I can’t believe I’m still doing this with 2,000 posts all over the last 5 years! Never would have thought it grow on me so much!

I was trying to come up with something monumental to blog about for this post, but that didn’t happen so I’ll give you a quick update on some tech (the new blog site) and a few personal things:

• I’m averaging more than a post a day, but sometimes I skip more than a few days, so I’m going to try and post more consistently (and more images with posts).
• I’m really liking WordPress, I’ve completely migrated all my old posts (from MovableType) to WordPress 2.7 (at least I think I’ve got all 4,000-ish archive/category/single pages) and mostly updated the “about“-type pages. I’ve been playing around with WP for a year and this interface on 2.7 version beats the interface for the previous six months (it was actually better previous to six months ago, IMHO). I’ll be posting more about my WordPress transition over the next few weeks (I’ve been making notes).
• Google has done an amazing job reindexing the updated site. It’s grabbed a good chunk of the pages and about 80% of the old pages have disappeared been replaced in the search engine. I’ll be posting more about this too.
• And I just saw they picked the new Doctor Who, but I’ll make that my 2001st post
• I’m still sick from when I mentioned it last week. The (medical) doctor thinks it’s some lower lung pneumonia on the right side so I’ve just been staying close to home and taking it easy (I’ll get x-ray results next week). Sleep has been the worse, I think maybe the drugs are keeping me up, or I’m just bored. Hopefully I won’t be posting more about this!
• Even being sick, the holidays were nice and relaxing, exactly what I needed after the last year, I’d have liked some more snow consistently on the ground, just enough to cover the grass. I wasn’t sick sick until Christmas so I made it through everything.

That’s it for now, I gotta go read up more on the new Doctor Who…

It seems to be going very well so far. I think I’ve got everything imported. Feel free to try a test comment (please).

Most entries and categories and dates should be redirecting. Date based pages are not redirecting (need a .htaccess rule or need to rewrite all those pages in MT with a redirect), but that’s okay, you’re only going to find that from a search and if you clock to comment it takes you to the correct page, just a weird interface change.

Categories still need to have hierarchies and descriptions.

All RSS feeds are redirected, so you’ll probably get a full reader by the time you get this post. And as of right now, they’re all redirected to an Atom feed. Does anyone really care/have a preference?

Not thrilled with this blog template but that’s easily changeable later. I’ll break down the steps of the whole migration later for anyone wanting to go from MT to WP.

Any .htaccess people who can help me with a rewrite rule?
I need date formats like /chapters/2008_12.php -> /2008/12/ and the same for /chapters/2008_12_16.php -> /2008/12/16/ . Actually the latter is really the only one that matters since the first was prevented by robots.txt and I don’t think I did any posts linking to a month (maybe a date).

Honestly, I’ve had harder version upgrades with Movable Type, but we’ll see once I start modifying templates for myself.

Disappointments: I wish the categories could have been in the root directory without having to be in another directory (my /topics/ directory). I wish I could have more easily moved the old files in with their old filenames so things didn’t have to be redirected.

I’ve still got to fix “About”, “FAQ”, etc. and I need the date archives to redirect.

Spam filter is working great! I really like the way the tags work, but they need some cleaning up. Ecto really helped me to turn my technorati tags into WP tags.

Fixed the search engine with a smart redirect. Needed that since I do searches in the middle of my posts (I should be tagging but I’ve have 3 years to go back and tag).

Updated the sitemap.xml files too.

These last few things should really help with the search engines reindexing me (I hope!)

Google has already been cruising through indexing pages….

It imported my pings/trackbacks as comments But at least they are still linked.

Some drafts became posts. This may have not been an import/export issue, this may have been something I did after the fact when I reposted posts to get my blogging client, Ecto, to convert my Technorati Tags to Wordpress tags.

