It's good to have a development platform again

I haven't been excited about PHP in a long time. A long time. We've recently started using Ruby at work (notably: Spree, for ecommerce), but it's prompted me to start using Rails to get stuff done on personal projects. It's what runs Emoji Rodeo's backend (more on that another day!), it runs the Pokémon lookup thing, and it now runs some stuff on this site. For specific URLs, I'm using Nginx to proxy to Unicorn and serve up some stuff that I just don't have the stomach to even bother trying in PHP any more. I have been writing PHP for around fifteen years now, and I still have to look up the order of parameters for in_array. Not even joking; I couldn't tell you with confidence what they are, and I know how to use tar and rsync without looking at manpages. It'd be a total guess (and I usually get it dead wrong).

This weekend, I made two things I've wanted to make for quite some time. They serve very little real-world purpose, except to feed my love of lists, APIs and site scraping, but they're made now.

• Films - parsing data from Plot into a format I can share with people who (for some reason) don't use it.
• Music - parsing my music-based Twitter alt into something that doesn't rely on Twitter's perverse interface.

I suppose, the next logical step is to move this blog over to Rails, but I honestly cannot be bothered with that. WordPress is fine when you cache the hell out of everything and don't attempt anything other than using it as a blog. It's a little frustrating to have to update it every 45 minutes, but I can live with it for now.

As a post-script, can we talk about how incapable humans are of following a standard once it's been created. I use pretty much three sites on @upsettingsounds: YouTube, Bandcamp and Soundcloud. YouTube and Soundcloud have two slightly different implementations of oEmbed (one refers to it as application/json+oembed and the other text/json+oembed). How hard is it to just pick one?! I hate humans.