Techie :: Techno ::: August 2007 Archives

What's going to happen with Irish blog aggregators and services?

IrishBlogs.info, which I run, is busy enough, but is a resource hog.

IrishBlogs.ie has been revamped, but any comments I've seen about it have been far from complimentary.

PlanetoftheBlogs became planet.journals.ie and seems to have died off

Is there a future for these sites / services or is everyone simply using technorati et al?

My Mac arrived about 15 minutes ago and boy is it shiny! You'll have to forgive me if I vanish for a while as : - it's really shiny - I've got to go to a wedding - did I mention it was shiny?

You'll need speakers and a sense of humour for this one. I'd recommend you DO NOT put it on too loud if you're in a crowded office, as you will get odd looks from people. Thanks to Niall for the link

A couple of months ago I was asking people about Mac laptops, as I was rather confused by the various options. I've also been reading the rather excellent (sorry Ted!) MacBlogger site for the last couple of months and found it helpful.
A couple of threads on CI and queries also got me asking why on earth Mac users seem to be incapable of getting their heads around basic functions and tasks. ....
So this morning thanks to my nice new shiny American Express card I placed an order for a refurb Macbook Pro!
Before you ask... The spec is as follows:
Refurbished MacBook Pro,
 15-inch,
 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
 15.4-inch display (1440x900 resolution)
2GB (two SODIMMs) 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
120GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive
Slot-load 6x SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB GDDR3 memory
Built-in iSight Camera
Front Row and Apple Remote

I also added a copy of Parallels and a laptop bag since I knew I'd need them ...

So now all I have to do is wait for it to arrive ....

I'm not much of a Skype user these days. I have it installed on my desktops and laptop, but I use it mainly for instant messaging, as some of my contacts don't use ICQ, MSN, AIM, Y! or IRC. Last week's outage seems to have upset quite a few people and I feel sorry for them. Though why so many people are that dependent on a free service is kind of disturbing. So this morning Skype posted an explanation on their status site / blog claiming that it was a Windows update issue. So let's see... the famous updates from Microsoft have been released on the same day for a long time. So why would it only affect Skype now unless there was a more serious issue in their network topology? Do they honestly believe that people will buy that excuse? Obviously some people will, but others will simply laugh at them. Infoworld's article echoes what a lot of networking and IT professionals have been saying:

Microsoft releases its security patches on the second Tuesday of each month, so this type of widespread restarting is nothing new. Skype hasn't said what in particular about August's updates led to the network crash, and its vagueness on the issue is causing some Skype users to cry foul.

Maybe the more gullible users will accept Skype's explanation, but I'd be seriously examining other options if Skype was one of my main methods of communication.

Although there is an official mobile version of IMDB it doesn't seem to be working and hasn't been working since I first tried it a couple of weeks ago. There is, however, an alternative: Mdog's interface to IMDB It's very functional and is perfect if you want to check some basic facts while watching TV or a DVD (more likely a DVD in my case). Admittedly some of the functions of the "normal" site don't work, but I can live without them. In any case it's better than having to boot up my laptop just to check some movie trivia :)

I've been working on the migration to Movable Type over the last couple of days. Unfortunately doing it "cleanly" won't be easy due to WP's broken XML export :( In any case I've posted some preliminary notes on what I'm taking into consideration and how I intend to deal with the issues if and when they arise. So the question that a number of people have asked me, both in public and private, is a fairly obvious one: Why are you moving away from Wordpress? If you are a regular reader on here you may have come across a number of my previous posts where I was dealing with the performance issues. Even though I have tweaked things and appreciate Donncha (and others) taking the time to help me squeeze more out of it, I'm really sick of Wordpress' inherent lack of decent performance. Rob went into some detail on his own testing and the results were truly shocking. The number of queries to render an entry on this server, even with all the tweaking, is just plain silly (and most of the plugins that I'm currently using don't even add DB queries - they're more aesthetic). And what about security? Of course software will have bugs and need to be patched and upgraded, but over the last few months the number of times I've had to run around late at night upgrading installs to avoid serious issues was just getting on my nerves. And what's WP's response? They seem to avoid the issue. The last security upgrade isn't flagged as serious, yet the bug sounds serious. I may be missing something, but the number of upgrades I've had to conduct would show otherwise. The other issue is management. If you only write to one blog or possibly two then logging in twice might not be an issue for you. I, on the other hand, have over a dozen blogs. I looked into WPMU, but to get it working with multiple domains would have involved hacking the files and the database - and I'd still have to upgrade every X weeks when yet another security hole was discovered. MovableType on the other hand is really slick. I can login to one interface and then manage as many sites as I want. Not only that, but I only have ONE install to worry about upgrading! Whereas a lot of the minor tweaks that you'd use on a WP install involve 3rd party plugins, MT makes it easy to customise and add functionality with its existing system. Performance wise MT is a lot more attractive as the entries are real files on the filesystem and not just mod_rewrites or temporarily cached files (via yet another 3rd party plugin - notice a trend anyone?) Another thing that bugs the life out of me is WP's attitude to their users and advocates. Over the past 3 years I have probably recommended WP to several hundred people directly and possibly thousands more indirectly (pushing blog hosting for example). However Wordpress is more than happy to ignore Europeans and run adwords campaigns to promote their US partners ONLY. SixApart, on the other hand, seem to have a much more open attitude to the rest of the world, possibly because they have staff and offices spread across the globe. So in a nutshell I will be happily moving away to something that I am happier with on both a technical and philosophical / moral level. You may find some of my reasoning a bit odd, but it's my reasoning and I'm quite happy with it :)