So after 5 years of using MovableType, and talking about sticking with things yesterday, I’m planning on switching this blog to WordPress. As I said a few months back –

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

I’ve slightly modified that a bit to make it more accurate in what I’ve learned since then. I’m also going to add that

Upgrades appear to be much easier to do in WordPress, they’ve all been pretty painless for me. (I never even liked doing incremental upgrades with MT)

Maybe as I customize things more this won’t be as true but for now it’s been pretty easy. And it’s an educational thing for me too, I’ve really enjoyed learning about it…

So for the next month(?) I’ll be changing and testing things. I’ll be running both in tandem stating soon, I’ll want some posts/archives once the switch is made. I’ll probably switch back and forth a few times as I’m testing so be patient with me as I make changes. The worst tests might be for the people using RSS readers, but I’ll try to keep those disasters minimal. If you see things broken for more than a day it means I didn’t notice, so please e-mail me and let me know.I don’t think I’ll be able to ever import everything the way I want to: keeping all my old permalinks and everything else so that I don’t break a million back-links to my site (and throughout my site). So I think when I do the final cut over everything 2008 and before will stay on MovableType and everything 2009 and after will be on WordPress.

I’ll be documenting this since I’m sure I’ll have to do some interesting things for category archives (I think I’ll fudge the last entry of each category to include the old posts) and searching the archives (this may require two searches, but I’m not sure yet).

If I can’t integrate them very well, I’ll just have a prominent button that says “click here for 2008 and earlier”. And I’ll modify a lot of the old templates to say ‘click here for the new stuff’. I’d just hate to have to do that for all the category stuff.

Any tips on the migration from anyone? Any resources?

So I’m tempted to migrate to WordPress (from Movable Type) I think I’ve got it all figured out on how to even retain my current URLs (as crummy as they are) so that I don’t have a bunch of broken links.

One of my worries is right now a lot of my pages score pretty good in Google searches, amazingly good sometimes, especially since my site doesn’t rank super high anyways, and I’m afraid of losing that rank. I’m not sure if it’s just that I built my pages well? or maybe my meta tags or if the structure of the page helps? or what? It’s just always done pretty good so I don’t mess with it.

What will I lose if I convert? What might I gain?The other thought is to leave my Movable Type site alone, delete the index page and use WordPress from now on but have links to the old pages. I’d need to keep the MT software so that comments and search would still work (I’d modify the WP search pages to say “you only searched the new site, click here to search for old stuff”). But I’d still have to maintain updates and such on the old site and check for spam and more….

Hmmm…. I’m either talking myself out of keeping the old one separate or possibly not migrating at all. I’m not sure which…

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.

So it’s snowing and we’re supposed to get a lot tonight (the “don’t park in the street” siren already went off). I’m geeked about that since it doesn’t seem like Christmas without it.

But I’ve noticed I’ve still got a fall theme up on my blog so I’ll be changing that to a Christmas theme that I’ve used before (if I can find all the parts). I’ve been learning Wordpress and so far I’ve learned it’s SO much easier to change themes in WP than in Movable Type…

So it looks funny over the next hour or so, I’m working on getting out the fall colors!

So many times I wish I could call someone late at night or early in the day to leave a message without waking them. THere are some services that delay delivery like this, but they’re (at least in the past) costly and slightly difficult.

Enter Jott: It lets you set up a list of people on-line. You call Jott say who/what you want to Jott (you put yourself in the list too) and then leave a thirty second message and it sends it to their e-mail. Did I leave out that it very accurately transcribes the audio file into text for you too?!? And it’s free?!? And it includes an audio file link too, just in case the transcription is garbled. Think about that before I tell you what else it does…

It’ll post it to a blog for you too (Blogger, WordPress (even if self-hosted), TypePad, LiveJournal), it’ll Twitter and Jaiku it for you too and post it to a Yahoo! Group and 30 boxes and you can use it to get Zillow (home value) quotes too. And it’ll set up reminders for you too. It’s all hands-free with your phone. And it’s free!I just posted a sample Jott for you to read, if you listen you can hear a slight mistake but it’s close enough, you’ve never know unless you listened to it. Other than the sentence in bold that says to read this message, it’s just cut and patse. FYI, the sample is a cheat, I really posted it to WordPress and just copied the post here for demonstrations sake. It currently does not work on Movable Type, I think it’s just the way MT handles multiple blogs, but since it uses XMLRPCs pretty close to the other blogs I’m hoping it’s a simple fix (but it’s beyond me).

You must try this!!! I’ve get it set for a few friends, my work e-mail and my home e-mail so I can just call with reminders for me or to get free 30 second transcriptions of text for e-mail that I need to send back at the office.

Sometimes it does take a few minutes (no more than 5 minutes, usually 2 minutes) for the Jott to get transcribed.

