Recently in the "Blogging" category...
I’d stopped using MarsEdit to create my blog posts and dropped back to using the online web form as it didn’t support the new tags property in MoveableType.
Now it does!
Sweet. I wonder if this works…
My latest 20% project at Google shipped today and as a result the blogroll on this site is now powered by Google Reader! That’s right folks, get them while they’re hot! Easy blogroll creation for everyone. Well, assuming you use Reader as your RSS aggregator….
Check out the post over on the Official Google Reader blog for all the juicy details:
As a blogger I like to include a blogroll on my site so that friends, family and other readers can take a look at what I like to read. It’s also a nice way to give a shout out to the authors of the blogs that I like. However, maintaining a blogroll can be a bit of a pain as your subscriptions ebb and flow.
…
20% time is such a wonderful thing. As well as being able to actually implement my own wishlist in another Google product, I get to play around with technologies that I might not use day-to-day. As a backend engineer, mucking around in frontend code can be refreshing…
And welcome to all you readers that came here from said blog. Kick back and stay a while.
The page rank of this blog has dropped from 6/10 to 5/10. Sniff.
The upgrade to MovableType 4.0 is kinda complete. There are still a few kinks to be worked out (e.g. ellipses aren’t being converted to the correct html entities for some reason), but on the whole everything is looking good.
I also switched on dynamic publishing for pretty much everything excluding the index templates that generate listings of all the posts I’ve made (i.e. the full archives and the OPML index). It seems to be working fine this time (unlike with MT 3.0). We’ll see.
I’ve also switched comments back on, but you’ll need to log in right now. Sorry about that, but the spammers were killing me.
You can either create an account on this blog when you try to login on the comment page, or you can sign in using OpenId! The new OpenId support is pretty cool.
When I get round to it, I’ll install all the stuff that’s needed to get CAPTCHA running so y’all can avoid having to log in.
Anyhow. Phew. Finally back to actually blogging rather than hacking on blogging software… Damn, there’s those damn ellipses again… And again…
Can I run an upgrade and just have it nuke my current templates?
For some reason, no matter how hard I try to copy the templates over from a vanilla setup, none of the archive links work. They end up being exported empty. Yes, I’ve setup the archive mappings.
Right now, I just want my content with vanilla templates. I’ll take it from there… So far, this is taking waaaay too long.
Any ideas? Email me at steve@steve-lacey.com, as comments are off until I can get this upgrade completed.
Update: Solved! It’s actually a bug in Movable Type. I found a post regarding a similar problem over here on the SixApart forums and it turns out that the solution described there fixed it. Somehow, my entry listing templates were not marked in the database as the templates to use for categories. A simple flip of a bit by groveling around inside the database and the problem is solved.
Now I just need to actually finish up the template rewrites and I’ll be golden. Don’t hold your breath…
I’m in the process of upgrading this blog to Movable Type 4.0. The actual upgrade went very smoothly, but I decided to take the opportunity to upgrade all the templates to the new formats.
Kudos to SixApart that the my old templates worked 100%, but there’s a bunch of new functionality I wanted to take advantage of - including dynamic publishing.
Anyhow, as I cloned my blog’s database I figured that any posts I make will be lost when I make the switch. Today I realized that as I compose offline using MarsEdit, I can just republish the posts after the switch and all should be well.
In theory.
I agree with Tom, so I shall steal his words. One of the finest living Englishmen is now blogging.
I am overjoyed.
I knew he was a Mac addict. I didn’t realize that he was a phone addict also… To have one of the greatest writers and raconteurs of our time blogging about tech is just wonderful!
Dadcentric has the details. Read it. You’ll thank me.
Photos from the event are over on Flickr.
A few weeks ago I received an invite to a Seattle blogger meetup from Chris Pirillo. I normally don’t head over to Seattle for these things as the 45 minutes stuck in traffic on the bridge is more than I can generally handle.
However, this time the meetup was being hosted by KOMO4, the local ABC affiliate - we’d get to take a look at the studios!
This invite was, of course, too much for this humble blogger to pass up, so at 5.30pm on Thursday, I headed into the mess that is I-520 and onwards to Fisher Plaza in Seattle. Btw, did you know that Fisher Plaza houses one of the best data centers in the area?
After the requisite 45 minutes of hell, I arrived and almost immediately bumped into Chris, who was walking into the building as I was taking photos. I say walking, but he was also streaming live video at the same time…
Anyhow, the event was pretty cool. The control room was pretty impressive and the news studio was smaller than I had imagined.
I spoke to a few of the hundred or so people there and the most interesting insight that I came away with was that there are way more non-tech bloggers out there than tech bloggers. The only tech blogger I spoke with was Mr Pirillo…
A good event, with good food.
I’m looking forward to the next one.
For my money, one of the best writers (ok, bloggers…) on the internets right now is my former colleague at Microsoft, Hal Bryan.
His posts are the highlight of my day. Well, week. Ok, month.
Take this snippet from his most recent post for example.
Have I no shame?
Actually, I do, but I’m about to squander the last of it away like Jack giving away his cow, without even some magic beans, much less their subsequent beanstalk, to show for it.
