Recently in Blog stuff Category

Wow, I thought I'd be playing with RC5 for a while before getting the final release but no, the real thing is here. Go grab yourself a copy

With the long list of recent launch disappointments (with iPhone 3G by far the smelliest) I gotta say, Six Apart have not only delivered a hugely improved product (faster, more features) but a whole new license structure.

The new licenses are very much value co-creation engines. In a nutshell, let the mass of small businesses and bloggers use all the variations and toys for free, let them build on them, change them, and if they manage to scrape some revenue out of their enterprise, then ask them to buy services (primarily the excellent support) and pay for a commercial license.

I am very, very impressed and will be upgrading all my installations immediately. Great work 6A:-)

Way hey! 8 minutes 43 seconds for an all-template all-entry total rebuild. My guess is this could be further optimized by redoing my templates (still using the 3.33 ones) and turning off a few templates that don't really need a refresh every time.

Considering the size of Donkey's database, the fact that it's being published to three parallel blogs (multiple template mappings for shufflebox, list apart and current) this is beginning to look really good, so congrats to everyone involved:-)

Well I've been running the iPhone plugin for movable type for a while now but had never used it in anger.

So I'm sending this entry as a test.

Fingers crossed:-)

Disclamer: We've had a bit of an ongoing debate on this one with Anil fanning the flames as he tries to support the MT cause. I should disclose that I'm a member of the Six Apart Professional Network and also a 6A partner for the Paris office just so's you know...

While I'm a long-time Movable Type fan and user, I remember the first time time I installed Wordpress. What a treat, the thing was completely painless and took no time at all. I was way impressed and have been since. Added to functionality, the open-source community around Wordpress has spawned a huge templating and design resource with hundreds of very high-quality designs for the lay blogger to chose from. In fact, for many a year I considered switching to Wordpress and was only prevented by the thought of having to maintain security on a php installation and how I would handle any serious load should one of my client's projects really take off.

Now I've pretty much stopped worrying about this in much the same way as I've given up on the flash/no-flash, mac/pc, tomato/tomahhto arguments—they seem a bit pointless and on average both options/solutions have their merits.

I had an experience of doing some migration and configuring last night which brought to light some issues I hadn't yet come across in any Wordpress v. Movable Type discussions. I was trying to replicate behaviours from an MT installation into a series of WP ones and came across the following difficulties where Wordpress let me down:

• I couldn't perform a search and replace of strings across blogs and their pages, entries, comments and templates. To get the job done I had to edit template and entry data outside of the WP environment
• I couldn't use my global templates. I use these to configure global variables that several blogs can then share (in particular, I use primarily to manage root path across different systems and to avoid multiblog-calling-itself errors)
• I couldn't re-use my user configurations across blogs and if I wanted to set up an admin to cover more than one blog I couldn't re-gen their password
• Cutting and pasting, or generally moving data between templates across blogs was very unproductive (ended up jumping between Firefox tabs)
• There were two other things that got up my nose and I'll get them down here as soon as I remember them...

Before the WPfanboys jump on me, YES, I understand there are workarounds, upgrades, plugins and other fixes to the above and of course I'm going to struggle working in an environment that isn't my first choice. I simply wanted to list these experiences as I hadn't seen them outlined anywhere else.

9 minutes and 22 seconds to rebuild Donkey. That feels pretty slow and this is on 4.2 release-candidate 2. The same site on MT3.36 on the same box with the same DBserver rebuilds in 7 minutes 28 seconds.

My guess is that I should bin all the templates and rebuild from scratch. As it stands today, I migrated the 3.36 database that the site currently lives in over to 4.2rc2 lock stock and barrell without doing any pruning beforehand. Next experiment will be recreating the site from scratch.

So it's a good thing Maarten is running a training session on template optimisation today :-)

(I should add that the migration from 3.36 to 4.2 is completely painless and largely automatic. The issue on the table with 4.2 is what the Six Apart site describes as "raw performance" hence my test above)

Well, I'm going on hols with Nicki and the bairn-gang for a week and have decided to not bring my powerbook.

I'll be back monday week and then off to seed08 in Chicago for three days. Suggestions for places to work, drink and play in C welcome. Any ideas about getting pay-as-you-go sim cards for the iPhone in the States would be also helpful :-)

A little confused by the implementations of permissions in MT41 -- Are these 'permission tokens', fragments of data that exist independently of the user-object? I mean I get it that:

user + blog + role = permission

but how does this interface (or datastructure?) express nested permissions? Or in other words, shouldn't the "moderator" role for user = James be superceded by his "administrator" role?

New stuff from 6A is usually rock solid so I'm guessing there's a valid reason for the above...

Hey, we've just had a long and very informative post from Matt, a Luton-based Openreach engineer. I hope this really is an engineer speaking and not some perverse item from a 'guerilla marketing' agency subverting from within. He describes some real horror stories, if you're interested in the BT thing it's well worth a read:

I was on a fault last week and the customer drop-wire from the pole to the house was rubbing through trees so I replaced it only to get a phone call the next day from my manager asking why I hadn't charged the customer as the trees were on his property--this is the level that they are stooping to.

Do they care? This thing has been simmering for a while now, I wonder at what point a BT pr person is going to chime in?

Is BT still shit? (A Donkey on the Edge)

So hopefully by now you will have noticed the in-your-face red stripe at the top of the page and made a note of my new number (07515661655).

So I can take it down and resume normal service.

Good to see Serge the Concierge doing his bit to promote the Alex James talk on Thursday.

Remember, get those cheese names to Billy before midnight tomorrow to grab your tickets:-)