These are my experiences starting out as a bicycle messenger. Today was my first paid day working for Mercury, who are one of the companies under the corporate umbrella of C.T.I. in Perth, Australia.

On Monday (yesterday) I just shadowed a messenger for half a day to learn the ropes and try to get a handle on how it works. I guess it was also a chance to back out if the whole experience freaked me out, which it didn't. Instead I sped down to Crumpler to buy myself a messenger bag.

On an impulse I bought myself an iPod Nano, second generation. I couldn't resist temptation and grabbed one when I went to visit my friend in a nearby town. I've been playing with it and its perfect for what I want it for, playing music while cycling.

Today I went for an interview to become a bicycle messenger. It went really well, the people I met were very cool, friendly and welcoming. I'm doing a trial morning ride on Monday following one of the couriers around so I can get a feel for it.

Mephisto now has an implementation of the MetaWeblog API so you can post articles (like this one) from your favourite Weblog Editor. I've been trying MarsEdit by Ranchero. The API seems to be working ok although when I post a new article it seems to be saved as draft rather than published which kind of defeats the purpose. I'm also not seeing a way to enter an excerpt either.

This is a version of the TextilePHP code wrapped in a Xaraya module format. I put it together ages ago and posted it on my company web site, but as that is going to get a re-design soon I thought I'd also post it up here. What follows is the original text from my previous post and a link to the module.

When I say vanishing dollar signs I'm not implying that the Xaraya team are extremely poor and getting poorer; what I mean to say is that for about two weeks I've been struggling with a Xaraya site that refused to display a monetary value denoted by a dollar sign, for example $5.50 would not show up in its complete form, but instead as .50

This should make your page titles reflect the section you are in. Its a bit ugly because I don't know the correct syntax for if and else if statements in Ruby so if anyone sees this and wants to make it neater please post a comment.

First of all, let me state that I'm no expert on these matters, but I have now got a successful install up and running using Capistrano on DreamHost. It wasn't all that simple, at least to a novice like me, but maybe my notes can help someone else who is struggling with this.

I've been struggling with getting Mephisto working on DreamHost shared hosting but I think I've got my head round it now. I followed Labrat's excellent instructions but being a RoR newb I still struggled and haven't fully understood the implications of what I've done. The only major modification I made was to use a different dispatch.rb file than the one supplied with Mephisto. I've attached it to the article in case anyone feels like using it.