I collect DVD’s, and have a weakness for certain types of movies and television shows. Sometimes, my standards can actually be fairly high, tending toward well-written dramas, comedies-of-manners - “Careful there, Vicar”, “Very droll, Bernard”, that sort of thing.
This isn’t one of them. Not even close.
No, in this case, I’m admitting to enjoying something terrible. Why? Well, because it has a rather surprising amount of good flying in it. Before Michael Bay gave us Pearl Harbor, before Tony Bill gave us Flyboys, flying scenes in movies and television shows were usually real, and, thus, good. If scenes weren’t shot for that particular title, then you might see stock footage. If it was faked, it was usually faked so horribly with models that it was worth watching anyway.
Hal, you need to write more.
These days I never manage to get all the feeds that I subscribe to read in a single day - I use an aggregator/feed reader for a reason: clicking through to the actual site takes time which I don’t have.
Therefore I’m unsubscribing from all blogs that don’t offer a full RSS feed - I want to read your posts in my feed reader - not be informed that there’s new stuff to read.
This is painful, as it includes a few friends (Kev, that includes you!)
Ho hum.
After almost 2000 comments getting through the junk filters (what’s up with Askimet?) over the past 24 hours and almost two a minute coming in, comments are now completely moderated…
Sigh.
Who’d a thought it? Me. Interviewed!
A new blog called BloggerView has just started up by my new mate Pete from down-under, him of the incredibly amusing blog Chocolate Makes It Better.
Anyhow, my interview is the first! 001! Does that make me a secret agent?
…
BV: It seems like you have spent a large proportion of your life developing software or games and even some other interesting projects that we will get into a little later. Can you tell us a little about the type of kid you were and where the drive for this area of your particular passion came from?
I was the typical geek kid at school - generally ignored by all; especially by members of the fairer sex. I couldn’t kick a football for toffee, so I generally just did well at the academic stuff. My parents were pretty encouraging and I guess I got into it all through a friend whose dad bought him all the computer toys. We’re talking KIM-1, PET, Apple IIe, etc… Then my dad bought me a ZX81 and a Spectrum and I was hooked. I learnt Z80 assembly ‘cos BASIC was boring, and then helped out a computer science teacher of mine with a book of computer games he was writing. This was at the time when you could buy magazines and books with printed listings of games in them that you’d type in.
…
BloggerView - Highly recommended.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg implies that I’m an old fart with no potential and that I wouldn’t get hired there due to my age and, as of three days ago, my impending fourties…
Handily Matt Mullenweg, himself a mere whippernapper, is on the ball with his consistently thoughtful (and of course, beyond his years) analysis:
I’m inclined to agree more with Mitch. Biasing your decisions based on something completely out of someone’s control, specifically the year they were born, seems as likely to have correlation to talent and success in a company as gender, race, or anything else that everyone knows doesn’t matter. It’s not what you’re born with, it’s what you make of it.
Rock on, Matt. Now where’s my zimmer frame?
I can’t think of anything interesting to say. Call it writer’s block, call it brain stuck in writing C++ instead of english.
Well actually, I wish I’d been at GDC, it looks like Kim had fun.
So, in payment for my awful writing habits recently (and just for Karen), here’s a picture of my daughter taken during my Mum’s recent visit…
I know I’m extremely late to the party with this video as everyone and his uncle twice removed has already blogged about it, but some of my dear readers don’t follow ye olde blogosphere as avidly as you and yours truly.
So this is for them.
This truly is a wonderful piece of video and above all a great introduction to whatever this thing called “Web 2.0” might be all about.
The Five Things meme has finally reached me - it must be really hitting the long tail of it’s lifetime now!
So, you get to thank to Justin Uberti for tagging me as I unleash some trivia about my life…
Anyhow, the rules are that I tell you five things about me that you might not know and then tag five others to do the same.
With that out of the way, here we go…
- My first coding experience was on a friend’s KIM-1. Then a ZX-81 followed by a Spectrum, followed by etc…
- At Sixth Form (High School to you Americans) I was instrumental in putting on a production of “HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy”. I co-wrote the script in whilst supposidly in physics class with a friend of mine and then let him direct the adaptation while I did sound. We sold out all three nights and made a bunch of money for the school - we had people coming to see it from all over the country.
- I wrote computer games at school and sold them. I wrote books of games with “code listings”. I was published in Crash.
- In the early 90’s I wrote an application for the official scorer’s at TCCB cricket matches that replaced the traditional, centuries old, scorebooks. It was a TCL/TK app running on X-windows on BSDI Unix on 386 laptops that connected back to base so we could provide live updates to Teletext. That was over a SLIP connection. There was no PS2 mouse driver at the time so I wrote it. Think about it - 70 year old cricket geezers using X-windows on Unix in the early 90’s. They loved it. Oh, and I also got to sit in the scorer’s box at Lords during the 1993 Ashes series…
- I love sailing. Especially sailing in far off distant lands. Unfortunately I’ve not got to do that much recently…
And with that I get to tag five other people. Lets go with:
Ok, so I may have nothing in common with the former right-wing representative, but at least his blog is published under a Creative Commons license…
Please, just go and read this wonderful story: Finding Rosie Mulvany.
Don’t you feel good and warm inside now :-)
And while you’re at it, subscribe to Shel’s blog - he’s a wonderful writer and you won’t regret it.
