eclecticism

As might have been implied by my last post detailing an evening’s work tweaking templates and installing plugins, I’ve decided to stay with Movable Type for my weblog. There are a few reasons for this, but it boils down primarily to two things: familiarity and loyalty.

This isn’t at all a slight against WordPress (which I was actively poking at), Expression Engine, or any other weblogging system, for that matter. I’m actually quite impressed with WordPress, and if I were starting a project from the ground up, I’d definitely include it in the list of strong contenders to run the back end. For this site, though, I decided that it was better to stick with what I knew and spend some time tweaking things than to jump ship entirely.

Right now I have a little over three years worth of experience with Movable Type (I switched over to MT from a similar but far simpler package called NewsPro on Dec. 21, 2001). While I certainly wouldn’t rate myself terribly high in the pantheon of expert MT users out there, after this much time fiddling and tweaking, I don’t think I’m any slouch, either. While I’m sure I could learn the ins and outs of a new system easily enough, in this case I’d rather use and build upon the knowledge I have rather than starting over from scratch.

Besides, in the time I’ve been using MT, the software itself has worked quite well for me. My battles over the past weeks have been with the comment spammers and their abuse of the limited resources of my server, not MT. Moving to another system might have worked temporarily, but it would only be a matter of time (and likely not very much time, at that) before the attacks started hitting that system — and I’m still not convinced that a PHP solution is the best choice for my webserver. Better for me to make a few concessions (disabling comments after 30 days, for instance) than put my server through the effort of serving up an entirely dynamically-generated website.

There’s one more big reason why I wanted to stay with MT, though — and that’s Six Apart.

As I mentioned above, I started using MT back in its version 1.something days, back when there was no Six Apart, just Ben and Mena in their apartment. Back then, I was one of many people occasionally popping up on the Movable Type Support Forums, and as often as not, it would be either Ben or Mena personally answering the pleas for help when one stumbling block or another was found. It’s things like that that add a more personal touch to software — and one of the reasons I’m fond of shareware programs like NetNewsWire, ecto, or many other programs where the developers are still personally involved with their user base — there’s the feeling of a real, breathing person behind the software, rather than a faceless corporation.

Obviously, as Six Apart has grown, Ben and Mena aren’t always as personally involved with their user base as they used to be. However, in my experience, Six Apart has yet to lose that personal, “real person” feeling, and that’s in no small part due to the excellent people they’ve been hiring, many of whom have been loyal users of MT for longer than I have.

When I got Slashdotted after news of my departure from Microsoft broke across the ‘net, I was using Six Apart’s TypePad service. As it turns out, I had the unenviable position of being their first Slashdotting, and those next few days became something of an experience (for both myself and Six Apart, I believe) in how to handle such an event. I’d already spent much of the day waging a losing battle with my inbox as comments, TrackBack pings, and e-mail missives deluged me, when suddenly iChat popped up with a friendly hello from Mena herself. I was a bit taken aback — it’s not every day I get an IM from the President of a software company, after all — but again, it’s things like that that impress me. Rather than assigning my case to one of the tech support crew, she and I spent the next few minutes working out ways for me to tweak the code on my pages to ease the load on the TypePad servers.

A few weeks ago, I realized that due to my own absentmindedness, I’d accidentally paid for a year of TypePad that I wasn’t going to be using, as I’d moved back onto my own server. It was a little frustrating, but I had noone to blame but myself, and said as much when I grumbled about it here. Imagine my surprise, then, when I got an e-mail from Brad Choate, who’d come across my post, pointed it out to someone at Six Apart, and had made arrangements with Brenna to refund me that yearly fee. I hadn’t asked for this, and there was absolutely no reason for Six Apart to do this for me — but they decided that it would be a nice thing to do.

Then, just a few days ago, Anil Dash noticed that with my battles against the spammers I’d started looking at WordPress, and he sent me a friendly little note asking if there was anything they could do to help me with my MT installation. I let him know that my limitations weren’t with MT, but with my webserver (and was barely able to keep from mentioning how nice it would be to find an Xserve PowerMac Mac mini on my doorstep one day — it wouldn’t have been at all serious, but I don’t know if Anil stops by my page often enough to catch my sense of humor), and thanked him for his note. Again, this is the kind of thing that impresses me — sure, on the one hand, he’s “just another blogger”, but he’s also the Vice President of the Six Apart Professional Network.

What it boils down to is that over the years, time and time again, I’ve gotten incredibly friendly and personal service from the crew at Six Apart. I can’t think of a better way to build and maintain customer loyalty than that.

So, to Ben, Mena, Brad, Brenna, Anil, and all the rest of the crew at Six Apart — thanks, folks. Keep on rockin’.

“I Don’t Want Your Love” by Duran Duran from the album Decade (1988, 3:50).

