Dropbox is my publish button
joehewitt.com
joehewitt.com
Once set up, it could be as simple as sharing folders with them.
Maybe people consider that 'hip', but I don't see how any of these 'trends' have any viability for more than, say, 12 months[1]?
[1]: http://fashion.about.com/od/latesttrends/a/trendover.htm
Markdown has also been around since 2004, so it's outlived the 12 month "just a trend" horizon by quite a bit.
As has been listed, rsync / git / NFS shares etc would have been a really easy way to get your objectives met UNTIL I read your response that this was for your girlfriend, and asking her to do a command line would be hard. Then I read further and saw this:
A password-protected drafts page allows me to preview drafts before publishing. Once they are done, I add the timestamp, save the file, and it's published."
That part seems more complicated to me than just hitting 'publish' on a Wordpress page, but so as to keep from sounding overly negative (cause really, kudos for doing what works) here are my tips to make it even easier.
1) Set up cron to restart the dropbox service every few hours. That should be a no-brainer, and would at least save you having to explain how every now and again you have to SSH into your server to fix your 'super easy' solution.
2) From an end-user perspective, I'm thinking rip off the old email-consumption strategy. Write the code to just check a POP server every couple of hours for unread messages. If there's a message, check to see if it's from your girlfriend's email address (optional). If it's from her, then publish it.
Markdown syntax would still apply, and you've now relegated blog posting to something as easy as just 'sending an email'.
Seriously though, a Makefile in your web directory with a default target that rsyncs your content up to your webserver via ssh solves this problem much more elegantly, without relying on a third party service. Bonus points for you if you render/minify your sass/scss and/or coffeescript as a target dependency.
PS: Put your remote username and remote port (if custom) for a given host in your ~/.ssh/config file, along with any necessary 'ProxyCommand's to allow direct "rsync ./ $hostname:public_html/" or such in your makefile.
They're all already too busy frying the pranes.
And compile markdown files to static HTML to be served directly on the target machine.
I suspect it's easier to go to a new client and set up dropbox on it and link it in, than it is to set up rsync and any necessary keys or firewall holes or if you are using windows, the cygwin system to support rsync.
There's a lot to be said about simplicity and ubiquity, especially if it's to encourage making a blog post, and not discourage it.
That said, using dropbox for this is terribly problematic in terms of security.
In addition, as I'm sure you recognize, this reduces breaking into your hardened box and filling it with unicorn pr0n to swiping your friend's laptop while she is in the loo at the Starbucks.
So someone can steal the key to your server with a few minutes access to your home computers or laptops and you will not know until you have unicorn pron all over your blog.
This may be fine, and I mean that, for a personal blog (that also has regular backups.) I wouldn't set this up for clients (as suggested by others) to make it easier for them to blog, I think I would find a different solution for them.
Don't get me wrong. For my own personal needs, I think your solution is better than say, posterous which seems to be going downhill fast.
I like the idea of easily, quickly, blogging within emacs.
Is there a reason this wouldn't work for your use case?
Also, there's this webapp called http://droppages.com/ which makes publishing from DropBox even easier.
Though personally, if I had to help a non-technical friend with setting up a blog, I'd just send him to Wordpress.com.
It's actually a really kickass feature
I've been very happily running it on my headless web server for over a year. There's a CLI installer, and you can do things using the 'dropbox' command-line utility.
build/project_min.js: build/project.js
rm -f $@
curl -s --data-urlencode 'js_code@build/project.js' --data-urlencode 'output_format=text' --data-urlencode 'output_info=compiled_code' http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/compile >> $@
I find that reading news aggregator content like Google Reader or Hacker News is much easier and faster in Opera than in Chrome.
Apart from that, Opera seems to have many bugs where pages that other browsers load just fine, load incorrectly.
But yeah, even now, Opera won't display your site.
About a month ago, I was researching this, and I found then, (but cannot find now), some threads that said this was a long outstanding problem created by some race condition. Another said it was caused by too much priority given to processing the Chrome spinner in each tab.
I don't know what the case really is.
I do know that Opera does a much better job of opening multiple tabs at the same time as Chrome, so I use Opera when working with feed readers and the like.
All else, I default to Chrome.
Then again, a lot of people can't understand why I create dancing Christmas lights every year, heh.
* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/
Come on. Really? How much transfer are we talking about to publish a blog article? And how often are we publishing. Maybe it's not FTP, but Dreamhost?
The Dropbox-based system is a neat way of doing it, but blaming FTP seems to be false justification for the effort.
If you want to hack, then hack. You don't need a reason to.
This has nothing to do with his publishing technique of course, I just found it strange since he mentions adapting to screen size. Maybe the page should adapt to window size.
I know that Marco Arment runs his blog off of his PHP version of the same idea, dubbed "SecondCrack" http://www.marco.org/secondcrack
I've also been looking at a simple blog updater that can update from anywhere (especially my phone or email), so I'll definitely check it out.
Wow, patronise much?