatting including syntax highlighting with ultraviolet e.g.

  strThis = "that"
  

• comments, including
  • moderation list
  • Peter's simplistic captcha system
• tagging
• pingomatic submission
• Technorati tags
• rss feeds (no atom yet)
• uses fragment caching for performance

Todo list:

• AJAX formatting preview
• atom feeds (do I care?)
• search (or rely on google)
• tag cloud
• archives by month/year: you DO care what I wrote in Feb 2005 right?
• gimmicks

Please let me know if you spot any sillies (that's if comment submission is working at all).

It's nice to use because the administration interface isn't split out into a seperate set of web pages, when I 'log in' I simply get extra buttons to press in the pages that you are seeing.

For the record I am still alive.

I'm busy working on a new blogging platform and I'm not quite ready to make it live yet. I decided to write it in Ruby on Rails directly rather than use an existing blogging application. I wanted something that ran under ruby on rails for the hackability and there were four candidates:

typo: Most popular rails blogging app but nobody seems to rate it as technically excellent. I tried the demo but was put off by the ajax: lots of complexity to go wrong there. mephisto: This seems to be highly regarded on a technical level but a few things put me off:

• it hasn't had an official release since 2006, the mephisto community seems to work in terms of svn revision numbers.
• it needs a pagination plugin to give basic functionality required by any blog with more than ten posts. I'd rather keep plugin requirements to a minimum (fewer things to break when upgrades come along).
• the database schema seems to be growing in complexity: 17 tables? The number of fields in the table that holds posts is also proliferating: 27 fields?
• the layout is configured by editing liquid templates. Apart from making it possible to edit layouts through the admin panel and to support themes, to me this just adds another layer of complexity and more to learn. I am happy with Rails built-in templating system. It took me no time to port my drupal theme to rails.

simplelog: a simple blogging platform but it didn't grab me. The link on the site to a wiki gives an access error.

radiant: Could be used for blogging but Radiant is primarily a cms. The author of Radiant uses Mephisto...

Development of my application has been quite rapid and it's very nearly ready for launch. However I have a problem with the Ruby on Rails testing framework: it's addictive and I can't bare the thought of putting up a live website without making sure it is thoroughly tested first. I'm in that testing/polishing phase that is hard to break out of if you have any kind of obsession with detail.

One thing is for sure: Rails is a joy to work with.

In the meantime, this old blog platform has lost it's lustre and I'm not so included to use it.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention hobix. I can't get past the website...

A google for "peter's blog" puts this site above the Blue Peter Blog!

Still top for 'Peter the wow noob'

I'm going to mention the phrase 'peter sublime hunter skillz' and see where it gets me.

UPDATE: it worked, no 1 google result next morning It also works for 'sublime hunter skillz' which is even better

Cross me and my wrath will be top of the google search results next day. So there.

I'm contemplating migrating this blog from drupal to Mephisto. The main reason is to put it on a more hackable platform. Drupal is theoretically hackable, being written in php, but the problem is that I find php a weak and ugly language, I'd rather play with Python or Ruby. I haven't been able to find a blogging platform written in Python, just a number of half finished projects (UPDATE: there is pybloxom but that uses files rather than a database which puts me off: SQL FTW). Ruby has at least two that I have found, both based on Ruby on Rails: typo and mephisto. Typo is a more popular application but from what I have read is leaning towards being a test bed for experimentation with Ajax. Mephisto seems cleaner and better designed so that is where I am aiming. Mephisto does seem a little cultish and doesn't have a large and active community. The principal developers seem very capable but are busy with something else.

Migrating the blog to Mephisto or any other platform has a number of problems which I am enumerating here as part of my planning:

• All the articles in the drupal database must be migrated. There is a framework here for migrating blogs to Mephisto and although it doesn't cover drupal (yet) this is a good start.
• The articles are all in wilki format and either need converting to textile (my preferred standard markup language) or a wilki filter needs to be written. Converting to textile is feasible and using a standard would make it easier to migrate again in future. However the conversion process would need to be perfect, developing a wilki filter has the advantage that I can fix presentation problems I find later, much easier than finding a problem and having to trawl the database to somehow identify and fix the broken textile.
• wilki uses the same syntax to link to other posts by node id and to link to tags by name. These links need migrating appropriately.
• Drupal offers many rss feeds based on categorys, tags, different paths, rss, atom etc. My access logs show a variety of these are being used but I don't know if any of these are actually being read by humans, scraped by bots or whether they are just ancient Rss aggregator subscriptions. I need a way to map all these old feeds onto appropriate feeds in the new system.

This isn't a simple matter. And I really need to be sure in myself that I find the right target before going through this hassle.

I'm finding the new Daily News blog format easier to deal with. It's less formal, it's easier to write and I think more readable. Collecting a days worth of notes on one page makes it more lightweight: I don't have to think of a title for each bullet point. I can edit the page as I change my mind or think of new things to mention.

How long will it last?

I've added no real content to the blog for months and let things stagnate. I move servers to save a bit of money and suddenly my page rank goes from 3 to 5. Is it because I am now on a US server and google has a low opinion of the importance of pages based elsewhere?

