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Friend: ExpanDrive Mac and Windows: 'Ridiculously simple SFTP/FTP/S3 drive access'

I will be describing ExpanDrive for the Mac but there is also a Windows version available.

Before I talk about ExpanDrive I want to be sure to say that there are any number of applications that work much like ExpanDrive. In fact ExpanDrive is based on the open-source MacFuse project and Macfusion is one freely available open-source front-end. There are options available for other platforms as well. (I've already mentioned the Windows version of ExpanDrive.)

The utility allows you to define connections to remote servers (using SFTP, FTP, or Amazon's S3 online storage service) and then mount and access those connections in the same way that you would a locally mounted volume (a volume on a locally attached USB hard drive for example.) This means that you can interact with files on a remote server as you would local files and folders, both in the Finder and other applications. For an Ode user, this means that you can manage your site as if you were working with a collection of files and folder on your computer, without the need to explicitly push anything to the server. It's an intuitive, efficient and elegant solution. What's more because working with an Ode site primarily involves text files, which are relatively small in size, ExpanDrive and Ode work work beautifully together (in terms of responsiveness and performance). ExpanDrive itself seems remarkably fast, in comparison to other, similar products. According to the developers 'the SFTP core' has been rewritten for version 2.0. This means that uploading photos, videos and other media (and even playing these files directly from the mounted volume through ExpanDrive) should be quick and efficient too.

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There's a lot to like about Sarcastic Robot a monospaced handwriting font by @chankfonts.

As you probably know, I like to say, 'Ode is simple'. More than a promotional tease, 'simple' is an inspiration, and the project's primary design principle.

Among other goals, I hope that keeping Ode simple means blurring the distinction between developer and end user.

Moreover, Ode is intended to allow us to take advantage the capabilities of modern text editors - some of the most sublime (robust, and polished) software applications ever written. With Ode, we use a text editor to manage all aspects of your site(s) (content management, design, and development).

When it comes to writing code, including markup languages like HTML, a monospaced font is your best friend - which is certainly not to suggest that they are not useful for any number of other purposes as well.

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Let's look at a couple of tags

Tags are bits of text inserted into directly into post files either by Ode itself or the installed addins. They can be used to used to store information relevant to the post, and instructions to control the behavior of the script.

Individual tags are a single line of text and have the following the general form:

tag prefix literal : tag source/addin name : tag name  : tag value

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