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The Daily Whim

The Daily Whim

All The News That Fits My Whim

Sun. Apr 04, 2004

The Daily Whim Begins

Hi, my name is Reid….

“Hi, Reid”

...it’s been 6 days since I’ve used Movable Type.

No one has explained exactly what the The 12 Step Program is in this particular support group, so I’ve been … self-medicating. Short story: new name, new look, and new content management system … same curmudgeonly proprietor and cynical content. It’s still “A Photo Gallery With An Attitude,” that’s been “Confusing Visitors Daily Since July, 2000.” But now it is also “All The News That Fits My Whim.”

But of course, it’s a much longer story than that. You might have read hand coded portions of it if you visited last week, but that was mostly spleeny venting about my frustration du jour.

Which I guess is as good a summary of this web site as there is.

At any rate, all that has vanished into the ‘Net ether now (highly uncharacteristic for me), including the sad but only slightly funny April Fool’s joke (after a week of frustration with Movable Type, I supposedly had converted the weblog to PDF).

The bottom line was that I decided I had as much experience wrestling with my installation of Movable Type (and that of others) as I want to have in this lifetime. And you have to realize, for a web control freak, that’s a big monkey to get off your back.

My methadone has a name. Textpattern. It makes my head feel funny sometimes. But that happened years ago when I switched from Blogger to Greymatter. And then from Greymatter to Movable Type. This is my fourth “content management system” in 45 months.

I think I may have a problem.

But as of today, it is a functional problem. Unlike last week. Textpattern has vast capabilities I’ve yet to implement, get to work properly, or even understand. But that’s why I chose it. If I’m going to invest this kind of time, at this point, I’d rather learn something new. And my timing allowed me to use a MT text import script that appears to have since disappeared from the web (ironically, the author switched over to MT). But that script allowed me to import over 250 entries (taking me back to September, 2003, the date of my last MT blowout … costing me 2.5 years of archives) that I had exported from MT as a text file.

Being able to import that content was a big deal for me. Unfortunately, I was unable to import the comments to the old entries (though they still exist on those original archive pages, just not in this new version). As I said last week (in a hand coded entry now vaporized), “think of me as the drowning man who is a poor swimmer. I could only save myself. If I’d decided to try and save you, too, I’d still be drowning in that Bad Place. And I had to get out.”

So there is obviously much yet to be done, but you’ll find the bare minimum functionality: a “home” page, with permalinks to individual articles, which can be browsed by category.

It’s still pretty raw. But for now, this is the new monkey on my back, with the portentous birthdate of 04/04/04. Play gently with it. It still has lots of growing to do.

Posted 9:44AM, Sun, Apr 04 2004 in · · 11 Comments below


Peanut Gallery

1  Reid wrote:

This is a test comment, since I appear to have left something out of a template. Doh! ... ah, it works now.

Comment by Reid · 04/ 4/04 10:56 AM
2  mas wrote:

I like the new look. It’s softer, more friendly. April 4th is a good birthday to have. INeedCoffee turned 5 today.

Comment by mas · 04/ 4/04 11:05 AM
3  Andrew Duncalfe wrote:

Very nice!

I’m waiting on the release of Movable Type 3.0, at which point I will decide whether to stick with it, or to move on to Wordpress or Textpattern. I’m looking forward to hearing what you think about Textpattern.

Comment by Andrew Duncalfe · 04/ 4/04 04:52 PM
4  rturner wrote:

Omigod! Here I pulled up your site after a short few days and half expected to see either “fatal error, config.php has crashed due to a conflict call on line 1567” or REDRUM scrawled all over the entire site. Instead, it’s not only functioning and looking good, but there’s new content(!).

I always wanted to have a blog with the subheader “All the news that fits”. Instead I’ve got a semi-comatose donkey in a perpetual state of roadkill, steadfastly refusing to publish anything newsworthy or remotely contemporary.

Seeing the disaster here last week, and knowing my copy of b-2 was full of bugs and holes, I successfully upgraded to Wordpress. It’s “successful”, but it doesn’t see my donkey doo doo at all. So I’m leaving the donkey simmering while I decide if I could just copy/paste everything to the new blog and pretend I just started it. As my friend Burak used to say, “there are worse things…”

Congratulations. I have an inkling of the bear you’ve been wrestling.

Comment by rturner · 04/ 4/04 05:11 PM
5  Harvey wrote:

Just glad to see you up & posting happy things again. Hope it runs smoothly for years to come.

Comment by Harvey · 04/ 5/04 03:07 AM
6  Reid wrote:

Thanks for the kind words, everyone. It’s simply nice to be functional again, even if I don’t fully understand this new environment.

It’s definitely better than “REDRUM scrawled all over the entire site,” which is where we were headed, for sure.

Comment by Reid · 04/ 5/04 12:47 PM
7  Matt McIrvin wrote:

Very pretty!

Comment by Matt McIrvin · 04/ 5/04 02:59 PM
8  Noah wrote:

Wow, what a lovely job – congrats on the new site. I’ll be interested to see how Textpattern works out for you over time.

Comment by Noah · 04/ 6/04 06:02 AM
9  Fox wrote:

WordPress can import MT entries and comments, and has many (if not all) the same advantages of Textpattern. Things are looking good arond here and I doubt you want to switch again, but it may be worth checking out.

Comment by Fox · 04/ 9/04 01:31 PM
10  sarah wrote:

It makes my head feel funny sometimes.

I know what you mean. Sections, categories, pages, forms. Eek. Although I am quite hopelessly (but not helplessly) addicted to MT, I decided to investigate TextPattern for one of my writing sites. I think Dean has done a fabulous job, and unlike my foray into the world of WordPress, I’ve not abandoned it after a couple of frustrating days. I’m excited about the ever increasing possibilities with TextPattern. But I shudder at the thought of converting my existing MT blogs over at the moment (or ever). I’d miss too much, and lose far too many brain cells.

Comment by sarah · 04/10/04 12:51 AM
11  Reid wrote:

Fox, I narrowed my search down to Wordpress and Textpattern, and did what “comparison shopping” I could, visiting sites powered by both, and reading articles about each program. I chose Textpattern because it appeared to give me more design control, because I liked the intelligence of its interface, and because even at its current state, it is but an infant who I expect will grow considerably in capabilities. Like anyone, I made a subjective choice based on my preferences and perceptions. There is no one “Right Answer” to these questions.

And I guess I haven’t really made clear the problem I had with MT. I’m a creature of inertia, who was fairly happy with MT and its potential for future development. I didn’t switch because of philosophical reasons, or because Dean bribed me with cases of wine.

It died.

And last September, I’d gone through Six Levels of Hell with a previous MT blowout, which cost me 2.5 years of archives. But … I started over again, with MT, and kept truckin’ for another six months. However, now faced with a seemingly locked up database/MT install that did not respond to the obvious fixes, and looking at starting over again ... I simply wasn’t willing to do it with MT.

I do still use MT for Pixel Pile, Arbitrary Secondaries, and QuoteLog. I’d made two installations of MT, one for the main weblog, and the second for the three “mini-blogs.” That second install continues to hum along fine, rebuilds in a snap, and has never thrown a single error. As long as it keeps humming, I’ll keep using it.

In the end, I couldn’t tell you for sure if the problem I had was specific to MT, or a MySQL database issue, or an issue with my web host, or (most likely) some combination of those three. In the time it would have taken me to even attempt to figure that out, I got a Textpattern install up and working.

And Sarah, I figured I was going to “lose far too many brain cells” either way, so I opted for learning something new with the brain cells remaining.

Comment by Reid · 04/10/04 05:45 AM
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