I’ve recently fell in love with Ping.fm. Originally, I was going to implement this exact type of multi-service posting for my shared stuff. Good thing they’ve saved me all of that work. Now I just need to post to Ping.fm and let them regurgitate it across the interwebz. There are already existing libraries for a few different languages. The Ruby library worked, but (IMO) needed some serious refactoring. So that’s exactly what I’ve started to do. The code is posted at the usual place. Enjoy!

Ping.fm Ruby Library: http://github.com/Oshuma/pingfm/

I’ve known about Heroku for a while, but haven’t used it for anything beyond creating simple CRUD for an ‘Article’ model or whatever. Yawn.

However, I just finished creating a test app for GitTrip that bumps Heroku’s coolness/usefulness up a few notches (and now serves as GitTrip’s unofficial official site). I did have some problems with installing gems through their gem browser, but it worked fine when I uploaded the .gem directly from my computer. I also stumbled upon the fact that they automagically create a git repository when you create an app. Check the ‘Revisions’ link in the Code ‘IDE’ (bottom left, underneath the file list). This, along with the Heroku gem, make working locally (almost) seamless.

Now you know why Heroku is cooler than you.

I just implemented a couple of extremely simple ‘render modes’ for GitTrip. The below image was generated from the current head of GitTrip, using one of the aforementioned modes. After a little more testing, I’m going to add to this site an image that’s dynamically generated from its GitHub repository using GitTrip.

There are many different types of git repository browsers, but none (that I’m aware of) allow you to ‘really’ visually browse a repository. Let me explain.

Everyone knows that each git object is a 40 character SHA string, containing only 0-9a-f. With that said, you can create a single RGB color using a 6 character string consisting of 0-9a-f. So, from each git object, you can grab (for example) 6 RGB colors (using the ”#RRGGBB” format), with 4 characters of the SHA left over. These colors are used to create a truly visual representation of the git object.

Here’s an image that was generated from the GitTrip repository (using the above example to determine the number of colors):

Here’s the SHA broken down:

0996d1ec3c0da1ff5ac91e5ed5678139932e ad4d
0996d1ec3c0da1ff5ac91e5ed5678139932e name

By default, the image ‘name’ (NOT filename) contains the remaining 4 characters interpolated with some other random data pulled from the SHA.

The only thing that’s set in stone is the image generation based on the SHA. Everything in the middle will be configurable or scriptable.

• http://github.com/Oshuma/git-trip/
• http://git-trip.rubyforge.org/

George Carlin forever, you cocksucking motherfuckers.