Learning to Type

As I’m typing this, my girlfriend is sitting here next to me on her computer, valiantly trying to install Movable Type on her server. She has a moderate level of experience with Perl and configuring CGI scripts, but she’s been struggling with it for hours.

It makes me glad that I spent US$35 (back before the cost went up five dollars) to have the Six Apart team install it for me, especially since I have so little expertise in the back-end details that a Movable Type installation requires. And it makes me think, too, that Six Apart’s upcoming TypePad, a kind of hosted version of Movable Type, is going to be a huge hit. The service will effectively help more people like me, who have only a passing knowledge of the ins and outs of Web servers, clear that hurdle and get on to creating interesting blogs.

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Six and a Half Posts About Six.5

Six.5The latest iteration of this site, version Six.5, goes public today. Here is the quick take-away: The past several years’ worth of posts are now all available and tagged for easy browsing, thanks to SixApart’s wonderful Movable Type software. Everything has been pretty seriously redesigned and is now very nearly compliant with Web standards — no old-style HTML tables have been used in the layout. Yay! There are still a few stray areas that need to be incorporated into the redesign, and some last minute tweaking for CSS and XHTML validation, and that will happen soon.

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The Last Mile

Six.5.06Every Friday, I think that this will be the weekend that I finally finish this project and it never quite turns out to be true. But this weekend I really do think I’m going to be done, at long last. As I near the end of this redesign, I realize that I’ve dedicated unreasonable chunks of time to Six.5 (and Six.0 before it), so perhaps it makes sense to start considering what the heck kind of yield I’m looking get back from all this trouble.

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Blogger’s Toolbox

Six.5.05For the sake of posterity, a few technical notes on how I built Six.5. First and most predictably of all, I’m proud to say that this whole endeavor has been a Mac OS X production (aside from browser compatibility testing on Windows of course). If you’ve read any number of posts here, you already know a few things that I’m head over heels about, and Mac OS X is one of them. This operating system has been a total pleasure to use, and completing a sizable personal project like this entirely with native X applications has me more excited than ever about the platform.

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Space-Age Webloggers Pad

Six Apart Ltd.Six Apart Ltd., who are responsible for Movable Type, have just announced the upcoming debut of TypePad, a hosted weblog tool based on MT technology that looks set to compete head-to-head with Blogger. This is terrific; I’m really happy to see that the MT engine will be broadening its reach.

TypePad is just one part of a frenzy of fairly major announcements today from the husband and wife team of Ben and Mena Trott; the company has also completed a round of financing, hired notable blogger Anil Dash as V.P. of Business Development, and formed a board of directors.

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A Hundred Words or Less, or More

Six.5.04When I was posting to this site with Blogger, and when the blog portion of the site was about 250 pixels wide, my posts were much shorter. Now they’re longer, sometimes much longer — this isn’t necessarily a good thing, but it illustrates the by-now-old saw that the medium is the message. In contrast to Blogger, Movable Type practically begs for more words for each post.

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Immovable Parts of Movable Type

Six.5.03Movable Type is probably among the top five best pieces of software I’ve ever used, whether online or on my desktop, but it has its shortcomings. But before I get into them, let me reiterate my continuing awe at its flexible, ingenious feature set, all of which is available for the princely sum of free. Ben and Mena Trott’s generosity is truly a marvel, and they’ve engendered a wonderful, vibrant community of users.

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The Fix Is In

Six.5.02Most of the major work on Six.5 is done. Late last night I finished the template for each individual post (the page that results when you click on the the post’s title or the “This post continued…” link). This was one of the main motivations behind Six.5, as the new template allows for a lot more design flexibility than its predecessor.

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Pardon the Mess

Version Six.5.01Last night I took Subtraction.com offline to start implementing the new redesign that I’ve been talking about for some weeks, so most of you will be reading this either via RSS feed or on Monday (or sometime thereafter). It’s been an interesting process, and it occurred to me that it would be entertaining (to me, anyway) to document a bit of it. So I’m going to use the next few days’ posts to talk about some of the improvements that this new redesign introduces.

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8 Simple Rules for Dating My Blog

Though the redesign of this site isn’t quite complete (the About and Links subsections need to be overhauled yet, one day) I’m already starting to think about version Six.5. There are a few basic motivations behind this. First is my newfound, gung-ho attitude about CSS; I want to rebuild this site using nothing but XHTML and CSS, as valid as I can get it. More than that, I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging and about designing blogs and blog content.

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