(Note: Because I’m terrible at remembering to post entries during the week, this post is actually from last week. But it’s still interesting!)

The past few weeks have been somewhat disjointed for me. I’d been working a lot to wrap up a long expected release, followed by a vacation without a project plan, and a few more busy weeks. On top of this, I spent a bunch of time working on wrapping up, or at least releasing a few personal project to assuage some guilt.

After all that, I found myself at loose ends: I didn’t have new projects because I hadn’t had enough time to think about them or more importantly I was so interested in finishing something that I’d been trying to suppress thinking about new projects.

Well that was a great idea. Not. Now, finally after spending too long lolling about and trying to restart the creative (and project planning) engines, I’ve actually done some things:

RstCloth

Basically this the first break at a very very simple API for generating reStructuredText. It’s modeled on the interface for my buildcloth which does the same sort of thing for generating Makefiles.

reStrucutredText exists to make text easier for humans to write well formed documents, which is great and useful for about 95% of use cases: human editable text formats for machine parsing are an amazing boon to documentation productivity.

There are cases, where it makes more sense to store content in a regular format, like JSON or YAML and build the content programatically, tabular data, integrating content from external sources. If most of your tool chain uses reStructuredText, then something like RstCloth is probably exactly what you need.

And because it’s a second-generation *Cloth tool, I already have most of the awkwardness worked out.

It’s still dev, and I’ll be getting documentation, a readme, and some examples nailed out in the next few weeks. In the meantime:

• rstcloth on pypi
• rstcloth on github

tumblr -- m.tycho.co

I reactivated my tumblr account, hooked it up to the awesome tumblesocks plugin for emacs, and have attached it to the concise m.tycho.co domain. I’m also mirroring the content at tychoish.com/micro.

I’m going to try to avoid over thinking this, but:

• While I’ve had some struggles with the emacs integration, it’s generally really idiomatic.

• I really like that you can queue posts. This is the feature that I miss the most about systems that I’ve used in the past to host tychoish.

• I like that there are some community features, and that the tagging isn’t worthless in light of being able to use tags to jump to relevant posts from other people.

  While I like self-hosted websites, and am kind of freaked out by the whole “my blog is a service,” I think that the connection to a community/audience is useful and powerful, and is not to be overrated.

• I like that tumblr does automatic integration with facebook and twitter. You can sort of do this manually, but baking things in leads to a better experience.