After reading my rant about comment spammers, Joel asked me if I’d thought about switching over to another weblogging system. Here’s a (somewhat expanded) copy of what I sent back.

> I’ve enjoyed reading your site (and its comments) ever since TypePad… and I bring this up as an honest suggestion. Why not try out WordPress? It’s simple and while it’s not immune to comment spam there are a wealth of plug-ins and options that filter or destroy them quite nicely.

Switching systems is definitely one of the things on the “possible solutions” list (WordPress and ExpressionEngine being the two top contenders). One of the things that’s been keeping me from exploring that is a distinct lack of redirect-fu when it comes to making sure I don’t break my old permalinks. I’ve received one offer of possible assistance with that, though, so it may be less of a hassle than it’s looked in the past. In the best of all possible worlds I’d be able to keep my current permalink scheme, but I’m not sure if that’s possible with the other systems, so if I have to, I’d settle for working redirects.

Part of what keeps me on Movable Type, though, is simple customer loyalty and experience. I’ve been on MT/TypePad for years now, and it’s what I’m most familiar with. Plus, they’ve been very good to me — they even just refunded me the $120 I’d accidentally paid for a year of TypePad that I wouldn’t be using, purely out of the goodness of their heart (I didn’t even ask — they saw my post grumbling about my own absentmindedness and made the offer).

I’m also unsure about how much moving to a PHP-based system (as both WP and EE are) would impact my server. MT’s Perl codebase has high overhead when it’s working on something, but then very low overhead when it’s simply serving static pages. Thanks to that, until the spam attacks started getting this bad, it played very nicely on my system. Since PHP has to process every page as it goes out, that’s more overall processing, and the question becomes whether PHP is resource-friendly enough on my box to be worth the switch. I’d used MT’s new PHP integration to dynamically generate pages for a while (before I decided that I wanted to integrate plugins that didn’t play nicely with the PHP code), and there was a noticeable lag when first requesting a page. More info on this aspect from any current WP or EE users (or even developers) would certainly be appreciated.

No matter what, though, I’m not going to be up and disappearing. I’m frustrated and annoyed by the whole situation (though not as much as I was yesterday), sure…but I’m not that easy to shut up, either.

Oh, one other thing: if I do move to another system, I want to be able to use tags instead of categories. I know that there’s a plugin for this for Expression Engine (John’s using it), and it appears that there is a hack for WordPress also (though that’s from a few months ago). Something else for me to investigate while I’m deciding which direction to head.

Update: I’ve had one vote against going to a dynamic system such as WP or EE. Phil (who I host) has both a WP and an MT weblog set up on my server. To compare the two, click these links and compare how long they take to load: MT (serving static pages) and WP (serving dynamic pages). It’s a noticeable difference, the MT site pops right up, while you can watch the WP site build the page. Off of that example, at least, I’m thinking sticking with MT and static pages is a good idea.

Update: Whee — I’m still getting comments, they’re just “old-school” e-mail comments. This is good. Both indieb0i and Ryan (and Gregor) have let me know about the Staticize plugin for WordPress, which “is a highly advanced caching engine that dynamically and automatically caches pages on your site that need to be cached, when they need to be cached.” Essentially, only the parts of the page that really need to be dynamically generated are, and the rest of the page is static (at least, that’s how I’m reading it). Nice, and puts WP back in the possibilities list. Thanks!

“Radio Bagpipe (Live)” by Pigface from the album Eat Shit You Fucking Redneck (1998, 4:35).

A few months back, after having been a happy user of Six Apart’s TypePad service for about a year and a half, I decided that I wanted to go back to having the finer level of control and options that Movable Type would offer, and moved my weblog back onto my own server. I made sure to make the move a couple months before my TypePad subscription ended, so that I would have time to move all my files over and off of their servers before I got locked out of my account.

Today I got a comment notification from my TypePad site. This was a bit surprising, as my account should have died in December. When I bounced over to the TypePad site, though, I was able to log in without a problem. Starting to wonder if I’d been stupid, I checked the Account status page.

Oh, dammit.

Sure enough, I’d made sure to save my credit card information and turn on auto-renewal at some point, and TypePad had very obligingly signed me up for another year of service in December. Me being my usual brilliant self with finances had never noticed this (in itself actually not a bad thing, though — I’m still far below where I’d like to be, but if I can take a $120 hit to my bank account without it causing major issues, things are definitely improving). I checked the TypePad FAQ, and sure enough, no refunds if you’ve paid in advance. Ah, well, that was what I expected anyway.