Do I care since it is probably a glitch? However, if it stays at 5 it could be time to cash in with some ads and affiliate links

I have missed blogging and feel guilty about not updating the site, especially the two pages of comments awaiting approval.

UPDATE: a week later and looking at the sitecounter stats there is no significant difference in traffic.

Lack of recent posts is mainly because I am now hooked on using daynotez on my Dell X51v PDA. It's becoming a more stream of conscious, diary kind of thing and is satiating my noting needs.

When I get some time I will try and knock up a Daynotez->blog bridge, however time is at a premium.

The Dell X51v is great, love it, cures all my hp rx1950 woes.

rx1950 == honda h100

x51v == suzuki hayabusa

I haven't blogged for over a month for personal reasons that I won't go into. I have quite a few things to write about, I have still been doing techy things over the last five weeks but I haven't felt inclined to discuss them with anyone. I have just set up a new blogging tool which may just inspire me to get posting regularly again.

Watch this space.

Based on comments left on this site I decided to look at TiddlyWiki, a personal Wiki system. I'm quite amazed by it as it is based on a single html file that does it all: it contains the code in javascript and also the CSS. It gives you a wiki editor plus storage for your wiki entries, all in the same file.

The entries in the Wiki are stored in 'Tiddlers', most of which are hidden when the html file is displayed. When you click on a Wikilink in the file the corresponding tiddler is displayed in the same page (not in a different page as is the case in a regular wiki). You can double-click on any open tiddler to open it in an editor. If you edit the file or add new tiddlers you can save it to your local hard disk, giving you a new version of the html file, complete with your edited tiddlers. The TiddlyWiki html file can be stored where you like, even on a USB flash key, giving you a pretty portable notebook with no software to install wherever you are using it. If you were so moved you could put the file on a web server, unmodifed, where folk could explore it wiki-fashion or download the thing to their own computer and edit it themselves. Cool. The TiddlyWiki site http://www.tiddlywiki.com, is itself a TiddlyWiki.

There are variations on the TiddlyWiki code that work with a server backend to store the tiddlers but the mainstream implementation is designed to work as a personal wiki system stored on your own computer (or flash key).

In a way the single file implementation bothers me because it means the wiki wouldn't scale very well: if I put 1000 entries in a wiki these are all embedded in one html file. This will take time to load into the computers memory where the browser will create a huge DOM model for it. FireFox is pretty memory hungry.

The ServerSide implementations that exist appear to load the tiddlers on demand so may not have this problem. However, in this case I am not sure how the search facility is implemented, whether it is delegated to a database engine. I have the code, I should look. There is a closed source Ruby-On-Rails version and in theory I could download the client side code and reverse engineer the server side code but that would be an objectionable way of doing things by my value system. I would only do that with an open-source system, maybe based on PHPTiddlyWiki creating PythonTiddlyWiki.

I think I could live with multiple TiddlyWiki files, one per subject, all bookmarked in FireFox: not such a big problem to context switch. In terms of Quick Blogging there is an ALT-J keypress that starts a new 'journal entry', leaving me to type what I want, press TAB, enter the tags, CTRL-Enter to finish. That's nice.

The way entries are stored in the html file is pretty clean: DIV's store the entries, with attributes holding the metadata: title/wikiname, modification date, modifier and tags. Easy to get the data out if need be.

I'll give it a try, see if I am still using it after a week.

What's the single most tedious thing about blogging: having to press the 'Add Blog Item ' button. I think I've hit on why taking notes with EverNote is fast: there is a blank note at the bottom of the screen that you can just start typing in.

I've realised that this could be done in a web app, simply by having a box on every page ready to start typing in. Google mail does something like this already: there is a little text box at the bottom of each message that you can select and start typing a reply: when selected it resizes itself and formatting toolbars and stuff appear. It's all very AJAXy and slick. Most of the time you can ignore it because it's not too big, once you explicitly start using it all the associated tools appear.

Compare to posting in drupal where there's all kinds of stuff filling the page: Input format, date edit boxes, categories, tags, I have to scroll down two pages to find the 'preview' and 'submit' buttons.

Here's a rough outline of the quick blogging features:

• Regular blog page appears with a textarea box ready for typing in
• Title is first line (if preceeded with a - or something), then a list of tags line, each tag preceeded with a dot or something similarly lightweight.
• Rest of post is in wilki format.
• Big button that uses AJAX to generate a preview which appears under the text box
• After preview a post button appears.

Everything goes in the one textarea box, no need to tab or click between controls. Now I know what I want, how to implement it?

I am growing disillusioned with EverNote, mainly because of the buggy handling of formatting: if you mark something bold, for example, it has an annoying habit of not turning the bold off, you have to fiddle around selecting a big block and turning it all off explicitly (very much like Microsoft Word). I'm happy to use markup to make things bold, it's simple and understandable.

I want all my notes on a server where I can get to them from anywhere.

