Now, if only I could heed my own advice.

1. I was seriously considering upgrading the software that runs a few of my sites to Movable Type 4.x to allow the use of the the iPhone/MT interface plugin. Yes, you read that right: I'm considering installing an entire CMS to get an interface for my phone. This plugin makes posting from the iPhone very, very easy. And a clean install of MT 4.x is actually quite easy as such things go.

   But upgrading from an old version, with an extremely custom template and unsupported database? Very, very difficult.

   So difficult, in fact, that I gave up trying to upgrade the existing installation and instead evaluated how much effort it would be recode several sites on the clean install.

   And the answer? Way more effort than it's worth.

2. I'm of a similar feeling of my second recent upgrade, of that to Apple's Leopard on my G4 Powerbook, Hithlum.

   My first upgrade attempt resulted in an unbearably slow system. This was not the desired outcome.

   So, after several hours debugging processes, killing off all sorts of little performance-stealing problems, I opted for a clean Tiger (10.4) install and trusted my backups. Tiger was great in all the areas I remember, and weak in all the other areas I remembered (cough cough Spotlight cough).

   After a few days of that, I thought that since there were enough other people having success with a clean install, that I would give it a try with a clean upgrade back to Leopard. In other words, I lost my marbles.

   You know what? I have not been entirely happy with Hithlum since I started meddling. And really, there's no turning back.

   Leopard may be faster than Tiger, but it doesn't feel faster. The 10.5.1 update helped stabilize some of the applications, and I'm sure that on a newer machine that I would be happy as a clam with Leopard. But instead I ask, was this really worth the time, effort, and money I spent?

   I suspect that the answer is no.

So: Future Brett! Listen up! I will make this simple for you. NEVER UPGRADE! Okay? Never.

(I don't know why I bother. Future Brett never listens.)]]> 4287@http://brettpeters.org/log/ Brett Peters Site Log 2007-12-04T01:48:52-05:00 http://brettpeters.org/log/2007/09/10/post-2004-or-a-mt-intervention-1.html#4205 Movable Type, darling, we have to talk.

I tried an experiment two months ago, where I tried to put all my online data into you. Brief updates, links, everything would get dumped into good ol’ Movable Type. You’re a workhorse, and I knew you could handle it.

And you did, but there were some problems.

• All the extra stuff has really slowed you down. It now takes 2-5 minutes to post even a simple blip.

• Your web interface is really not easy to use. Once I tried MarsEdit, I could see that it wasn’t just trying to write from the iPhone - it’s just not easy to write in your web interface.

• Putting everything together has resulted in a lot of clutter. The last two months are huge. And they’re mostly text. I looked up last night and saw pages and pages of links, with very little content.

And that’s just not right. You should be used for what you’re good at, not shoehorned into a whole set of other tasks.

So. I’m sorry I tried to make you do all those other things. Let me let you get back to doing what you’re good at - publishing stories.

I’ll move the other things off to sites and software that are made for them.

Have a good night.

• Being able to post iPhone pictures to this site while flying across the country, or to Trip’s website on a daily basis, admittedly rocks.

• Some photos that get posted here deserve comments, but you know my position on comments on this blog.

• The hundreds of pictures I post don’t count towards my somewhat limited space on my webhost.

Unfortunately, and I can say this because I know nearly all the readers of this blog, Flickr is not well-liked among my friends and family. And I can see why:

• It has a confusing interface for browsing many pictures.

• Multiple people had login problems.

• Organization is a) confusing to a casual browser and b) requires another step in organizing photos. (Sorry, but tagging doesn’t immediately make sense to a lot of people.)

I do most of my work in iPhoto; while I’d started bumping into the performance limits of iPhoto 5, I knew that I could always upgrade to iPhoto 6 to fix that problem, but I also knew that a new version was coming any day now. So that wasn’t a huge issue (but it was certainly making me grumpy.)

More importantly, there was no way to eliminate that second step of having to organize photos on the website as well as within iPhoto. There are good export plugins to Flickr, but that’s all they are — exporters. Once the photo is up, there’s no way to sync information.

Eventually, and you can probably go back in my photostream to find the exact date, I just gave up on organizing my photos on Flickr. Too much time was spent tagging, writing captions, assigning to sets. It was a step that I didn’t need, and no one commented on it when it went away, and it didn’t have any impact on my negligible social presence in Flickr… so it was gone.

Earlier this week Apple released their .Mac Web Gallery, which is seriously all kinds of awesome if you already use iPhoto and .Mac. Even if you don’t, it’s still all kinds of awesome as a photo gallery. Slick? Yes. But its also easy to use, with download and upload tools that make sense. Its interface is easy for visitors to change.

Or, at least, that’s my impression of it.

I was giddy when I saw how it integrated with iPhoto in the demos. (I was also giddy at how it integrated with the iPhone, but that’s another story.) You make a change in iPhoto and it appears on the web. If a visitor uploads a photo to the gallery, it goes back down to iPhoto. Hooray!

It’s shiny, it’s glossy, and it certainly holds a lot of promise for making my life easier. It doesn’t do some of the things Flickr does well, like generic camera phone uploading, posting to blogs, and holding large-resolution versions at the ready. I can see both as tools that work, and that this isn’t an either/or proposition.

But some feedback to Flickr was so negative when I switched last time, I’d be a fool to not ask you what you think.

So: here’s my gallery. Please let me know what you think of it.

For example, Twitter. Before iPhone (BiP), it was undeniably cool to be able to text status updates to my website. Where am I? What am I doing? Just check my home page! Oh look, I’m downtown, taking pictures. Or mowing the lawn. Or driving to DC. Or driving from DC.