So Movable Type 4.0 is out. I thought it was odd that you can’t purchase a personal license any more, just a business one. Don’t panic though, you can still get a personal license for free but purchasing it used to get you “official” support and (it looks like) that’s not available. But I was mistaken, for $49 you can get a year of support(see Anil’s comment below) you just have to buy it from the business page. I really don’t think I ever used the support (or at least not very often) so not a huge deal, but I think it’s odd that it’s hard to realize that you can buy support you just have to go to the business page. And I still think it’s weird it’s cheaper to buy two 5 user licenses than one 10 user license.

Plus, come fall they plan to release some kind of OpenSource version this fall, which will be very interesting…On a side note, while I love Movable Type and I’d love to upgrade, I’ll have to wait for the 4.1 release, I keep my installation too complicated and installing always brings the bugs to light (old plug-ins that break, bugs that I used to my advantage that might be fixed, and obviously the possibility of new bugs) I’ll wait for the revisions so it’s one less thing to worry about. Plus, I’m really afraid MT-Blacklist will stop working; it still deletes hundreds of messages a day for me with no intervention (since May of 2005 it’s deleted way over one-third of a million billion spam messages that I’ve not even had to glance at) that with SpamLookUp keeps me sane.

Although, I must point out, everyone on-line seems to be saying that MT 4.0 is pretty painless to install…

So every so often I see my site from a computer with a lower screen resolution and the center columns is just way too skinny especially if there are images. So I’ve done some alterations to the main page if you have a screen resolution of 1,000 pixels across (or less) I feed you a different CSS file that pushes the right column off the right of the screen so if you want to see it you’ll have to scroll to the right (I’m thinking the better viewing will make it worth it). JavaScript will have to be enabled for this to work.

Please let me know if this works better for the lower resolution people (and look the same for the rest of you). I’ll probably move some items from the right to the left if this works out and I’ll do it to more pages on the site (especially the individual ones that you can put the comments on).I used this information from the Movable Type Forums to do this. Everything that you need should be there.

FYI – Over 10% of my viewers have screen sizes less than 1,000 pixels wide and another 10% are unknown.

Please give me some feedback on this, I’m only trying to make this better for you…

I upgraded my Movable Type yesterday and today (the blogging software that this site runs on) from 3.2 to 3.34 so if you have any problems commenting or even reading don’t be shocked. I’ll post a note here here when I start (and when I’m done) so outside that range everything should be fine.

DONE! (Well, mostly done, but it’s almost 6 am and I’m off to bed). Details you probably don’t care about (unless you have problems) are listed below…Boring updates below. (Some of this info is for me to recall too too.)

So I’m playing with Technorati Tags on my pages (you’ll see some attached to some of my posts) and I’m not liking how they are working from a placement standpoint. I am experimenting so we’ll see where they get moved to (or if I even keep them).

Tags are supposed to do two things (IMHO):

So as I mentioned a few days ago it’s been 3 years I’ve been blogging. But here and the last few days I’ve been jotting down some odd stats:

So a few weeks ago I mentioned we were trying to get a domain name for Melissa. Well we finally settled on YourMelissa.com as the address. Once we got her set up on-line she then immediately titled the site “A Musing Melissa”! Where the hell was that idea when we were picking out a name?!?

So she’s been talking about life, her kids, being single and figuring out who she is as her kids become adults and she gets used to handling life on her own. She’s been posting and I keep forgetting to send some traffic her way. So go on over to A Musing Melissa and say hello. I’m sure she’d love to get some comments and find some other blogs to read.

I think I’ve got her all set up to handle gravatars so if you’ve got one she’ll think that’s especially cool to see your icons, which then might motivate her to post comments on other sites (I think she’s just been lurking so far) she still thinks of this as a “parallel universe”.

Sorry for some of the odd display problems lately (no content to the post or no images). I’ve been having some odd rebuilding problems with Movable Type and 1 and 1 hosting (at least I think it’s related to 1and1 hosting, even my access to the MT interface has been slow lately). Anyone else having similar problems…?

So Yahoo Small Business has started including Movable Type with their small business installations. This has got to be great for Six Apart (MT’s owner) and since I’m a huge MT fan and user you get to hear about it! This includes 5GB of disk space and 200GB a month of storage and a free domain name for $8.01 a month (this is 33% off for the first 6 months) including PHP, mySQL, fastCGI, Perl, MT updates and 24/7 phone support.

