Comments on: They Are Still At It

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 05:20:17 +0000

Thanks, Bryan. This won’t happen instantly, but I need to be thinking about it. I have a domain name I registered (but haven’t used) some time back that comes up for renewal in late July; that seems possibly a good time to make other changes as well.

I may miss some aspects of my manual system, but I’ve been reading about the concept of Web 2.0, in which blogs (among many other things) are primary data sources that can be packaged and distributed in a variety of ways. The idea of full-text syndication in a more modern format appeals to me; I’m certainly willing for any not-for-profit org to syndicate what I write if it gains me an extended readership. I don’t care a lot about credit (beyond keeping my name on my posts) or hit counts; I don’t even count hits right now… that’s not why I write, and never has been.

Beyond that, I want to be able to blog from a variety of places without hassle. The public library is great for that, but for some reason unknown to me, they block FTP upfront; I can’t do it from there. (Yes, I’ve discussed it with them; they really do block it. Go figure. I don’t see it as a bigger security risk than HTTP.) I use an FTP wrapper web site when I’m there, but that has its own inconveniences. I want to be able to blog with no significant annoyances from anywhere my laptop has a net connection.

And there are things that my pile-of-web-pages approach cannot conveniently do. For example, I don’t have categories; it’s too messy to do that. And posts are attached permanently to a page; I can’t easily allow things gradually to “scroll off the bottom” of the blog as they age.

As to the blogroll, no matter where I go, I’ll have to do some of that manually. Originally it was a Bloglines blogroll; that proved to be too slow to load. I consider that an inconvenience, but nothing more than that. All in good time. If I decide to cut over, I’ll leave the old blog up as an archive, blogroll included. This is still in the pre-planning stage. Unlike Mr. Bush, I don’t go to war when the idea first enters my mind. 🙂

Again, thanks for the info.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 04:13:09 +0000

They need some time to turn on a mySQL process for you in advance of starting up WordPress and you a blank .htaccess file in the root directory. Other than that the blogroll conversion to an .opml file to transfer it is the most time consuming.

You could just transfer your current system without switching to WordPress, but it does make a lot of things easier.

If you want to customize the template I can probably still locate the filenames to change, all .php files.

The newest version 2.03 was just released and it hasn’t hiccuped.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 01:22:18 +0000

A plutocracy? surely not a Pluto-cracy, since the owner of Mickey’s big dumb dog is a content provider, and is presumably on the other side of the debate from the telcos. But yes, absent internet neutrality, the internet will be ruled by the wealthiest of its interested parties, surely to the detriment of the rest of us who put up web sites.

My internet provider (not my web host), also my phone provider, was SBC. SBC was recently acquired by AT&T, which sent me a letter reassuring me that nothing about the service would change. They were almost right: the service is the same, but the price promptly increased by about 10 percent or so. Don’t ever assume that anything AT&T does with the internet has anything to do with the public good; it’s all about the corporation’s short-term self-interest. “Money, money, money mo-ney… Mo-ney…”

(Aside: I’m seriously considering switching my blog to your web host, where I already have an account I’ve used for photo storage for quite a while, and very likely to the same blogging platform you’re using. Any words of wisdom, if I should decide to do so?)