Pardon Our Appearance

Tue 21 Nov 200605:42 PM

A crazy week and a half. I’ve been overextending myself with work and life, and neglecting this blog. I’m going to try and pick up the pace this week and write some more posts, but heading into Thanksgiving, and then into the craziness that usually constitutes the December holiday season, I’ll be lucky if I can turn out a decent number before the year is out. I’m just sayin’, is all.

Let’s start things out with a little housekeeping, though: I’ve had some very generous help from Su at House of Pretty in trying to get my intransigent Movable Type problems in order.

We’ve tried a few things, like optimizing my templates, enabling Fast CGI, clamping down a bit harder on comment spam and search bots, all with varying degrees of success. The situation is a little better now, but the problem hasn’t completely disappeared. We’re groping our way towards a solution, and I hope to have things relatively ship-shape around here before too long.

A few people have recommended jumping the Movable Type ship for something a bit more modern and reliable, like perhaps Expression Engine, or even rolling my own via Django. My response is that I’d jump for joy if I could do that, but I’ve no idea when I’d find the time to rebuild everything within a new blogging framework. I mean, if I had the brains, talent and revenue-based impetus to roll out a brand new, custom blogging platform the way some people do, I wouldn’t be writing this post.

In the meantime, you’ll also notice some broken PHP includes here and there; thanks to those of you who have emailed me to let me know. And the site-powered search is broken too, though it’s been broken for a long while, and I need to find some time to remedy that. I guess what I’m saying is: please pardon this site’s appearance while improvements are being made. Thanks.

Return of the Friday Free-for-All

Fri 3 Nov 200608:42 PM

The War on Error-ism

Wed 18 Oct 200609:12 PM

Something’s up with my installation of Movable Type and/or the MySQL database powering it. Often, during the publishing process — after hitting Save or Rebuild — the application will fail in its attempt to get a response back from the server. What results is a message that says, “Internal Server Error.” Fun, right?

This was something I started to see a few months ago, about the same time that I upgraded, after much delay, to Movable Type version 3.3. (To be fair, I’m not entirely sure that the upgrade was the cause of the problem.)

At first, I thought I was only seeing it on the administrative end, when I was editing posts, creating new ones, or managing comments. Then I started to realize that users were seeing it, too, because I suddenly started to get multiple copies of comments, often published in quick succession. Obviously, people were — and in fact, all evidence indicates that they still are — submitting their comments, encountering this error, and then, thinking their remarks weren’t successfully published, submitting them again until some sort of confirmation indication appears.

The Movable Feast Got Away from Movable Type

Wed 26 Apr 200612:59 AM

From time to time I get emails from readers asking some variant of the question, “What did you use to make your blog?” The answer is Movable Type, a very capable publishing tool to which I owe a great debt; without it, I’m not sure I would have written the hundreds of posts I have, probably remaining instead just a frustrated design and technology writer of dubious talent, wrestling with the limitations of Blogger. For publishing power relative to what was available even just five years ago for much, much more money, Movable Type offers a tremendous and compelling value.

Those questions are often followed up with, “Do you recommend that I use Movable Type, too?” That’s a little trickier, but honestly, I think I’ve come to the point now where I’d have to answer, no, I wouldn’t recommend Movable Type to new bloggers. Instead, I would recommend WordPress, very similar software that’s marked by a few key differences: it’s open source, which means it’s free; it’s PHP-based (versus CGI and PERL-based, like Movable Type), which means it’s technologically easy to modify; and it’s clearly the publishing tool of the moment.

State of Subtraction.com

Sat 22 Apr 200609:21 PM

The estimable John Gruber has taken the plunge into full-time, self-employed blogging, and I envy him. As I wrote in the link I posted to the Elsewhere section of Subtraction.com, this is a win all around: readers will get more of Gruber’s uniquely detailed and exquisitely reasoned Macintosh punditry, and Gruber will get to focus on Daring Fireball, the central passion of his professional talents.

He writes, “There’s nothing I want to do more than this.” I can empathize, because while I’m genuinely engaged by many things in life — including the daily and deeply satisfying challenges at my job — there are few things I enjoy more than working on this weblog. As a designer, authoring a weblog is more or less like landing a dream project with a client who’s always in agreement with your own creative judgment. It’s no accident that the design profession and the blog phenomenon have been intimately entwined since this whole thing started. It’s the first medium that has allowed unfettered access to publishing for a population of craftspeople who have almost always had publishing just beyond our reach.

Music for Blogging

Tue 18 Apr 200610:16 PM

Remember When You Said…

Thu 23 Feb 200610:35 PM

This is either the beginning or the middle of a golden age for software, in which, almost literally, any feature set you could want (within reason, of course) is being worked on by somebody somewhere. And if you wait just long enough, exactly such a product will make its debut in the marketplace.

I’ve made this declaration before, and I really do believe it more and more every time one of my half-baked ideas for clever software products is unleashed onto the world in a more complete form by other people. The latest example is coComment, a concept that I wrote about nearly a year ago, but which recently entered a private beta period. coComment is a tool for aggregating all of the remarks that you, as a Web surfer and blog reader, might leave on other peoples’ weblogs. It uses a little JavaScript bookmarklet to almost transparently intercept your comments before you hit the “submit” button to publish those comments to a weblog, and then saves a copy of those remarks to a page of your very own on the coComment servers. The result is an archive of your remarks that might otherwise never be properly assembled into a single location.

Remember When You Said…

Thu 23 Feb 200610:35 PM

You Wrote This

Sun 12 Feb 200607:16 PM

This is either the beginning or the middle of a golden age for software, in which, almost literally, any feature set you can want is being worked on by somebody somewhere (within reason, that is; “Weird Science’-style technological advances are still out of reach) and if you wait just long enough, exactly such a product will make its debut in the marketplace.

I’ve made this declaration before, and I really do believe it more and more every time one of my half-baked ideas for clever software products is unleashed onto the world in more complete form by other people. The latest example is coComment, a concept that I wrote about nearly a year ago, but which recently entered a private beta period. coComment is a tool for aggregating all of the remarks that you, as a Web surfer and blog reader, might leave on other peoples⁏ weblogs. It uses a little JavaScript bookmarklet to almost transparently intercept your comments before you hit the “submit” button to publish those comments to a weblog, and then saves a copy of them to a page of your very own on the coComment servers. The result is an archive of your remarks that might otherwise never be properly assembled into a single location.