This offer is only through the end of this year. I’m not sure how many MT users this license includes…

Doesn’t Yahoo! already own some blogging site (other than Yahoo! 360)?

So it’s been two years that I’ve been blogging!!! I’m still short three posts from 1,000 but maybe I’ll have something more introspective to post in a few days. I just couldn’t let the day go without a post. Besides, I have a few questions for you…

Blogging facts from Gary Said…

So I use 1and1 for my web hosting for this site and I really like them. They’ve got $5.99 domain name registration all the time (that’s the best ‘all the time’ price around) and a variety of plans and they really have all sorts of options you can choose from (news on your page, mySQL, SSI, PHP, clipart, some built-in flash, e-mail, ftp, ssh, statistics, photo albums and more). They’ve got plans as low as $2.99 a month and that includes a domain name (lower priced plans don’t have all the features) and 1GB of storage and 150 e-mail accounts.

My biggest complaint has always been the web interface to manage things was slow, but they just fixed it!!! That’s why you’re getting this pitch, I was just using it and the new interface is much nicer and much faster. And the interface works well with a Mac (at least with Safari on my OSX Tiger machine).

My other complaint is that you must have them manage your DNS list (you can buy your domain name somewhere else but 1&1 must host it and the sites that goes with it, you can point your mail MX record somewhere else). This probably will not matter to the average user (and probably isn’t understandable either).

FYI – Movable Type requires Perl (which is not in the $2.99 plan) this means you need at least the $4.99 plan to run it.

Happy Birthday! Movable Type blogging software turned four today. As many of you know, I use Movable Type for this blog and I think it’s excellent software. I’ve been using it a few months shy of two years and it’s only gotten better and better. If you’ve considered Movable Type you should check it out (it’s free for personal use, but of course this provides no support to you).

So it’s that time of year again, a time to share. The time when bloggers (female and male) reveal more than what’s in their hearts and bare more than their soul. This year they are raising money for breast cancer and Hurricane Katrina victim relief (previously I think it was just the former). Covered bloggers (hands, props, food items, bras, etc.) were free to view, but they still hoped you’d donate. You have to donate $50 to get the password for the uncovered bloggers. They’ve raised over $17,000 dollars the previous years, so please check out the fourth annual Boobie-thon, it runs from October 1st until the 8th.

This is my first post using the scheduled post function of Movable Type. I’m posting this mid-September but wanted to get the info out at the correct time so a few details may not be perfect. (I’m assuming that it all works the same as last year.)

FYI, the auto post function didn’t work…

Sarah said:
1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

“I’m the guy who still hardcodes his own HTML and I just didn’t get it.”

“It” was using special software like Movable Type to run a web log. Why would I every want to do that?

FYI, this was over 800 posts ago on January 5, 2004 and the title was Might as well face it… (I’m addicted to blog!)

So the new version of Movable Type is out. And they’ve got a great promotion price for the personal editions only $39.95! Don’t forget, they always have a free version for personal use which also has unlimited weblogs (the free version of the software is not disabled at all) but no support other than the forums.

If you have donated before, they let you apply a $20 credit from earlier versions and it makes it $19.95! It’s “just” five authors (that’s four more than I have), it’s $30 more for unlimited authors. This is an awesome deal! Nothing like when they did the 3.x release upgrade that made everyone (not me) crazy about prices and limitations.

I’l probably be upgrading next week, once everyone else has worked out all the bugs

I think it’s got moderation for trackbacks and some new styles “stuff” to make it easy to manage the look of your site. Also an unlimited number of blogs! Here’s a list of their “32 Favorite Features”.

It’s also got some 3.2 specific plug-ins: one that’s supposed to be super for enclosures (like for feeds and podcasting!), some notifier stuff, something for stats and I guess the new styles thingy is a plug-in (or maybe this is something extra).

Testing a slight problem concern with posts and dynamic templates in Movable Type 3.16. They don’t seem to be resetting the cache properly. Actually it’s working to some extent, but it does take a while (close to an hour) for some of the pages to update; see below for more information.

