At the risk of waxing poetic over something perhaps rather obvious, I still find myself awed at the nexus OS X provides between eye-soothingly gorgeous GUI and hack-inspiring *nix underpinnings.

Take my blog, for instance. I blog via local MovableType install on my iBook, connected or no. The next time I dip into flowing IP, the flick of a switch (ok, so a few keystrokes, password, and flourished <return> or three) and piping-hot content is poured into into my publicly available server. Blog locally, publish globally.

And the mind-numbingly simple one-liner (albeit a tad ghastly to the uninitiated upon first glance) is:

rsync -t -v -essh -r /Library/WebServer/Documents/ {username}@{hostname}:public_html

Alias that to something sane, drop it into your .tcshrc file, and there you have it... DIY upstreaming. Admittedly not elegant as Radio Userland's point-and-click simple upstreaming, it nevertheless makes you feel warm and fuzzy -- at least about that Terminal app.

Of course one can take this to the nth, cron'ing it, checking for updated content via modification time, attempting an upstream only if you're wired (or pleasantly untethered, mind you), and wrapping it in the UI GUI goodness of an AppleScript/Aqua interface. But don't underestimate the thrill of % blogsync, especially if you've been locked in the candy-coated GUI world of Mac OS < 10 and never chanced upon a command-line before -- or worse, a stunningly featureless DOS shell.