February 2, 2008 Archive Entries: WordPress vs. Movable Type, Apple MacBook Air - Mini-review, More Space for WordPress, Microsoft and Yahoo!

« Saturday, February 2, 2008 »

Microsoft and Yahoo! - 44 Billion

Who cares!?! Unless you own stock in Yahoo, of course :)

Microsoft has nothing to offer Yahoo, IMHO, they've never been great with the internet (search, MSN, webTV, etc.) and that's okay. Really, Bill, it's okay. It really is.

I'm assuming Yahoo! will take the money and run, unless they've got a lot of debt, this is a nice chunk of change (and if they've got a lot of debt, this'll pay it off).

I do worry about Flickr, Del.icio.us, the nice mobile web portals and whatever other sites that Yahoo owns. But at the end of the day, I think the 'net will be okay and not have anything to worry about...

I don't really understand the concept of business at 44 billion dollars, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about but I promise I'd be a fast learner if anyone ever put me into into a situation where I would need to learn about it...

I just think about Guy Kawasaki and he must be really kicking himself for not taking Yahoo's offer to be president way back in the day. Several years ago I saw him speak and he mentioned that tidbit after mentioning other people's famous mistakes like "640k is all anyone will ever need".

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Posted by Gary on Saturday at 8:34 AM on February 2, 2008.
Related categories: news, technology
Thanks for the 1 comments/trackbacks from: Connecting News, Commentaries and Blogs at NineReports.com
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More Space for WordPress

WordPress.com is a place where you can have your own blog, it's got lots of great features and it's free! They do have some advance features you can pay for like your own custom domain name, more disk space and other great features.

Here's the newest great part: they used to only have free storage of 50 MB of files and they just upgraded your free space to 3 GB (that's 3,000 MB) so that's a heck of a free upgrade! It's not that 50 MB is all that small, but a bunch of photos from your 8-megapixel camera and you can fill it up pretty quick, 3 gig is a very generous amount of free space. Now they are selling 5 GB upgrades for the old price of 1 GB upgrades. If you already purchased a storage upgrade they've automatically increased the storage space.

One of the many reasons I'm liking the WordPress community more and more...

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Posted by Gary on Saturday at 10:00 AM on February 2, 2008.
Related categories: WordPress, blogging
Gary Said... http://garysaid.com/

Apple MacBook Air - Mini-review

So I went to the Apple Store today to take a peek at the MacBook Air. Honestly, I had pretty low expectations so I thought I'd get my socks knocked off, but it was just okay. It's more beautiful than my 12 inch PowerBook, but just by a small margin. It's light and thin seems pretty durable, and has the beautiful LED display (but a bit of glare). But I thought I'd leave and say "I have to have one", but it didn't happen. If I had the extra bucks to spend it on I'd certainly get one, but I think I'd still need a more powerful laptop.

Pluses: 3 lbs., 13.3 inch low power LED display, small, new track-pad, backlit keyboard. Please note, some of these are huge pluses.
Minuses: External DVD drive (which I could live with), special MagSafe power adaptor, slow hard drive, lacking ports, 80 GB, maximum HD, no option for a spare battery and (of course) the price. Note that while it's a metal MacBook it has a shared memory video card like a MacBook, not a MacBook Pro.

The solid-state 64 GB drive is a plus, but the $1000 price tag is certainly a minus...

If I had a 17 inch PowerBook, the MacBook Air would make a great addition as a "day" computer, when I don't need the power or DVD drive and didn't want the 6.8 pounds to lug around. If I could only have one machine I'd probably take a loaded MacBook 13.3 inch (5 pounds). If I could "create" an ultimate machine it would be a 12 (or 13.3) inch MacBook Pro; I could even live with an external DVD drive it it could lower the size and weight...

This kind of fits with my initial thoughts when I first saw the announcement of the MacBook Air, it's not what I was hoping for. If you haven't seen it, this is the MacBook Air ad.

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Posted by Gary on Saturday at 3:47 PM on February 2, 2008.
Related categories: apple, portable
Thanks for the 7 comments/trackbacks from: apple: e:leaf: Gary LaPointe: KenC: Gary LaPointe: Ruhayat: Gary LaPointe
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WordPress vs. Movable Type

I've always been a huge fan of Movable Type, but I've been playing with WordPress on and off lately and I think it might become my new blogging platform for anything new I create. I'm not sure if I'm willing to export and import my old blog and lose a bunch of Google results because the pages aren't named the same or because of something else unforeseen.

Here's my whole comparison wrapped up in to two sentences -

I think WordPress is easier to setup and it's also easier for beginners to do advanced things with WP than Movable Type. From the other side, I think that doing really advanced things is easier with Movable Type, while doing ultra-advanced things are probably equal between the two.

The biggest thing I don't like in WordPress is how dynamic things are and if your web host goofs something up, the dynamic stuff chokes which would be your whole site; I've seen this happen with several different hosts. In MT I kept my main page and individual page posts static, and the rest dynamic so at least the whole thing didn't crash. Also, the dynamic-ishness of the pages slows things down a little. But it's so very easy, I can't even tell you how easy it was to do an upgrade (one tip: if you modify a default template to use, be sure to rename the folder it's in and you won't accidentally over-write it when you upgrade). On the other hand, when I post something to WP it's very very quick since it's not rebuilding things. That's really nice to be done as soon as you post.

So far it's also been much easier to do (incremental) upgrades with WordPress. It's actually so easy, I'm surprised they haven't added a few other steps which would make it one-click. It's really disabling the plug-ins, copying the new directories over the old and reactivating the plug-ins; I'm sure this could be made one-click to "halt" the plug-ins, copy from the path that you specify, clear the cache and start the plug-ins back up.