There is something odd with cached dynamic pages in Movable Type 3.16, I’m not sure exactly what it is yet. When dynamic pages are created they are supposed to remain in the cache so they don’t need to be created again. But when I view the pages after rebuilding (reposting/updating) a page it seems there is a delay (minutes?) before it rebuilds them. This isn’t a problem (for me) if there is a delay (even if it’s minutes) it’s just hard to see what’s going on with them. For my test it took just over an hour and I don’t know why they finally changed (no pings, comments or attempted spamming in the logs).

WARNING – GEEKY CONTENT FOLLOWS:
I created this post at 6:47 pm and I later modified it (at 8:40 pm and also 8:55 and 9:15) and the changes are not showing up (immediately) on the category or date archives. I even tried changing the timestamp (to 9:18) but it didn’t seem to speed anything up. Eventually they all changed (9:42, 9:47 and 10:07 were when the 9:15 changes propagated through; but that doesn’t mean the other changes propagated around before then).

It didn’t seem to make a difference when I did a new post (I did one 15 minutes ago and it still doesn’t show up on the same date archive pages listed above). Still a delay before those changes propagate around. Last night when I noticed this I did delete the cache and templates_c directories, it didn’t seem to help anything (other than everything rebuilding automatically the next request). This last update is posted around 10:40 pm…

So it’s hard to test when pages rebuild. I’m not sure if it’s with every new post or just with posts relevant to those pages being modified. Anyone know?!?

Another interesting (but unrelated) point with the cached dynamic pages is my pages (used to) say what your search terms were, like “It looks like you came here searching for Veronica Mars” but it wrote it to the cache so even when someone came to the page looking for something else or even by directly clicking it still reported that “fact”. Very interesting. Now all my pages say at the bottom when it was created so if it’s not the current time, I can see how long it’s been cached. This is probably affecting my search results record keeping. But it should still give me a good idea of how people find my site.

Hmm… It just hit me that I do some PHP to make sure non-content related stuff doesn’t go into the search engines (ads, comments and my sidebars) I bet that doesn’t run live anymore (actually if a search engine grabs a page first it’ll look all mucky for everyone else, I’ll probably remove that code). This is not to cheat the search engines, it’s to get them to get the data that this page was published for.

I’m in the middle of my Movable Type upgrade. So far so good, it was pretty easy to do so far. Comments are in moderation mode, I have to approve them before they appear, once I get the new spam catchers intalled I’ll open them back up to the world for instant posting. If something seems really bizarro is happening you can e-mail me… Thanks!

Thursday Thoughts is a new weekly meme. Don’t forget you can always links to all sorts of memes at The Daily Meme

Since this is the first of Thursday Thoughts, let’s start with first-time blogging.

Mell (of Divergent Poles) was trying to understand what a trackback is, so I’m making this post as an illustration.

While creating this message there was an empty spot (just like there is a place for the title) to add trackbacks, since I’m referencing this post (i.e. I’m talking about Mell) I’m adding his trackback information to that spot. When I post this message it’ll send a tiny message (called a trackback or sometimes referred to as a ping) to Mell’s message and now he’ll know I was talking about his post and get a better understanding of this (I hope). There is no indication on my site that I trackbacked him (other than me telling you), the main reason is to let him (and his readers) know I are talking about him and when others read his site they’ll know I’m talking about Mell so they might follow the link to see what I say (in this case, if they want to know what I think a trackback is).

Trackbacks are generally for when you are specifically referencing someone’s specific message. Sometimes if you’re making a similar post or have more information. But I think internet etiquette is it’s if you’re referencing their specific post. Since I am talking about his post, this is a valid example… I can’t even tell you how long it took me to understand this, hopefully my example will make some sense.

The trackback is not just the address for the site or the message, sometimes it’s something odd (for this example it’s http://haloscan.com/tb/mditangco/110399998884597771) but you don’t care ’cause you’re just going to cut and paste this part. If you look at his message you’ll see it now says “Trackback (1)” (or more, it was 0 before I posted) if you click there it will reveal the first few sentences of this message and the title is clickable and takes you back to this message (which is much more helpful as a link if you started at Mell’s and not here), it’ll also list any other trackbacks that may have occurred since then.

I use Movable Type and it supports Trackbacks, some software does not, so your mileage may vary.

