Getting rid of Open With duplicates, via Daring Fireball.

If you work with Markdown files, this is an indispensable addition to OSX preview functionality.

I have just finished the alpha version of Ristretto, a ‘baked’ blogging engine. That is, it’s an engine that reads posts written in Markdown and generates static html files.

Ristretto is loosely inspired on Marco Arment’s Second Crack. Some interesting references about why baked blogs are worth considering can be found in A plea for baked blogs, Blogging with Octropress, and Blogging with Second Crack.

Ristretto is written in Python. The alpha version of Ristretto is functional and can be used for daily blogging. I am using it for both this blog (code.zoia.org) and zoia.org. It can be found on Github. (I have switched both this blog and zoia.org to Ristretto.)

The geek inside me longs for something like http://scriptogr.am, a solution where you publish a new post just by creating a Markdown file in a folder on your Dropbox account. Your post gets automagically coverted to static HTML and published on your site.

The geek inside me longs for writing some code to accomplish the same…

Wordpress is a great platform, and I use it for several blogs. But for most of my needs I could use a simpler solution that did not require a ton of plugins to accomplish simple tasks.

I use Sidestep on OSX to build an encrypted connection to a remote server of my own through when connecting to the Internet on public WiFi networks. But the latest version of SideStep does not work reliably with Mountain Lion.

TunnelBear offers an alternative, and its free for casual use (up to 500MB monthly).