November 2011

I moved from static HTML pages to web applications and back to static HTML files. There’s a lot to be said for the simplicity and portability of a bunch of files. Static site generators like Jekyll are increasingly popular; I’ve built a simple publisher that I use extensively. Web apps give you something else, though, that are still useful on a static site. Access control. I’ve been resorting to htpasswd to protect static files, and it’s far from optimal. I don’t want to know or manage users’ passwords. I don’t want them to remember a new ID. I just want to allow specific people to log in via their Google Accounts. (OpenID is too confusing, and most people use Google anyway.) ...

The best way to explain code to a group of people is by walking through it. If they’re far away in space or time, then a video is the next best thing. You can recommend them to try out the best coding apps as well. The trouble with videos, though, is that they’re big. I can’t host them on my server – I’d need YouTube. Editing them is tough. You can’t copy & paste code from videos. And so on. One interesting alternative is to use presentations with audio. Slideshare, for instance, lets you share slides and sync it with audio. That almost works. But it’s still not good enough. I’d like code to be stored as code. What I really need is codecasting: a YouTube or Slideshare for code. The closest I’ve seen until day-before was etherpad or ttyrec – but neither support audio. Enter Popcorn. It’s a Javascript library from Mozilla that, among other things, can fire events when an audio/video element reaches a particular point. ...