Driven. As I mentioned a few posts ago I picked up hosting with TextDrive.
I'm rather pre-occupied with exams and work at the moment and haven't
had much chance to do anything with my new account other than prove
that it works and revel in how neat mod_vd is. One of the first things I want to do with the exams out of the way is get started using Rails (a big reason for choosing TextDrive was their support of rails both technically and financially).
One thing I don't especially enjoy though is coding in vi over ssh. Even with a nice windows SSH client like SecureCRT
it's not a desperately happy experience. The promise of a ruby
mode for emacs got me as far as firing that up — easily far enough to
remind me how much I loathe emacs. There had to be better way.
My explorer replacement of choice Directory Opus
has secure FTP and makes light work of shovelling files around but
having to save files & then drag them to upload makes edit/run
development cycles laborious. That's when I remembered WebDrive
a clever SFTP & WebDAV client which maps remotes to local windows
drive letters.. I'd looked at it once before but since I already
had DOpus it seemed like overkill.
Using WebDrive my shiny new TextDrive BSD account becomes another drive
on my system and suddenly I can edit in place with WebDrive handling
all the nasty SFTP cruft in the background. It's not lightning
fast (my upstream bandwidth is only 256Kbps and SSL adds some overhead)
but it is convenient. I'm hoping this means I'll be able to use ArachnoRuby (when it's released) to develop Ruby projects remotely.
If you need this sort of flexibility (and not everyone will) I can
highly recommend WebDrive. And a TextDrive account to go under it! [Curiouser and curiouser!]