This is where it gets confusing (the differences/similarities between trackbacks and pings) – Every time I post a post my blog automatically pings a few different addresses so other pages know I updated my page. Why? (I’m glad you asked) Here’s three examples. 1) This is so that things like the MovableType home page knows I recently updated and lists me as a recently updated page. 2) And so Blogrolling (see the list of blogs I read on the lower right) know I was updated. On my page if a page has been updated in the last 48 hours and blogrolling knows about it (from a direct ping at http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ or from looking at some other pingable places) it marks those pages in bold/italics for me and I don’t have to do a thing. 3) This same auto-ping alerts Yahoo! so that when (if?) people have me show up on their MyYahoo! start page it knows to update the content for them. This is probably technically called pinging a site but it’s probably not that much different than the trackback concept (if not identical). Bottom line, if I changed all the spots on my site to say “pings” instead of “trackbacks” it’d be the same thing.

So I’ve almost been posting for a year AND I’m almost to 500 posts. If I average my average number of posts per day I’ll probably hit both at the same time.

I kinda jump from one end of the spectrum to the other (funerals to sappy TV shows to technology), I keep thinking that I’ll break out the tech into it’s own blog, but I can’t decide it that’s necessary. I’ve got an idea for a tech specific blog, and if I do that, then I’d have two tech blogs (extra geeky and semi-geeky) so I think I’ll keep them together for now and if I go the other route I’ll just keep the long tech reviews to the extra geeky blog.

I finally got a few comment spams. It’s probably the only place I’ve ever mentioned the word c_sino (and I’m not going to say it again, it’s that place where you go g_mbl_ng).

THis isn’t any kind of an invite, but it’s just weird how long it took and the fact that I make people type in that little code (like at ticketmaster) before they can post…

The confirmation comment post that movable type sends you should have a delete option built in! RIght?

(I’ve since removed the CAPTCHA requirement to post)

Nothing super significant: I’m using the columnize plug-in to save some space for my archives and categories, I’m using the more javascript to make the extended entry accessible on the main page, hmm… (I did a third thing too, something I found on Girlie’s site while looking for something else…) Oh, at the bottom of the my main page, how I did the recent additional entries was an idea from Girlie. Of course this was all done with Movable Type from Six Apart.

From RE: Blogs

Today was a nice day, I’ve been working on my To Do list and adding things almost as fast as I can cross them off. But I’ve been getting lots done. The one annoying thing was buying an additional bathroom rug (which I thought I did a week or two ago but searched the house/car/house/car many times for) and after being home 5 minutes I found the one I already bought… Back to Kohls!

One of the High School teachers was having a barbecue and I got an invite which was nice, sometimes things like that just go out to the specific buildings and I don’t hear about them. I’m on that odd borderline of Administrator or Person, depends who you talk to, what their mood is and how upset people are with other administrators. It was a lot of fun, we grilled, played croquet ate and played with the kids. There were some babies, one that finally warmed up to me and let me carry here around, and some older kids. Got to meet some spouses and that’s always interesting. I felt bad taking off as some others were showing up but the allergies had been starting to kick in and and then the neighbor started mowing (cut grass is my kryptonite).

On the way home, talked to some older gentleman at Borders who was looking at the O’Reiley’s Essential Blogging book and hopefully I gave him some good info, he want to get into it but wasn’t sure where to start. I pushed Movable Type but suggested TypePad if he just wanted to try it out. I found a few winners myself: Two 2004 O’Reiley’s books PHP & MySQL and and Pocket Linux guide.

Plus I found out a person I dated was getting married soon. For some reason I always find that interesting when I find it out about someone…

From RE: Blogs .

I finally saw a copy of ‘Teach Yourself Movable Type in 24 Hours’ at the store and it’s mine! Mine! Mine! I’ll do a short review later. But I’m notoriously bad at doing book followups….

From RE: Blogs

Go listen to a great interview with Ben and Mena from Six Apart (Movable Type). They have an interview with Doug Kayeat at IT Conversations. It’s very enlightening since it took place before last Thursday. Anyone who thinks they backpedaled after their announcement would be wrong (maybe a tiny bit right, but not much), they pretty much say it all here (a week or two before). Listen to the recording (it’s 39 minutes) you need to hear it, not read it. They say how they (the company) are changing, what people aren’t going to like and what the changes are and all sorts of interesting things. I think I like them even more now…

IT Conversations is a great web site. Lots of interesting interviews and conversations.

