Ten Reasons Why

Yeah, so I spent a couple hours wrangling around with Movable Type last night. I don’t know why. I’d had a lousy day of wrangling with other various bits of software, projects, and people at the office, plus I skipped lunch, so i don’t know what made me think that coming home and before eating dinner deciding to entirely redesign a site I hadn’t touched in two years.
Glutton. For. Punishment.
It could have gone horrifically wrong. I could have gotten in way over my head, what with the HTML and the CSS and the templates and the MT settings and the repeated clicking of the rebuild button. I could have totally lost it and left the job halfway done, and you could be reading this in 12-point Times Roman on a gray background just like 1996. And it did look dicey there for about 30 minutes when I couldn’t figure out why every time I rebuilt the site Movable Type insisted on not rebuilding all the archives. (Answer: set some more radio button preferences and a drop-down or two plus checking the Movable Type documentation. I hate it when I have to RTFM.)
In the end, though, I pulled it off and ordered pad thai to celebrate. The site looks . . . well, it looks like about 2003 instead of 1996. Literally. Those of you who somehow still have me in your feed reader since the days back when I was posting regularly may recognize the same green color scheme and the banner image from a previous design. Stick with what I know how to do.
A couple of years ago, I attempted a much more ambitious site re-design that did go horrifically wrong, and I wound up just slapping up some goofy black-and-orange Movable Type template that I pulled off a free template site. And there it stayed for years, sorta like the stack of boxes sitting next to my desk that I put there when I moved into my condo several years ago. (There’s probably something really important and life-changing in those boxes, but it’s been so long I no longer have any clue what’s in there. It’s like a personal time capsule. One day I’ll get around to opening them up, and then it’ll be all like “Ohhhh, that’s where i left that coffee can full of diamonds!”)
There’s still some hinky stuff. One bit of hinkiness being that if you’ve subbed to my RSS feed, you probably got a full feed of old posts from me when you woke up this morning. Sorry ’bout that. And I’m not gonna be winning any design awards. I expect I’ll want to screw around with colors and line spacing and font sizes . . . or maybe just not touch it for another two years. And, oh yeah, I haven’t even looked at it in Internet Explorer yet, so it may look like ass in IE. But, really, if you’re using IE, just frickin’ switch to Firefox or Safari already. I’m so over you IE users and your quirks.
Anyway. There you have it: Ten Reasons Why slightly updated for the tail end of the decade, but still kicking it with the old school charm. :-)
Now all I have to do is write.

Movable Type, Weblogs

John Dennett was kind enough to point out that TypeKey was upchucking all over anyone who tried to comment on my blog.
Don’t know what the problem was. I went through step after step resetting up the TypeKey authentication service for commenting, but it just wouldn’t stick. Finally, I just created a new TypeKey account and that seemed to work. Guess the initial TypeKey account was corrupted somehow.
Dennett was kind enough to say in his email that the horked TypeKey connection was “probably why you’re not getting any comments on your blog.”
The other (more likely) reason is that I’ve only posted six times in the last year — and 2/3 of those in the last week. Not exactly blazing a trail for loyal followers, am I?
For some reason, I’m feeling a little bloggier these days, so maybe the more frequent postings will persist for awhile.

Movable Type, Weblogs

If it hasn’t been obvious I’m on hiatus and probably will stay as such for a while longer. Too many other things to focus on. In fact, I’m thinking about scrapping blogging altogether. I don’t get out of it what I used to (primarily because I don’t put into it what I used to).
Curious: assuming that I stop blogging, how would people react if I just took down the weblog entirely? E.g. any links people had made to old articles would be broken. Is there some etiquette around this? Is there some way to do it politely? re-directs? 60-day lead time? What?

Weblogs

JournalCon 2004 will be held in DC, practically in my backyard. Eh, well, not my backyard since that’s really not a backyard and more of an actual alley, and it’s kinda several metro stops or a 30 minute walk away from my backyard/alley, but you sort of get the point. It’s, like, really close, man.
JournalCon is a “gathering of online journalers, diarists, personal webloggers and other web writers.” Of course, I don’t really know what JournalCon is like, having never been in the three years they’ve been holding it, but it can’t be too bad of a way to kill an August weekend.

Weblogs

The birth of robotic mobile photo blogging. As Evan says: Laugh now . . . while you can!

Weblogs

The dullest blog in the world.
I shall refrain from comment.
Link via Doc Searls

Weblogs

Dive into spam:

Weblogging is growing up. Oh wait, you thought that would be a good thing? You must still be young.

Weblogs

Oliver Willis, in Deflating The Blog Bubble, writes:

During one of the Saturday sessions [at BloggerCon] a member of the audience referred to the assembled crowd as “utopia”. Now, yes, I loved the blog camaraderie but quite frankly I don’t want to be the only black person in utopia. I was the only black person in that room, and was one of a few minorities.

A thoughtful and thought-provoking post on the reality, not the hype, of weblogs.

Weblogs

I’ve been slightly annoyed recently by the minor outbreak of inane comments posted by the intellectually inept who wind their way to some years old post via a search engine. Comments of this nature tend to be more annoying than offensive, and sometimes are just pathetic in their lack of basic reading comprehension.
But more disconcerting is the recent outbreak of comment spam. In the last week, I’ve deleted at least a half dozen or more advertisements for penis enlargement pills, viagra, and other questionable products that were posted to comments on random blog entries. Seems like I’m not alone either [1, 2, 3, 4, etc.].
I’ve seen a few methods [1, 2] for stopping this that involve multiple customizations to Movable Type.
For the time being, though, I’ve finally converted the backend of my Movable Type installation to MySQL* and used this close comments script (which you actually have to get here now) to close comments on all posts older than 21 days. Not only does this decrease the annoying crufty responses, but I hope that it will also limit some of the targets for the vulgar spam.
I’m seriously considering changing my policy of having open comments on every new post. I might just open up comments for the posts that I want people’s feedback on. That seems a shame, but I spend enough time filtering spam from my email inboxes. I don’t want to have to do the same with my weblog.
* That also explains why the Last Modified date for every post on this weblog is now 5:53pm yesterday. Argh.

Movable Type, Weblogs

Will Richardson writes:

Forget all that stuff I said about moving too fast. I’ve decided I’m going to create one Web log a day as a surprise “gift” to various clubs and teams and teachers.

Great idea for a school! Eighty percent of them will never get used, but the twenty percent that do will probably use them really well.

Education, Weblogs