So now I’ve got a TypePad account that I’m not using that’s all paid up and useable until next December. What in the world do I do with that? I’ve discovered over time that I don’t do well trying to keep up with posting on multiple weblogs, so starting a second weblog just doesn’t seem like a realistic option. I don’t want to move back to TypePad — not only would that be a fairly major pain, but I don’t want to lose some of the extras I have with Movable Type that TypePad doesn’t offer. I use [Flickr][5] for my photos now, so a photoblog isn’t really necessary.

[5]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/djwudi/ Flickr: Photos from djwudi”

Prairie suggested I try selling it on Ebay, but there’s hassles with that. While I could probably delete most of my personal information, the URL for the site is djwudi.typepad.com, and I don’t want to hand the ‘djwudi’ name off to someone else — until I actually started using my full name regularly, ‘djwudi’ was my normal online ID, and I still use it in [quite a few places][7].

[7]: http://www.google.com/search?q=djwudi&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 Google for ‘djwudi’”

I guess I’ll just keep it around in case something really strikes my fancy and seems like a realistic project. No point in canceling it, as long as it’s paid up through the year, at least.

“World Window (Fusion)” by Haujobb from the album Industrial Mix Machine (1997, 4:37).

Wow. Straight from Jay Allen:

Six Apart has announced in co-operation with Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and other blog vendors a massive joint anti-spam initiative based on the HTML link type rel=“nofollow”.

The initiative is based upon the idea of taking away the value of user-submitted links in determining search rankings. By placing rel=“nofollow” into the hyperlink tags of user-submitted feedback, search engines will ignore those links for the purposes of ranking (e.g. PageRank) and will not follow them when spidering a site. […] It is important to note that while the links will no longer count for PageRank (and other search engines’ algorithms), the content of user-submitted data will still be indexed along with the rest of the contents of the page. Forget all of those silly ideas of hiding your comments from the GoogleBot. Heck, the comments in most blogs are more interesting that the posts themselves. Why would you want to do that to the web? Now, the astute will point out that because links in comments/TrackBacks are ignored by the search bots, the PageRank of bloggers all around the blooog-o-sphere will suffer because hundreds of thousands of comments linking back to their own sites will no longer count in the rankings. And that is most likely true. But that inflated PageRank, which was a problem created by the search engines themselves, is the rotting flesh that the maggots sought out in the first place. If you ask me, I say fair trade. In the end, of course, this isn’t the end of weblog spam. But because it completely takes away the incentive for the type of spamming we’re seeing today in the weblog world, you will probably see steady decline as many spammers find greener pastures elsewhere. That decline combined with better tools should help to make this a non-issue in the future. Every little step counts, some count more than others, and history will be the judge of all.

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p>Very cool. Also very similar to a technique I was using a couple years back, though that was geared to blocking off areas of the site to ignore rather than affecting individual links. Either way, though, it’s a big step forward. I’m especially heartened to see the list of competing companies and weblogging systems that are participating in this.

“Smack My Bitch Up” by Prodigy, The from the album Fat of the Land, The (1997, 5:42).

Okay, I’m hoping someone out there might be able to give me a hand here.

I’m working on moving Eclecticism from TypePad over to my own server. I’ve got 95% of the site framework finished (i.e., the design and the slight tweaking to account for differences between TypePad and MovableType, enabling TypeKey registration, and so on), but I’ve got one little thing that’s causing me issues.

Here, I keep my linklog in the sidebar as a separate weblog, using an SSI command to insert the last fifteen posts of the linklog into my pages. Quick, easy, and very simple to do — and I’m having a bear of a time getting it working on my server.

Here’s what I’m dealing with… Read the rest of this entry »

Anil’s post about moving from New York to the Bay area for Six Apart prompted me to go take a curious look at the Six Apart jobs listings.

As much as I enjoy being something of a “jack-of-all-trades” in my computer experience — lots of experience across a wide range of fields — the downside is a lack of comprehensive knowledge in nearly any field. It’s a shame, too, because I think I’m about 80% qualified for a job at Six Apart. Read the rest of this entry »

Has this information been made public yet?

Mark Pilgrim’s b-links pointed to this post that uses Six Apart’s new TypeKey comment registration system. Even before reading the post itself, I noticed the “sign in” link for TypeKey, and since I’m curious about how it is going to function, I figured I’d see if I could set up an account.

I hit the sign in link, and then went to the registration page. When I put in my usual login name, though, I was told that that ID was already in use. Since I hadn’t signed up for TypeKey previously, this came as something as a surprise to me.

Suddenly curious, I went back to the sign in page and tried logging in using my TypePad login — and what do you know, it worked! Nifty — apparently, anyone who uses TypePad to run their weblog auto-magically has a TypeKey login.

(Moments later…) Aha — apparently I wasn’t the first person to discover this: Michel Vuijlsteke pointed this out in the comment thread. Damn, and here I thought I was getting a scoop…

(A few more moments later…) Argh — David Ely beat me to it too.