It seems only yesterday that the guys behind SiteVista let me take a look at what they were cooking, but if you look at my original post it was over two years ago! I gather that SiteVista was successful and I did see its name cropping up all over the place, but for whatever reasons they guys decided to revamp it and rename it - Litmus was born! Paul gave me access to a beta account on the new system a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't get a chance to write about my experiences with it (besides they needed time to iron out some of the bugs). The new interface is very slick and incredibly fast. They've increased the number of browsers they're testing against dramatically to include a number of weird and wonderful combinations, so you too can cater for the oddballs :) (I wish whoever was looking after sites like the CRO would use services like this! ) One of the really nice features they've added is the option to share tests with the public via an easy option in the dashboard. So, for example, you could go here to see the tests I ran on an MT4 install. They've also added an email testing suite, so that you can iron out potential issues across a wide range of email clients. Want to know how your newsletter looks in AOL for example? Now you can. If you haven't got an account I'd heartily recommend you signup for a free 30 day trial. You can then whine at your web designers and back it up with proof! :)

After weeks of testing, retesting and hundreds of hours of blood, sweat and tears, the Movable Type team have released Movable Type 4 to the world. You can read the full official announcement from Anil Dash which was published in the last half an hour or so I'll be upgrading my main install to use the latest version of the code later this morning and intend to post in more detail about my migration from WP back to MT. I last did the migration about 4 years ago, but in the other direction! The launch of MT4 also sees the relaunch of the MovableType site with its brand new look and feel which some of us were lucky enough to get a sneak peak at a couple of days ago. The new site also includes a completely revamped plugin directory, which should be welcomed by users of all types.

The 2007 Irish Internet Association Net Visionary awards are now open for nominations. People I'd like to see win this year:

1. Alan O Rourke
2. Conn
3. Red Cardinal
4. 2Bscene
5. Damien Mulley
6. Dave Davis

The category list is below: Social Contribution Technology Journalist Innovation eGovernment Internet Marketer Web Designer Web Developer Online Trader Educational Contribution Internet Entrepreneur Mobile Internet Application Best Online Banking Service Best Podcaster Best Blogger I'll try to put together a proper list of people I'd nominate under each category over the next couple of days ...

If you want to use Lifeblog to post to MT4 have a look at this howto that I wrote up last night

I've started migrating all my various Wordpress based blogs over to Movable Type 4. It's still not a stable release, but I'm more than happy to start moving the less important ones over while the developers work on fixing various aspects of the importer utilities. Unfortunately Wordpress' export is not proper XML, so that's not helping matters. The first blog to move over to the new platform is MobileBlogr.com, which I picked up secondhand from Ken a few months ago. Being able to use the MT interface to manage multiple sites makes life much much easier, plus I'll be able to post from my n95, which is an added bonus!

I've mentioned using the mobile web a bit recently, so in true "eat your own dogfood" fashion I pre-ordered Scrubs Season 6 on DVD using my n95!

You can click on that "thing" to see what I can currently see in my browser when I try to use a public service website - namely the Irish Companies' office (CRO) It was working fine not so long ago, but an "upgrade" has broken it completely. Seemingly it still works in Internet Explorer, but I don't use Internet Explorer and have no intention of being forced to use it when I should have access to site like this. How hard would it have been to write compliant HTML and test the site? So who is to blame? Was it a $random CRO employee or the website developers? Answers on a postcard please ..........

Following on from yesterday's "upgrade-a-thon" the Movable Type team will be running a "hackathon" this evening (Irish time). If you want to participate join #movabletype over on Freenode. It should be interesting / fun!

The Nokia N95 is a thing of beauty. It's got all those funky features that every geek dreams of:

• GPS
• Bluetooth
• Wifi
• 3G
• MMS
• SMS
• Camera

And you can make phone calls too !! It's also got a radio and a few other little gizmos that make it a fun piece of kit. Paul and I decided last Friday that enough was enough and that we'd simply buy ourselves new phones, so we did! It's a really neat device. Yes it has got terrible battery life and the memory card isn't the biggest at 1 gigabyte (though I still remember using PCs with less space on their hard drives a couple of years ago ....) Krystian has an older model (not sure which one) so he's been trying to persuade me to load lots of cute bits of software onto my new toy, though I haven't actually got round to adding anything as yet. If you're a blogger you should like the free software that comes with it - "Life blog". I haven't tested it with Wordpress, but Movable Type 4 supports it, as do other SixApart products and services. You can also download a free podcast reader from Nokia, though it doesn't integrate properly with the browser ie. RSS feeds don't get automatically handled by it, which is a pity Paul goes into some detail about the features and their technical specs, so I won't :) The kind of things that really interest me, however, are native GPS support. I spend a lot of my time trying to get to meetings in towns and cities that I don't know too well, so if I have some semi-decent maps installed this will save me a lot of time and headaches (driving in circles round Mullingar brings back "fond" memories). Now I'm off to get more ringtones .....