*Blog Down Time*
I'm shifting this blog over to Wordpress from Typo because there are continuous run away fastcgi processes. This has happened at both Dreamhost and Site5. I'm not sure why this is happening, but I've read of others with the same problem. With a bit of luck you won't even know I've gone, but you never know...
*Update*
I finally managed to get "msgpad":http://msgpad.com up and running again after a brief self induced outage.
While refactoring the code I realised I needed to improve the way the assets (javascript, stylesheets) were being handled. "AssetPackager":http://synthesis.sbecker.net/pages/asset_packager wasn't quite what I wanted, but was a step up from my shell scripts.
So what I ended up with was Brian, my asset manager. Brian is cool because he understands:
* My javascript, stylesheet dependencies.
* Compressing assets is required in production, but not during development.
* Caching is best left to browsers by filename, so Brian versions compressed files that are distributed in production.
* Some day I may want to add support for other assets such as XML, html... That's why he provides user definable "compilers" in the configuration file.
* When I reference a single asset, I really mean the entire dependency tree, and in order.
* I want terse, but understandable configuration. He uses YAML.
He's cool for more reasons but I'll elaborate some other day.
Why call it Brian? Names are arbitrary and that was the first name that popped in to my miniscule brain.
Brian is still in the lab, but once I get my blog moved, and perhaps a few other things done, I'll provide more information and open up the source. It's setup as a Rails plugin right now.