One downside I’m seeing right away: when I leave a TypeKey-authenticated comment, my name shows as “djwudi” rather than as “Michael Hanscom”, and I can’t seem to find a way to change that. Hmmmm…

So now the question becomes, when to TypePad users get to start playing with TypeKey on our weblogs?

iTunes: “All Tomorrow’s Parties” by Apoptygma Berzerk (2000, 5:05).

A few months ago Alex Hung, one of the regulars in the TypePad User Group, announced that he was working on a Windows-based application for posting to TypePad and MovableType-based weblogs that he was calling TypeWriter. Not being a Windows user I didn’t have a lot of use for this, but I watched his progress as he posted updates on his project in the forums.

Earlier this week, Alex, Adriaan Tijsseling, and Joi Ito jointly announced that they have joined forces, and TypeWriter has now become Ecto for Windows.

Congrats to all involved!

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes: “Sex On Wheelz (Radio Edit)” by My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult from the album Sexplosion! (1992, 4:01).

I have no idea if anyone other than myself is currently subscribing to my ‘comments only’ RSS feed, but I’ve noticed an odd issue with it that I haven’t been able to troubleshoot yet. I’ve asked for help on the TypePad User Group, but I wanted to mention it here too, in case anyone else has been noticing this or might be able to point out what I’m doing wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

I just had someone ask how I was able to create the four RSS feeds for my site. Here’s a quick rundown, along with the templates themselves, should anyone else want to do the same thing. All the templates are RSS 2.0, and have been checked with the RSS Feed Validator. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the wonderful little things about a weblogging system such as TypePad or MovableType (and many others, of course) is that there are a lot of nice little usability touches that make it so much easier than having to work with all the HTML code yourself. Rather than mucking around with <p> tags and the like, you just type away, and when you hit “Post”, all those niggling little details are taken care of for you.

Every so often, though, something doesn’t quite work the way you’d expect it to. Over the past few days, a few people have been posting in a thread on the TypePad User Group, trying to figure out why every so often, using the blockquote tag would suddenly cause display issues in a finished post.

Since I’d had to battle with this in the past, I ended up writing a small book attempting to explain just what was going on. My full post (in my usual overly long-winded style) follows… Read the rest of this entry »

It’s plug time!

I’ve been hanging out on the TypePad User Group for a while now. It’s a great little resource for TypePad users — entirely unofficial, but a good place to go as a first resource for figuring out issues with coding and maintaining TypePad weblogs.

We’ve noticed that while there are a lot more TypePad weblogs popping up, it’s lost some of the “community” feel that it had in the beta test days, and it was suggested that…well, I’ll let authenticgeek speak for himself:

I think this forum is an awesome place to get info about TypePad.

There is just one small problem, TypePad is growing at such an huge rate and we’re not getting as many new users as we should be. Sure, it’s not a requirement to show up here if you’re on TypePad but I think there are people out there that should know about this place that don’t. Any ideas for how we can better get the word out to new TypePad users? We could even talk to Ben/Mena about possibly getting an official link here from the TypePad site since I’m sure they don’t have the time to answer so many little questions about CSS and whatnot. I’m going to make another post on my blog to remind people (the few who read) about this place. I urge other members (especially people with massive hits *ahem* djwudi…) to do the same and submit any other means for spreading the word.

<

p>See? They just want me for my potential hit-generating ability…;)

All joking aside, it is a good place to go for information, questions and answers. Feel free to drop on by.

Congratulations to Six Apart for TypePad’s getting an Editor’s Choice nod from PC Mag in their roundup of blogging tools. A double-whammy, too, as MovableType is the only standalone (non-hosted) weblog tool reviewed in the round up, and gets five stars.

(via Everything TypePad!)

Three new features for TypePad weblogs have been announced today at Everything TypePad:

1. TypeList Sort Options: TypeLists can now be sorted alphabetically or by rating, in addition to ascending or descending by date added.
2. Photo Album .zip Uploads: Rather than adding photos to photo albums one-by-one, you can now upload a .zip archive with multiple photos, which will be automatically decompressed and added to your photo album.
3. More Privacy Options: You can now choose between no password protection, password protection for your entire site, or password protection for individual weblogs and photo albums on a case-by-case basis.

One of the constant topics that many webmasters and webloggers are concerned with these days is Google, how to increase your site’s standing in Google’s eyes, and therefore drive more traffic to your site. I use a number of techniques on my weblog, both in the code and how I create entries, that help Google get the most useful information out of my pages.

While I’ve mentioned some in the past, the subject recently came up in a thread on the TypePad User Group, and I shared some of my methods in that thread. At the request of both Liza and Richard, who have also been posting about this topic, I’m re-posting my post (post-haste, though not post-mortem, and definitely not postpartum) here… Read the rest of this entry »