The acquisition of the popular mobile photo app Instagram by Facebook was well documented, and since then there’s been quite the clamor from people like myself to get out of Instagram, or more to the point, away from anything related to Facebook.

There’s been plenty also written about not being a free user.

The problem is finding a solution to replace it. The convenience of having the retro-y filters, ease of snap, edit and upload to share with Twitter is a big draw.

Last week @Mike_FTW posted a challenge for people to Photoshop his new book Design Is A Job into a photo from a historical moment and share it on Mlkshk, which is a great site that allows for easy sharing of images. They provide a bookmarklet as well as browser extensions to easily share images you find on the web, but it also uses an API for posting from Twitter.

My go-to Twitter app on my iPhone is Tweetbot, which supports the Mlkshk API, as well as having recently added support for using the really nice iPhone camera replacement app Camera+ .

You can both take and edit an image from Camera+ directly in the Tweetbot app.

While Camera+ doesn’t have the same Polaroid™ style images or the exact same filters, they do provide a lot of built in options in the base app (currently on sale for 99¢) as well as in app purchase option for other filters. I’m a big fan of the stabilizer feature. Nothing worse than a shaky image.

So the combination of these 3 apps/services can all but replace Instagram, and allow me to vote with my wallet, vs suffering from the fear of free apps/service being swallowed up.

While Mlkshk is free, you can purchase a plus account to help support the service and keep it around. I’d highly recommend spending the $2 a month. (I’ll be renewing mine this week.)

So, $2.99 for Tweetbot, $.99 for Camera+ , $.99 for analog filters in Camera+ , $2 a month for plus membership to Mlkshk.

Today in the Habari IRC channel, while fighting with the LESS framework and using rgb, rgba, and HEX color values, I lamented

this is my problem with getting anything completed. I wind up on these tangents learning about other semi-related stuff, and never get the original project I started done

As if on cue, Owen replied

You need focus. We all need focus. We need people to stand behind us and remind us to stay on target so we can blow up the death star.

Indeed. Where’s Ben when you need him? Where do you find your Ben?

I have been struggling with this blogging vs Twitter thing too long. I’ve put my proverbial foot down. If I can’t fit it into 140 characters without editing punctuation, shortening words, cutting out context, it’s going into a blog post. Period.

Ironically, the blog does auto-tweet new blog posts, which is kinda like a self hosted twit-longer kinda thing, no?

Perhaps I should hack the plugin to able to add a #longread tag to, well, long winded rant so as to warn those who prefer the tiny digests of inane thoughts and links.

I’m also looking to add a linklog section, just need to coerce one of my Habari folks better versed in atom feeds help me update a plugin (I’m looking at you michaeltwofish ).

I am in the process of moving from another server, so things might look a little wonky for a bit. In addition, I’m switching to using Amazon Cloudfront/S3 to serve my images/files, so I’m waiting for DNS to propagate on that as well.

Should be all sorted out by tomorrow evening.

I am in the process of moving my sites from Slicehost to Linode, as most are aware Slicehost is being phased out for Rackspace Cloud. Anyway, I upgraded my VPS at Linode last night to Debian “Squeeze” and installed APC, which created a problem with the WordPress installations I had there. Basically, I couldn’t access the admin. Through the power of Twitter and the invaluable help of Mark Jaquith, I learned that by default APC doesn’t play nice with files that are checked out via Subversion. I think the root of my problem was a stray apc config for overriding include once, but certainly the subversion issue could have been at play too.

Anyway, a little Googling on the subject, I discovered there’s a configuration option for APC to use ctime instead of the default mtime. Adding apc.stat_ctime=1 is all that is required.

While I’m on the subject of migrating from Slicehost to Linode, Andrew RIley pointed out that someone had written a ruby script to migrate the DNS information for you.

Addendum To be clear, I install WordPress using Subversion and the appropriate tag. My Habari installs are also all Subversion checkouts from trunk.