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Fundable.org

May 1, 2005 by chris | 2 comments

fundable

I thought I’d take a minute to plug my friend’s new startup, a project that I think has a lot of potential and that could be very cool if it takes off.

Fundable.org. Its a very neat idea. Say, for instance, that you’ve got a project you’d like to undertake which requires buy-in from a large number of individuals. Something like having a web designer create a good looking webpage for an open-source project or bringing a decent band to a musical vacuum like Pittsburgh.

Fundable allows you to create a “group action” that people can contribute money towards. Say it’ll take $1000 to get The Long Winters to make a stop in Pittsburgh during their next tour:

  1. Create a group action with a goal of getting them to play here in Pittsburgh.
  2. Allow the advance purchase of 100 tickets to the show for $10 apiece.
  3. If the group action gets 100 people to contribute, the $1000 is “turned on” and the group leader can then withdraw the money and set up the show.
  4. If the action doesn’t get enough contributors, everybody’s money gets refunded.

Its a neat concept and I think it could be great for setting up “bounties” for open-source projects or for starting advertising campaigns for non-profit groups.

So go check them out and let me know what you think.

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Automated PGP-encrypted MySQL backups

April 16, 2005 by chris | 3 comments

I’ve been bad. Until recently I haven’t been backing up my MySQL database. Bad things could have happened.

Today I finally hacked up a simple script to run from cron that will automatically dump, zip, and mail backups of my MySQL tables to an email address I specify. I set up a Gmail account to send the dumps to because they’re about 8 meg each. The dumps are also encrypted using my PGP 1024-bit public key to give me a bit of security.

Since I didn’t manage to find anything similar in my Googling, I decided to post it.

#!/bin/sh # Performs a backup of MySQL, encrypts it using PGP, and mails it to a particular user # The user to mail the backup to. Should have a public key in the above user's keyring... MAIL_TO="your-backup-account@gmail.com" MAIL_TO_KEY="Your PGP key ID" # Subject of the mail. A date stamp will be appended to it MAIL_SUBJECT="[mysqldump] MySQL Backup for " ###################################### DATESTAMP=`date %Y-%m-%d` FILENAME="/tmp/mysqldump-$DATESTAMP.gz" # Generate the dump mysqldump --all-databases | gzip > "$FILENAME" # Encrypt it gpg --encrypt --recipient "$MAIL_TO_KEY" "$FILENAME" # Mail it! mpack -s "$MAIL_SUBJECT $DATESTAMP" -c application/octet-stream $FILENAME.gpg" "$MAIL_TO" # Remove the backups rm -f $FILENAME $FILENAME.gpg

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Del.icio.us Plugin for WordPress

January 3, 2005 by chris | 29 comments

The dynamic links on the left-hand-side of my blog are pulled dynamically from Del.icio.us. This makes it easy for me to manage my link collections without cluttering up my WordPress database.

Since I think others might like to take advantage of this as well, I’ve packaged it up into an easy-to-use WordPress plugin.

I’m proud to announce the Del.icio.us Plugin for WordPress version 1.0.

Update: Ok so it appears I should have done some more research before going through all the work to polish up my plugin. But mine is still new and different and in my opinion, better.

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