Blogging

Much like most of the WordPress community, I’ve been waiting with baited breath for the release of 1.3. I’d all but forgotten about it until I recently discovered Blogsome in an attempt to get Dana into a quality blogging package. Blogsome is a little known free blogging site. And it’s run with WordPress 1.3 software. They even give you your own subdomain name in the format: yourname.blogsome.com. How sweet is that? At any rate, seeing the new features in 1.3 resparked my interest. I know it’s only a matter of time before it’s released (and hopefully soon). As such, I’ve put up a testing installation. It’s going to be in a state of flux as far as format and looks go, but the content will be static as I simply copied the data from this 1.2.1 installation into a new database for testing. ...

Some of my friends (Katie and Dana) use free blogging services, namely, LiveJournal and Blogger/Blogspot respectively. I personally went straight to Movable Type and then WordPress hosted on my own domain. Of those two choices I’d tend to go with Blogger. It’s owned by Google now, so there’s plenty of growth potential. Probably the main reason would be that I actually dislike LiveJournal because: it’s slow, its themes are applied only to the front page (comment pages are the horrendous style of the rest of the site), it’s slow, you are forced into a long address (even blogspot gives you a subdomain), it’s slow, everyone and their brother has an account there so you’re forced into an obscure AIM screename-ish username, and did I mention it’s slow? Yeah. I don’t like LiveJournal… at all… in any way… shape… or form. ...

Brent Simmon’s, developer the excellent MarsEdit, has asked a very important question. Isn’t it time that a common weblog system feature set was agreed upon? This is related to my earlier entry about the fact that WordPress doesn’t entire support Movable Type’s API. For the record, it is very close. This isn’t horseshoes and computers are far less forgiving than any person I know. By leaving something as “minor” as post specific text formatting, it becomes impossible for external editing software to determine how to format posts, particularly for preview purposes. ...

I’ve adopted the excellent Markdown to format my blog entries. It’s makes it much easier to write and maintain entries. However, because WordPress has to filter each post every time, it slows down my homepage considerably. That is something I’ve come to live with and accept. What is not acceptable is that WordPress still doesn’t support mt.supportedTextFilters. This is what tells external editing apps like MarsEdit know what formatting is being used so it can properly preview entries for you. As a result, Brent had to put in a custom preference (that one must manually add in) to force preview of Markdown formatting for all posts. This is rather unacceptable, but not Brent’s fault. ...

No sooner than Peter Cohen mentions getting more than 11,000 comment spams than I realize that I had been hit. I previously had less than five spam comments. I now had about 50. Ugh. Luckily, setting WordPress to moderate comments with more than 3 links in it did the trick. Considering the success he had with MT-Blacklist and MovableType, I thought it was time I got WPBlacklist which is the equivalent for WordPress. Installation was quick and easy. ...

The good new is that WordPress is a million times easier to install than MovableType. I also like its interface much better. The bad news is that its documentation, or at least the organization of the documentation is lacking. At any rate, I also moved my weblog to the root of the domain, so I’ve made a pointer from the old directory. I just hope that users that were using an RSS client to read my site will notice that the feed has moved as well (it’s linked on this page).

Following confirmation from Ranchero software that NetNewsWire does indeed work with WordPress, I’ve decided to move to it. Partly was to keep current and partly because of some of its features are compelling. I won’t be making any more entries until the migration is complete. I’ll also be making my blog the front page for my domain. Stay tuned!

I’ve been using MovableType to run my blog here and it’s been working great. However, MovableType 3.0 and up are no longer free. For now, the current version of MovableType I’m using is sufficient, but I’m concerned about long term viability. The guys over at Unsanity have moved to WordPress, which seems pretty nice as well. Does anyone have any recommendations for Blogging choices? Keep in mind, I’d like to continue to have the option to publish using NetNewsWire, which does limit the options a bit (WordPress may be out of the running because of this). My host does supply Blogger software as part of their package as well.