From RE: Blogs

It’s a little later since my earlier MT posts (one and two) and people have calmed down a bit about MovableType’s new pricing structure. Which for individual personal use really isn’t that different than the previous versions. I like that some of the big names in MT blogging feel the same way as I do/did. (Of course I didn’t list the few big names that disagreed with me.)

This is a bit of a followup to my earlier entry on the new pricing scheme at MT (which could have be subtitled “whiners begone”). Read Melissa’s post, she made it pretty understandable when she summarized up Mena’s followup post (which clarified a few things and even retroactively removed a thing or two from the EULA). I’m sure they lost some business, there were too many upset people yesterday.

Highlights of the update
• Some of their choices were made due to results of a survey (which I failed to answer). If you combine two or three blogs into one (and they aren’t used sepratly) it only counts as one.
• The dual processor rule should not have been in the EULA.
• You are not required to upgrade to 3.0 and you only have to obey the liscence as to when you agreed to it.
• You can add individual author/logs to the personal license for $10.
• Old archived blogs don’t count.

I feel bad, I bet Mena and Company lost some sleep yesterday (or maybe they keep a bar at the office).

MovableType released their new version of blogging software and just about everyone has gone through the roof. They’ve got a new pricing scheme and guess what? It’s not free any more. And everyone is whining. The software has only been out for a few hours, it’s not like everyone is desperate for an upgrade. Many folks seem like they are going to jump ship immediately?!? The biggest feature seems to be the registration for comments which not many people seem interested in.

My favorite whine is: “it doesn’t have that many more features and it costs too much”, well, keep using the version you’ve got then.

I probably won’t upgrade unless it’s got some great feature in it. But I don’t rush out and buy the latest version of anything the day it comes out either… I might switch over to a different product and I might rave about it when I do, but I don’t think I’ll whine about MovableType when I do (especially if the only thing they screw up about it is the price/marketing).

I love MovableType, it’s the only blogging software I’ve tried but it seems that’s what all the cool kids (i.e. smart) are using. I mean I really like it, it’s great. I have see a few other things but they seemed a little more complicated but I may peek into it some more. It’s fun from a programming standpoint, it’s flexible and I really have been having a lot fun with it.

I gotta ask again. “What’s wrong with your current 2.661 version of Movable Type that would make you migrate to another piece of software?” I haven’t noticed anyone complaining that 3.0 has (crucial) features they want and can’t afford.

1. A geek– Hey, who handles tech support at your place? You? …the six year old? …or someone from outside? …and how about in your web space? No, we’re not looking for techs; we’re just curious . I’m it in my family, I do all my own web space (including my own Movable Type installation stuff). I’m the house that relatives call/visit when upgrading stereo or computer equipment.

2. in the– computer? Just a curiosity for the designer types: what Operating System are you running? …and which browser? Since sites can show up differently in different browsers it’s more than a casual question. Macintosh OS X mainly (sometimes Windows, sometimes Linux). Mostly using Safari.
3. Family– Do any family members read your place? Do they care? Do they have a clue? …and how about your ‘off line’ friends? …or do you supply a little bit of separation there? My mom stumbled upon it when visiting a relative, they decided to send me mail (and found my ‘blog). She didn’t say much about it, I have no idea if her and/or other relatives read it. I don’t mention it to friends generally. If they find it they find it… I usually don’t complain and I always avoid talking about dating so how much trouble can I get into?!?

From Thursday Threesome

So I just did a demo of Movable Type for the technology coordinators in our county (Wayne, Michigan). It was focused around the ways that I use it for school (work) for to help our staff. It’s at http://techliterate.net/ if you are interested, there are three categories (Tech Help, Tech Tips and Reference Information). You’ll notice the Tech Support and the Tech Tips are cross-referenced together in the right-hand column (I love how great Movable Type is!). It’s a (very) boring background, but it’s consistent and the colors change as you go from area to area (and it I think it looks mostly the same in all browsers). My point of this isn’t so much the demo as that Movable Type is great software.

And of course I had to mention how crazy I thought friends (i.e. Heather) were when they first mentioned it to me. And now, here I am looking for a 12 step program to help me…

1. What are the last two movies you saw? Butterfly Effect (excellent!). Paycheck (pretty good).

2. What are the last two TV shows you saw? Keen Eddie (always fun). West Wing rerun (always good).
3. What are the last two items you purchased? A computer projector to use as a TV (still debating if I like it). Some new tennis shoes.
4. What are the last two beverages you drank? Water and OJ.
5. What are the last two sites you surfed (before coming here)? Heck, I don’t know I went to the Movable Type page and was checking out the new posts somehow found a link to the TT…

From Tuesday Twosome.

