Blood Socks

I’ve been promising this for a while, and I finally came through. Not with a battle-ready megafortress, but more a little teepee sitting in the desert. It’s missing more than it has, but at least it’s here. First off, let’s get something clear:

I will be posting once a day for at least the first year of this site.

While certain areas of my life have been flourishing and outright exploding over the past year, many have languished and stagnated. Of all of these areas, the most troubling one is creative output. Maintaining a blog does not alone sustain and grow the right half of the human brain, just as taking walks doesn’t constitute a full regimen of exercise. But for many people, a walk each day is all it takes to avoid getting fat, thus giving you more energy for other things. As you can see, I’ve languished long enough that this is the height of my analogistic powers.

I’ve designed this site to emphasize more than just written posts, but also songs, videos, images, quotes, whatever, all tumblelog style. It’s not like I’m all business. But I’ve written some good blog posts over the last few years, ones I’d be proud to use as writing samples or develop into essays. That’s really valuable stuff. The kind of backbone my brain could use.

And that’s alongside continuing development, especially in this first month, where I’ll be adding new features almost every day as well. A list of things to come would be way large, but the most imminent things are Textile support (for you and me both), comment previews, and IE/general visual improvements.

My CSS skills have heightened from my last two incarnations, and I think my aesthetic is a little more in line with the times now. I’m not ashamed to send people here anymore, which is nice. I’m actually planning on importing all of the data from my last site (not too hard), and my first site (like really hard). But once it’s done it’s done forever, and I can pick it up and carry it around with me like a lunchbox.

Some technical details: this site is written in Python, using Django. It was a real big change from working in my most common language (Ruby), and I experienced a lot of frustrations along the way, some that made me want to start the whole thing over in a more comfortable setting. But I persevered, and along the way have begun developing a grudging respect for Python and substantial respect for Django.

Everything here is still very fluid, permeable. You could probably break the site pretty easily if you tried. But don’t. Instead, tell me what you think! And be honest!

It’s been around for a couple weeks now, but it’s worth mentioning that I put up a website that shows all of my money. Specifically, it shows my checking account, savings account, credit card balance, and my total remaining student loan balance. That’s all I have; I don’t own stock, or have a 401K (by choice). The bank accounts and credit card are updated automatically each night, and I update the student loan myself monthly, since it only changes monthly anyway. There’s an RSS feed, so you can get daily updates, and I made it so I can embed it in the sidebar over there to the right.

As the site’s footer says, many of my loved ones saw no point to it and thought it would only bring me harm, no matter what I said to them. As far as I know they still all feel that way. But I did it anyway, cause I’m convinced that for the vast majority of people, money has no reason to be taboo, and I would like to see what happens if I violate that taboo in a very public way. So far, all that’s happened is I’ve received a few admiring emails, a couple emails of lengthy financial advice, and given a bunch of people some lol’s. I do, admittedly, still find it jarring to get an email from someone who somehow knows my financial state—my instincts tell me that no one should know these things about me. I’m pretty sure that the death of those instincts is imminent.

A few people have suggested that I put a PayPal donation link on the site. On almost any site I could think of making, like Isitchristmas, I’d consider that “selling out”, but there’s an argument to be made that it’s interesting and appropriate for Ohnomymoney. There’s also an argument to be made that people will then see it as a money making gimmick and lose interest. I don’t know. At the least, people would have to trust that I’m actually trying to make it into the black and that their money would be put to use doing so. Maybe I could accept donations specifically for my student loans, since that’s one debt which can only go down. I’ll keep thinking about it.

I do have one major planned feature remaining, which is to make available the history of an account, or of my whole worth, over time, and plot the data on simple chartz or graphz. I’ll use the Google Charts API. If you’re wondering how the site works under the hood, it’s written in Ruby and Haml, on the Camping framework, and works with the Wesabe API to fetch my balances each night. I make the source code available, so go take a look—it’s dirt simple.

I’m not trying to overhype this site, here; it’s a tiny little thing that just shows a few numbers, that’s all. Unlike Isitchristmas, it will draw probably no more traffic than my blog (which is about 30 visits per day, if you were wondering). I’ll be thrilled even if the only thing it does is inspire someone else to post their finances on their blog or something. Down with the taboo!

If you don’t use Basecamp for time tracking, or you don’t use a command line, you can ignore this post.

I made my first Github project today. It’s something small I made a few months ago for me and my coworkers, a command line tool to log your times on Basecamp. That’s how we do time tracking inside thoughtbot, so it vastly simplifies my life to not have to visit Basecamp in my browser 10 times a day, I can just log time on the command line. I named it Basecamper.

Go check out the README to see how it works and how to install it. It’s dirt simple, and there’s 3 of us at thoughtbot that use it exclusively. I even wrote myself an accompanying script (not in the repository) that does my code commits and time logging in one command, using the same message, so I don’t have to duplicate it. It’s a great boon to me.

Basecamper on Github

I had an awesome Christmas. Like usual, I went first to Catskill, NY
down to Dublin, Pennsylvania to spend time with all my family. I got to stay longer than last year, and even made a trip to the Q-Mart. Sadly, my Q-mart story from when I was 15, wherein I obtain a floppy disk filled with unofficial, animated, (and heavily pixelated,) Flintstones pornography, came out during gift-giving, and my family kept bringing it up for the rest of my stay.

Coolest gift: my hip mom spied me twittering about the comic chainsawsuit and got me the book! She even got it autographed for me. And this is only after me mentioning a few of my favorite strips. Wicked cool.

Upon first coming home for Christmas, I spent two very, very late nights working on websites. The first night I spent open-sourcing IsItChristmas, which now has a home on Github. Already, this decision is bearing fruit.

The other night was spent finally integrating Sir Kevin Burg’s redesign of my money site. Kevin actually gave me a mockup and HTML/CSS for the redesign back in like June, but my interests started veering in other directions and I stopped doing anything on the site. Maybe this will spark me into giving it some more attention.

Great holiday—very relaxing. It’s also been oddly grounding. My new weird freelancing lifestyle now seems somehow more real and “legitimate” after having been pierced by my lifelong holiday traditions. My world is not so different after all. One further effect: my two all-nighters were completely invigorating, and reminded me how much I miss working from internal motivation. These days, I regularly distract myself too much with books and games, and rarely binge on side projects. This has got to change…and now!