How to...
Create an account, enter a username and password.
Go to my GitHub project, click on Settings, click on Service Hooks.
Click on the name of your platform, enter your credentials from step 1, and click a checkbox to activate.
Go back to the platform to see my app running.
To update the app, update the GitHub project. "Continuous deploy."
This is as simple as it can be, and if you do it, I will use your service, and more important, if it's reliable and affordable (say $10 per month), I'll recommend it to my readers and users of my software and of course I will use it myself.
Of course it has to be reliable and perform reasonably. Scaling -- not such a big issue. The idea is to have people running their own apps in the cloud, for them, and their friends, or a workgroup in a corporate setting.
A great thread on Facebook started by my friend Elisa Camahort Page.
She pointed to a Slate piece by Farhad Manjoo (another friend!) that says you should never put two spaces after a period that ends a sentence. I certainly agree, and while I was taught by my typing teacher in 7th grade, Mr Corwin, to type two spaces, I learned later in life this was a mistake.
Anyway, I pointed out that the web agrees. You can type as many spaces after periods as you like, the browser will only show one.
I demo'd this with a comment, and added four spaces after each period. The browser only showed one space, even though Facebook dutifully sent four.
I love it when technology gets something right.
I suggested giving Tim Berners-Lee a big hug next time you see him. Or it might have been Marc Andreessen who made this call.
This came up in a comment on yesterday's post.
I used to have a Cobalt Qube, many years ago. I even hosted scripting.com on it, as a static site. It ran Linux and Apache, but I never accessed it through the command line. It had a very nice selection of server software pre-installed, and a web-based admin app, that was also very nice. Easy to use. And way ahead of its time, I think.
It was a great start, but it was never finished, as far as I know. That was 15 years ago. By now we should have a fantastic web-based admin app for Linux. It's a very important, imho, missing piece.
I would love to participate in a community effort to catch up to where we were with the Qube, and then go way past where it was.