Remember when I mentioned Kung-Log a while back? Well, now the first public beta of Ecto is out.

Us poor Mac people don’t even have the formatting toolbar when editing our Movable Type. But now we (and other brand bloggers) have this excellent editor for OS X! Create thumbnails, edit different blogs, easily use categories, post drafts, customize your own HTML commands, save drafts on the hard drive (if not on-line) and edit (yes, I said edit) previous posts and it has a spell check. It’s really great if you like to blog. It’ll even use your CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) to show you the previews!

I cannot believe it’s the almost the end of the week already! It’s been a busy week I’m getting closer to being done with the ‘Help/Support Blog’ at work. I love Movable Type! I want to do everything in it.

A year from now I’m going to be at the CES show in Las Vegas! I never got around to making arrangements this year, but next year it’s a must! I saw Leo on TV today giving his report on the new toys that are going to be out soon.

Don’t forget a new episode of Joan of Arcadia is on tomorrow. And the season premier of Stargate-SG1.

Only one more day for Heather on her big exams (GOEs). Seven questions over 4 days (1/2 day for 6, all day for one)!

It’ll be the weekend soon and I can be outside during the day! It’s dark out all the time and I’m tired of it.

I’m addicted to blog! (To be hummed to the rhythm of Robert Palmer’s tune.)

Then: So I thought Heather was crazy (crazier) when she told me about this Movable Type software she was using for her blog. I mean there are about 80 jillion ways she could be keeping this diary(?) on-line, why Movable Type? I had even seen it before and thought it was interesting, but still… I’m the guy who still hardcodes his own HTML and I just didn’t get it.

Now: It’s like wow! I’m not even talking about the software just the posting is kinda cool. It’s like therapy without having to make the appointment. I don’t know if anyone is reading but it’s not like your shrink is really listening anyways…

Okay, back to Movable Type: This is very cool software at a nice price. It kinda violates what web servers were originally supposed to do: serve documents with out altering (parsing) them. MT just parses and parses and if you loop it right, it parses it again. Actually it does all the parsing beforehand, but it’s really hard to tell. But that’s all fine because what it does is do exactly what the web was originally supposed to do (actually what the pages were supposed to do). Wait, I’m not contradicting myself (yet), there’s a big difference between the web and web servers and web pages.

Part of what web pages were supposed to do is provide text, emphasize different blocks of text (headings, bold and italics) and link pages together. This was so that you could use any kind of browser and it could show you how you want to see the text. (I’m doing most of this from memory, it’s a blog not a research paper.) This also helped to make the pages accessible to the blind (flashing graphics with text dancing around generally cannot be read aloud to the blind by the computer). I was always surprised there wasn’t a web browser that didn’t show you just the headings any then you clicked on it to get the content below it; one reason is probably that people never format text the way it was intended so it wouldn’t work very well. (Did you know the guy who designed(?) the web, it’s a shame I can’t think of his name, just got Knighted?) But now we have different kinds of syndication (xml, rss, etc.) which does (almost) exactly the same thing, MT almost forces you to create your pages this way. Actually the less you know about programming the more likely you are to create good formatted pages. It’s amazing.

Why don’t I post more: Besides having the time? When I have the time – Half the time I can’t decide what to post. The other half of the time I’m playing around with it from the geekier side, it reminds me of the good old days on Unix working with Lex and Yacc. Wow, talk about full circle, I’m back to using Linux (Unix) and parsing text…

PS – Thanks Heather!

There seems to be some issues with editing Movable Type posts on a Macintosh, it doesn’t show you the formatting tools (bold, italics, underline, links). Well even if it did, you’d still want this software tool, it’s called Ecto (formerly Kung-Log) (for OS X) and it lets you do all that and more. Create thumbnails, different blogs, categoris, post drafts, customize your own HTML commands, save drafts on the hard drive (if not on-line) and edit (yes, I said edit) previous posts and it has a spell check.

This version requires MacOS 10.2 or higher and either a MovableType installation of version 2.6 or higher, Nucleus 1.55 or higher, or any weblog system supporting the MovableType, MetaWeblog and/or Blogger API.