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Michael Boyle's weblog

Scoble: Talking with Six Apart

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I just caught up with Scoble’s interview with Six Apart over at PodTech.net. It’s a good piece, though if you’ve been involved in blogging in the corporate environment there’s not much new. What was new was the focus the Six Apart gang is putting on getting MT into all of the mashups that are coming into vogue. I think they’re really well positioned to take that a long way.

I just hope that Six Apart doesn’t lose its core constituency first – like me, for instance. Shipping MT4 without an easily extendable library of ready-made templates – and without even providing complete instructions at how to build your own – was a huge mistake.

Done!

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I’ve pretty much completed the transfer to WordPress from Movable Type now, and it went very smoothly. WP is very nice to work with, and I chose a very well constructed base theme (if I do say so myself) to work from, which helped. The only dicey parts were a) matching the file naming format of the posts I imported with their old format generated by MT; and b) removing some links from my (old) post titles, which was causing problems.

There’s one major to-do yet: figuring out how to save myself from my idiotic post-title method (i.e., the title is actually the first few words of the post). I think I have the solution (using some advanced CSS and a quick template edit), so we’ll see.

As always, if you notice anything strange let me know. It should be a million times easier to leave comments here than it has been in the past while.

Excuse the mess

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After upgrading MT to version 4, I’ve decided to upgrade this blog to WordPress. I’m sure MT 4 is great, and I did like some aspects of it very much, nevertheless it’s time to move. This isn’t a hugely high-traffic site, so I won’t miss not having the blog written to static files that much and frankly that had become the number one reason – besides simple inertia – for staying committed to the MT platform.The reasons to change? There are several. First, I like the themes implementation of WP a great deal. I made a huge investment in the MT3 templating system – re-implementing the whole design in pure CSS using stock MT templates. It turns out that the choices I made in doing so were more or less implemented in MT 4 – but their implementation is lower-level than mine was, and to re-do that seems daunting, so say the least.

Second, I’m frustrated that so much of the documentation for MT on the Six Apart website is still devoted to MT3. They clearly consider documentation to be an inessential feature of their software – whereas I think it’s AS important as nice things like a stable application. I’ll say it again – an application that is stable, but doesn’t have very good online documentation, is not ready for release. My experience with MT4 is that I have to do almost all of the work to figure out how to implement it myself, and quite frankly, I don’t have the time.

Third, I can’t believe that after three years of effort, there is essentially no theme structure built into MT4. I have wanted to change the look and feel here for a while, but it’s a huge leg up to start from an established theme by a designer who shares one’s own sensibilities. Right now, I can’t get that with MT4.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think MT4 is a wonderful tool – but not for this site, not at this time. And I shouldn’t overlook the fact that doing this will allow me to clear away a lot of cruft that has built up over the almost 8 years of publishing mikel.org.

I think

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I have MT 4.01 installed correctly. Now for the fun of updating all of our templates etc. I like this very much, though, and even with my recent experience with WP I think I’m going to stick with MT.

If it has fucked with all of Nadia’s accents, I’m going to be pretty pissed. é à ça etc.

Better late than never:

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Better late than never:

spurred on by my post yesterday, I have finally licenced the content of mikel.org under a Creative Commons Canada by-nc-sa license. It was really just inertia that kept me from doing it before, or at least since November 2004 when Canadian CC licences were first made available.

Wish list? Movable Type makes it easy to create a US license right in the site preferences. Frankly, though, I think it’s obnoxious that Six Apart has a US-centric feature embedded in their software when International versions do in fact exist. I also wish the Creative Commons Canada people had: a) made it easier to download the appropriate graphic and store it locally (with instructions for those who don’t know how); and, b) I wish they’d included size attributes in the image tag itself. Small details, but important ones.

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