I am aware that some customers are chomping at the bit to buy MarsEdit, but have not been able to do so because they don’t have a credit card. While most Americans can’t imagine life without one, they aren’t so popular in some countries.

So for all of you with PayPal accounts but no credit card, I’m pleased to announce that the Red Sweater Store now supports PayPal for purchasing MarsEdit. Go ahead and test it out :)

I’ve recently seen two bug reports about the behavior of the MarsEdit “Bookmarklet,” the little link that you can stick in your browser’s toolbar to easily “reblog” stuff that you find on the web. The gist of the problem is that special characters end up getting junked in transition so that they show up as useless parts of escape codes in MarsEdit. That’s no fun for anybody.

Following a lead from Takaaki, who reported one of the issues, I found what appears to be a sane workaround. The bookmarklet needs to use “encodeURIComponent” instead of “escape” to sanitize the input strings for the “magic URL” that sends the page to MarsEdit. (Read more about the various escaping mechanisms and when to use them).

The best part about these bugs is I can release a fix without updating MarsEdit itself. The behavior of MarsEdit seems to be perfect when the bookmarklet is altered to use the proper escaping function. So if you’ve run into this problem, please give the new bookmarklet a try:

Post with MarsEdit (drag link to bookmark bar)

And be sure to let me know if there are other issues which should be addressed in the bookmarklet for the next MarsEdit release.

Anybody running WordPress should be aware of the recent security breach at WordPress HQ, that caused a pretty troubling “tainting” of the 2.1.1 release distribution. The funny thing here is, if you updated to 2.1.1 early enough, or if you got the sources directly from the Subversion repository, you’re “safe.” Well, relatively safe. They apparently added some more security fixes to 2.1.2, so it’s a good idea to upgrade anyway.

If you run WordPress, you’ve probably discovered that upgrading can be somewhat tedious – especially if you have custom changes. The problem is you need to apply all the modified files to your blog directory, without destroying anything custom you’ve popped in there yourself. Assuming you haven’t modified any core files the process is a simple matter of updating the core files while leaving your custom files, e.g. themes and plugins, alone.

For a long time I did these updates by unzipping the release files directly to the affected directory. It turns out that the unarchiving process was “non-destructive” in the sense that it wouldn’t overwrite an entire directory just to update one file. So that worked pretty well. But then one day lurking in the IRC #wordpress channel, I learned a great tip, which is to use Subversion directly to export the release onto your blog directory.

I use Subversion myself for all my web files, so it’s easy to “play with fire” and run a command like this:

svn export --force http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.1.2/ ./

What this does is spray all the files from a particular release (in this case 2.1.2) into my blog directory. Since I’m also running svn, I then have the luxury to “svn status,” “svn diff” etc, and compare the changes. I then test the upgrade and commit the changes to my personal svn repository when everything looks OK.

This technique has essentially cut my “time to upgrade” for WordPress down to about 2 minutes – and I don’t have to deal with downloads, packages, etc. The only downside I can imagine is that if WordPress removes a file, I’ll have a stale copy of it. I suppose I should look into an improved technique that would consider this – but it hasn’t been a problem yet.

In the latest DreamHost newsletter, DreamHost offers an apology for the recent outages. Actually, they don’t offer an apology in the newsletter, they make stupid excuses and then point to their self-titled “Super Lame Apology.” At least they got one thing right.

I find almost every line in the newsletter to be laughable, so I’d like to reply on behalf of all DreamHost customers:

Downtime gets me down.

And yet whenever it happens you respond publicly as if it was the world’s greatest joke, poking fun at your own incompetence and hoping to skate by again on the “DreamHost candor.”

Hopefully, since you don’t run a web hosting company, it’s not so big a deal for you.

Who me? Having my site – my company’s public face to the world – go down? No big deal at all. It’s not like I care about my customers. Maybe you could learn something from me.

Yeah, you can’t check your email from midnight-5am Pacific time one Sunday. Hopefully you aren’t normally on the Internet then.

Ah, touche! The old “we messed up but you’d be super-lame to have wanted service at that time anyway.” That’s classic, really. And apparently you don’t give a crap about anybody not living and working in a US-centric time zone, either.

Hopefully, you’re normally flipping from rooftop to rooftop, throwing shuriken and eating pizza at that time.

In comes the pseudo-insanity humor. Ah, DreamHost! You’re so funny. As long as you keep making comic-book cartoon jokes, I don’t care how reliable my service is.

Nevertheless, not everybody can be a ninja, a teenager, a mutant, or even a turtle, and some of you may have gotten a little down this last weekend when our planned power outage had a few unforeseen side-effects.

Again, it’s my fault for not being a fictional superhero. Not yours for bringing my site down?

Which is why, we recommend you read this blog post about our new “SLA”!

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2007/02/28/super-lame-apology/

So we can treat ourselves to the even more long-winded, even more fake-apology, even more “cracking jokes at the wrong time” version of this bullshit.

Uptime gets me up!

Just imagine how much customers like it.

And yet, in spite of all this crap, I’m still a DreamHost customer. I host the main page and blog on Pair, because they give a crap about uptime. They make it their point to have a reputation for 100% reliability. And since I switched to them I have literally not been down once.

But DreamHost has such great, liberal services. I run my mail through DreamHost because they have better mailing list support and a fairly good webmail interface. I also host some svn repositories there, and run some company project management stuff through a subdomain there. I stick with DreamHost because they offer great services. It seems to me they could really go all the way if they fixed this messed up attitude they have about uptime. It’s not a joke, DreamHost. It’s the steady downfall of your business.