This is no more than a plug for the Dilbert Blog by the Dilbert Cartoonist, Scott Adams. Very well written, interesting and amusing, not very technical apart from promoting blackberries (Dear Santa, I want one!).

You can download a free book, although it is in the much reviled pdf format.

This is the 1000th node. Now not all nodes relate to posted articles but this has to be some kind of landmark. There are probably over 950 actual posts here by now.

And they said I wouldn't keep it up. Who? Well, nobody I know but some cynic somewhere must have said it at some time. Or am I being cynical by writing that?

If my rss subscribers are getting a flood of seemingly duplicate postings it is because I decided to reformat my posts a tad to emphasise the awtags links below the node bodies. I edited the awtags source to change the word 'tags:' to the more informative 'Related Topics:' and I edited the awTags_TagLinks css style to delineate the links from the node body:

   1  .awTags_TagLinks {
   2      padding: 5px;
   3      margin: 20px 10px 10px 10px;
   4      border-top: 1px solid black;
   5  }
   6  
   7  .sticky .awTags_TagLinks {
   8      visibility: hidden;
   9      display: inline;
  10  }
Toggle Line Numbers

This also hides awtags from sticky nodes which I use at the top of tag descriptions.

Writing a blog I habitually google for references and copy the link location from the google results and paste them into my article, using the totally essential 'Copy Link Location' entry in Firefox's context menu. A few weeks back google started messing with the URLs in the search results in order to track people clicking on them. This changed the URL from something like:

http://www.microsoft.com

to the totally annoying:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A//www.microsoft.com/&ei=G3QVQ_H5CYKERaGaqfEO

To fix this I have installed this script for greasemonkey which fixes this while not depriving google of their stats or advertising revenue.

Be careful who you criticise as you might just meet them one day. In an earlier post I may have conveyed some satisfaction that Saskia was evicted from Big Brother. Here she is with my daughter:

Flickr photo set: 15 of the 16 2005 housemates at a book signing in London.

Moved Peter's Blog to new oneandone dedicated server. Observations:

• Much faster
• The cache problem has gone away (qed Site5?).

The speed may be due to:

• dedicated server to itself
• mod_php instead of cgi on site5.

In summary, woo hoo.

My Microblogging tool is coming together. This is my vision for a blogging tool that is:

• Fast to post with so posting is as lightweight as possible
• Supports tagging to organise the posts. I have decided that tagging is preferable to putting articles in a rigid tree hierarchy.

I decided on the following architecture:

• VIM as an editor. For me this is by far the quickest way to do data entry
• I create however many posts in an single page and post them in one go
• I use Vim's python scripting to send the file full of posts to the server via an xmlrpc call
• The server implements a python cgi script to process the file full of posts. It splits the files into seperate posts and submits them to Drupal one by one. Drupal is the backend database and is also a reporting tool.

Most of the processing is done by the cgi script. I could post directly from VIM to Drupal, post-by-post but the Drupal blogapi does not support awtags and I'd rather write some python to do it that struggle modifying the php code. The cgi script also supports reading back a days-worth of postings so I can also edit existing posts.

Using VIM I was able to create a nice syntax-highlighing definition to make the posts easy to edit. Here is an example of how it looks in VIM:

This is the title
    23 August 2005 12:34
    [some stuff]
    This is a posting in Vim. I can create stuff in VIM much faster than I
    can type it in textarea in a web browser.

    As posts support basic html markup, html tags are <i>syntax highlighted</i>.

    It will syntax-highlight python:
    <python>
    for i in range( 10):
        print "Python rox"
    </python>

    It shows blocks with a green mark in the first column.

    It will syntax-highlight php:
    <php>
    $strStr = "What is the dollar for?";
    </php>

    It marks out my verbatim blocks:
    <verbatim>
    This is preformatted.
    </verbatim>

The format of the posts is a title line followed by date/timestamp and a list of tags, followed by the post itself, indented to delineate it. For me the syntax highlighting is the killer feature, I am almost word-blind without syntax highlighting. I stole the idea fromwas inspired by The Vim Outliner.

I won't post all the code here as it's too big to post inline and it is highly likely that nobody else is interested anyway. It's not quite finished, I still have a few issues to resolve:

• VIM macros to help in posting, such as filling in the date.
• Support for multiple blogs: work blog, personal note blog and this blog. How to cross post?
• Any way to handle images/attachments?

I call it the Microblog, micro to emphasise the fine-grained nature: not big laborious articles (like this one) but short pithy notes.

Giving Dave Winer's new OPML Editor a try. It is cross between an outliner and a blogging tool. You can see my new blog here. At the moment it comes with free hosting but make the most of it because Dave has wisely made no commitments.

As a tool it looks like an update of Radio Userland. It supports html markup which is pretty much a must-have these days.

Posting through the editor is very quick and easy, I could be tempted by it, or maybe a way of importing the OPML into Drupal? I'll have to think about it. OPML is a nice file format, XML and all that, not proprietary or a binary black box.

It supports a kind of public outline which you can share with your buddies or, my preference, use to dump notes for home or work.

It is interesting, I'd play some more but unfortunately I've got to do babysitting