Wicked cool, I tell you. And for many users of Twitter, it really was, because the service would spit those updates right back out into a variety of places - SMS, IM, web, even email. But for folks like me, with normal, sane friends who do not need to know my every move, that’s not very useful.

I found that I very much enjoyed the minimalism of Twitter. 140 characters encourages you to post without having to think too much about it.

But there were a lot of things about it that I didn’t like, especially when they changed their badges so that you couldn’t publish private tweets somewhere else. (This was the infamous login problem on my homepage.) Why put it all somewhere else for the world to pick over with their APIs and fancy-schmancy web services … all because you like texting in the entries?

I’ve been hitting the mobile Twitter site on my iPhone this week, when finally it hit me. Why do I need this if 1) no one I know in real life uses it, and 2) I already have a blog? I can send out tweets blips all I want now that I have an actual web interface at my disposal!

(I dunno. Sometimes these things take a while for me to put together. )

Anyhow, I whipped up a template in Movable Type this afternoon to put these little blips into practice, using some of the twitter badge javascript to make things look the same. They’ll be where the tweets were (on the home page) but blips will show up in the logs, too. I’ve hidden them on the home page to keep things simple, but will have to figure out how to remove them from the individual archives later.

Right. As you were.

Yes: I'm giving Twitter another try to see if I can figure out why it's become so damn popular. It doesn't make much sense to me when I'm at home, but the more I'm out and about I start to seewhy folks like it. I'm also trying to understand the appeal of many other mobile doodads, but this one seems like the best place to start.

Frankly, I don't get the appeal of a lot of the mobile services out there; I look at them and ask, "why do I need this in my life?" without ever getting a satisfactory answer. Perhaps I haven't found the right situation to let their utility shine through.

(Or, maybe, they're simply not useful. That remains a real possibility.)

At some point, the madness will end, right?

Honestly, it’s slow going. I’m hesitant to dive into the old posts; there are some that I feel I should bury, and others that I feel were written by someone totally alien, and then there are still others that make me think back to a particular day from years ago, and I wonder where the time has gone.

The oldest published entry in Flotsam and Jetsam is elaborate. from 1999. It was posted to a much different website than the one you’re reading now. I remember what I was trying to create when I first posted it, how frustrated I was when I couldn’t make that happen, and how I had to walk away from it all for a while and grow up before I could be comfortable online again. For several years it was the best post on the entire site. (It may still be, for all I know. That’s a scary thought.)

I’d done all the technical work for the import weeks ago, but it’s sat on my to-do list since then, daring me to attempt to edit my past. The temptation is there, and remains there, to just delete it all and present a blank slate to the world. I am not the same person who wrote those posts. I moved across the country, got married and became a father. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to just delete it all and start over from another point, say somewhere in 2005.

Reasonable, but dishonest, too. I was that person, and there was a lot of good mixed in with the bad. I guess this is what it’s like to come to terms with your past selves? Can’t change what’s happened, can’t unsay what’s been said, move on, there’s more to do. So mostly, I’m only editing the links, correcting the most egregious mistakes, and clicking Publish. It’s slow going, but not as slow as I feared.

Because, you know what? There’s a lot of cool stuff coming up ahead, and I need to get on with it.

• Get posts by email. While many of you read this through a feed reader, the main audience of this site actually tends more towards direct visits or email. Given the success of my son’s email newsletter, I’ve decided to offer the same service here via Feedburner. Emails are sent once a day; feel free to give it a try. (Link is at the top of the index, too.)

• Blog consolidation. The front page has undergone another revision (7.0, by my highly-inaccurate count) and several sections have been cordoned off for editing. The material will end up here, so you don’t have to keep hunting through various blogs: The Blue Lamp Cafe has already been merged, while Flotsam and Jetsam and The Bookdragon Tales will undergo some editing before joining the logjam. Other pages are being revised as time permits.

• logjam changes. I recently took the plunge and updated from the 2.x tree of Movable Type to 3.x, and have found a few features I like, like hierarchical categories. The global forwards/backwards pages are gone (they were seriously screwing with my PageRank) and the entry title code has been reworked.

• Quick sidebar, please. The sidebar to the left is an experiment with several services designed to share information: my Shared Google Reader pages, del.icio.us bookmarks, and flckr photos are the first additions. (I’m still undecided about this.)

• Integrated feeds. I’ve also added my del.icio.us bookmarks and Flickr photos into the site feed. The bookmarks will probably take the place of most of the tidbits formerly posted in the web log, but for record-keeping I’ll have del.icio.us post them here under a separate category.

• … Well, almost. Unfortunately, Google Reader doesn’t have the same sort of integration yet with either Feedburner or sending digests via XML-RPC, so those articles will only be available via a separate feed. (This is probably a good thing: I’m worried about overloading the feed with too much noise as it is already. Please let me know if you think this is the case, or if I’m worrying too much.)

• Alternate Stylesheets: gimmicky, slow, gone. Based on some tracking pixels I dropped into the alternate stylesheets for this layout, they’re not getting used. White is nice. So those will probably disappear and make my head code block much simpler. Each page you view currently results in 13 file GETs before any images are requested, which results in slower page loads. Removing those file accesses will speed things up and make the logfiles pretty again.

• Plus la change… Many things are still the same: no comments, the archives run backwards from the rest of the internet, and I still spend too much time talking about computer drama.

What, you’re still awake after all that? Go to sleep!

Seriously!

It’s a long story.

Note that I still haven’t digitized any of those tapes. Sigh…

Then I go read some political sites and remember that there are really good reasons why I turned them off in the first place.