url_pipe

I presented url_pipe at last night’s Democamp.  Short story: it’s not ready. Filters work, the command line doesn’t.

The consensus I got from a few geeks afterwards is this could be useful. A few might help, which would be great.

Simon challenged my choice of RESTful architecture for creating filters rather than passing arguments. If the resulting command is incredibly long, it could be passed through a tiny-url function. That’s crazy enough it might just work; it also handles some of the security and caching issues. I’m pretty sure he’s correct, since that actually simplifies the code considerably

Those are the kinds of feedback geeks need to tinker productively. People that say “yeah, that’s cool”, those that say “I can help” and those that point out how you could make it simpler.

Code will be out soon, I promise. For now, I have to catch up on some Standoutjobs work. It’s my day job and they were kind enough to let me have some flexible hours to work on this - despite the fact we’re in crunch mode and getting ready for a beta.

My last big hurdle is getting a server set up properly. I could go on about the technical WTFs I have had working on this, but it probably should go in a post by itself. Actually, it could be a series of posts: I spent more time fiddling with server configuration issues than writing code.

Ok, one teaser: at the last minute at the SAT, my server wasn’t responding. I ssh into it, and it seems to be fine. It turns out no traffic was going through port 3000. I restarted my server instance on port 80, and things started working fine.

A server not responding, minutes before a demo. How stressful is that?

Another post will follow with SVN info when things are a tad cleaned up. In the meantime, please get in touch if you want to help!