Most of my work for Automattic is done on a remote sandbox machine, somewhere in Texas. I’ll often jump in and make smaller edits over SSH via vi, but when I’m doing something bigger I much prefer to work locally, using TextMate (I’m on a Mac, obviously). To do that, I need to be able to access files as if they were local, which means either duplicating them to my machine (lame, annoying) or mounting them directly.
I’ve been doing that via one of the following options, and I’m wondering if anyone out there has a better solution.
I’ve tried both for a while now. They both work. Except for when they don’t. Here’s what I’d found:
- Transmit seems more responsive, when it’s working
- Macfusion often crashes Finder the first time I access a newly connected filesystem (and is then reasonably stable)
- Transmit much more randomly just stops working and gives no indication, I just can’t browse any more and have to disconnect/reconnect
- Macfusion allows you to easily customize a neat icon for each filesystem
- Transmit seems to have more aggressive caching (or a longer TTL on it) of filesystem details (part of what makes it feel more responsive)
So, have you used one of the following methods? Is there a configuration option I’m missing? How do you go about solving this problem?
UPDATE: I should have mentioned that I need to be able to do this over the open internet (securely), where I’m not connected directly to the same network as the server.
For the past few months, my team at Automattic (Team Social FTW!) has been working on a super-secret project. Today, almost perfectly synchronized with the NASA space shuttle landing (total fluke, but awesome regardless) we launched Jetpack!
Jetpack is a new plugin that delivers a bunch of popular features from WordPress.com (the hosted site, which Automattic runs) to self-hosted installs of WordPress (such as the one that runs Dented Reality). Once you install Jetpack, you get some of the cooler things available on WordPress.com, automatically enabled on your own WordPress site. The modules you get today are just the beginning though, there are a lot more planned for future releases. We’re going to be targeting some of the biggest features that are easier for us to do on our massive grid/cloud infrastructure, but harder for folks to do on their own shared-hosting accounts.
We also managed to partner with a bunch of leading web hosts, so if you’re doing a one-click install on Bluehost, DreamHost, Go Daddy, HostGator, Media Temple, or Network Solutions, you’ll get Jetpack as part of your install. This is huge for people installing their own WordPress.
This has been the coolest thing I’ve worked on at Automattic so far, and it’s been awesome to be involved in a project that has seen so many contributions internally (over 40 people were involved in everything from UX to design to internationalization to testing and debugging) and so many iterations since its inception. I’m really proud of what we’ve created, and hope that it sets a new bar for the design of WordPress plugins (I really think Jetpack is beautiful, amazing work Joen, Hugo and MT!).
So – check out Jetpack if you’re running WordPress on your own server, and let us know what you think!
Which features would you most like to see in Jetpack? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see what I can do 
PS: This post proudly proof-read by After The Deadline, as delivered via Jetpack
Today is a very exciting day for me, because I start as a full-time employee with Automattic, Inc.
Here’s a little bit about how that happened and what it means to me:
Read the rest of this post…
It’s almost time for another WordCamp event, and I can’t wait. This is the big one – the fourth annual San Francisco WordCamp! This will also be the fourth WordCamp that I’ve attended. Yes, I believe that makes me somewhat of a groupie.
There’s a new website online as of yesterday and it’s looking pretty spiffy. I’m looking forward to seeing Tim Ferriss and Tara Hunt speak in particular.
Oh, and I’m going to be helping out on the “Genius Bar” for a bit as well, so drop by and get some questions answered!
This will probably be a bit of a different experience for me than previous years because I’ve been doing some consulting work with Automattic, so I’ve met a lot of the crew now, and it’ll be good to see a lot of them again here.
I’ve just released a plugin I’ve been working on called “Sparkplug”. It’s quite simple (although some of the code turned out to be a lot more complex than I expected!), and just gives you a small sparkline graphic indicating the number of posts per day for the current “view”. This is particularly handy on multi-author blogs which are split up into discrete sections via category or tag.
It was specifically written for/tested on the as-yet-unreleased Prologue Projects theme from Automattic, so when that comes out, it’ll be ready to go. Check out all the details about Sparkplug.
Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a new importer for people who use LiveJournal, but would like to switch over to WordPress. With LiveJournal laying off a bunch of employees, it seemed like some people might prefer to move to a platform where they had a bit more control over their own content, rather than relying on another company to handle it for them. I decided that my measure of success would be that it needed to be capable of importing Guav’s entire journal — comments and all, without error.
As it turns out, it’s been quite a project. LiveJournal’s API is, shall we say, “challenging” to work with, and the sheer size of Guav’s journal (over 3,700 posts and nearly 200,000 comments) meant that I kept running into time, memory and database limits that would crash the importer. After a lot of back and forth with Guav though, I’m happy to present the new importer (find it under Tools > Import > LiveJournal), sporting the following features:
- Just enter your LiveJournal username and password and you’re ready to go
- Via the API, it connects directly to LiveJournal and imports all of your posts,
- Posts marked as “Friends Only” are assigned a password within WordPress,
- Posts marked as “Private (you only)” are marked as Private within WordPress, which means that only authors on your new blog can read them,
- lj-cut tags are converted to the WordPress equivalent, the <! — more — > tag,
- lj-user tags are converted to normal links, and have class=”lj-user” attached to them to make it easier to style them if you like,
- Tags are imported properly,
- If you closed the comments on a post in LiveJournal, then they’ll be closed in WordPress as well,
- Lots of the “meta” information related to posts is also imported using WordPress’ Custom Fields feature. You could then use these values to reproduce some of LiveJournal’s functionality within your new theme if you like. The fields imported are:
- If your post contains adult content (lj_adult_content),
- Your current co-ordinates and location (lj_current_coords and lj_current_location),
- Your current mood (lj_current_mood),
- Current music (lj_current_music),
- Your userpic keyword (lj_picture_keyword)
- Next up, all of your comments are also imported,
- Threading is preserved, so replies to other comments show up successfully (provided you enable that feature in WordPress),
- The “subject” of each comment is included as the first line of the comment itself, because WordPress doesn’t have a comment title/subject value,
- LiveJournal users get links back to their LiveJournals,
- Your own comments are linked to your WordPress account, and are linked back to your new WordPress blog,
- Anonymous users are labeled as “Anonymous”,
- “Screened” comments on LiveJournal are imported as “Unapproved” within WordPress, so you can decide what to do with them
So there you have it, a brand new, shiny LiveJournal importer. This should be bundled with the 2.8 release of WordPress (it’s available right now on WordPress.com), and will be available for everyone. As I mentioned, it’s been tested with one single, very large blog (and a few smaller test ones), but if you find anything wrong with it, please file a bug on the WordPress Trac!
Huge thanks again to Guav for helping with the testing of this thing (maybe now he can migrate over to WordPress as well)!
