Blogging

Changing the theme

by
A screenshot of the Yoko web site, showing what the Yoko theme looks like on different screen sizes

After a few months, I’ve become bored with the ‘Atom’ theme that I’ve been using since switching to WordPress. So I’m giving the Yoko theme a try, as featured in Smashing Magazine a couple of months ago. I’ve had to customised it a bit, and so I have spent my lunch hour at work learning about WordPress Child Themes so as not to disrupt the core theme files.

To me, it feels more fresh than the previous design. Whereas Atom was a big, extensible framework plugin, this is a relatively simple one. It’s also notable for using the new HTML5 tags and is able to adapt its appearance depending on screen size. Whilst this means that the mobile version of this site, which uses the WPtouch plugin, is now theoretically unnecessary, I’ll keep it for now.

Any thoughts about the new theme are welcome. I think everything should be working correctly but let me know of any funkiness.

Goodbye Melody, Hello WordPress

by
Leeds Station

It is with something of a heavy heart that I’ve decided to abandon Melody and move the blog to WordPress.

Long time readers will find this as a surprise – in the past, I’ve defended Movable Type when I’ve felt it under attack from WordPress ‘zealots’. Back then, WordPress was the new kid on the block, whilst Movable Type was much more established. Today, however, the situation has changed, and this is why I’ve made the change.

Movable Type

I left Movable Type earlier this year for a few reasons. Firstly, after trying Movable Type 5, I found it was aimed at large, professional blogs and not personal blogs like mine. The 4.3x line is still being maintained with security updates – MT 4.36 came out last week – but not with new features.

Melody

I hoped that Melody would provide a good continuation of MT 4.3x. Unfortunately I’m not that impressed – whilst it has improved some aspects of Movable Type, it hasn’t been the major step forward that I’d hoped it be. Furthermore, a number of plug-ins that I found really useful in MT didn’t work properly (or at all) in Melody, and as some of them were several years old and seemingly abandoned by their authors there was a slim chance of this happening.

It’s well known that the past few years has seen Movable Type stagnate. When I first started using it in 2002, there was a very active community developing plug-ins and themes for the platform. But this community has all but died out, and despite the best intentions of the Open Melody group it hasn’t re-ignited. The MT community is, basically, dead.

WordPress is where the community is. Whilst blogging in general is past its prime, WordPress still has a large number of themes and plug-ins which work with the latest version, plus active support forums. The documentation has even improved.

I’ve also changed. I don’t revel in spending all night adding new features and installing plug-ins. I want a blogging system that just works.

WordPress

What made me choose WordPress is taking over administration for the web site for one of the student groups that some friends are involved in. This previously used WordPress, and rather than try to shoe-horn it into Melody, I decided to stick with it. The system proved to much easier, more manageable and more slick than MT or Melody ever was. Upgrades, in particular, were very easy. So having used it for a while, a few hours ago I decided to migrate this blog too.

Getting the blog up and running in WordPress has been pretty easy. The import process from Melody was quite straightforward, and worked fine. I’ve then spent no more than a couple of hours trying some themes and getting the configuration in place. Despite being a completely different system, migrating from Melody to WordPress has taken about the same time as Movable Type to Melody.

The current theme is somewhat temporary – I haven’t yet decided on a final one. In the meantime I’d welcome any comments you may have.

More Melodic

by
Rochdale Canal

For the first time in over 8 years, this blog is not running on Movable Type. Because I’ve migrated to Melody.

Announced in June 2009, Melody is a fork of Movable Type 4 maintained by volunteers, many of whom formerly worked for Six Apart (MT’s original developer). It carries on in the same direction as MT version 4, rather than the very enterprise-focussed MT version 5 which is now being developed by a Japanese company called Infocom.

Because of its common heritage with MT, you can switch to Melody by installing it over Movable Type, and then simply tidying up the bits that are no longer needed – there’s a handy migration guide, too. It’ll keep all of your blogs, comments and settings.

Because Melody is new, and not quite ready for a 1.0 release, there are a few minor issues still and the admin interface still looks like it needs a little polish. In particular, a number of plugins no longer work; for now, you won’t have to type the word ‘ball’ when commenting and you won’t be able to log in using your Facebook account, but hopefully new versions of those plugins will surface soon.

If you see any other funkiness, let me know.

9th blogiversary

by
Birthday Cake

Way, way back in January 2002, when I was merely 17 years old, I started writing a blog. The same blog that you are reading, 9 years later.

While I’m not posting nearly as much as I used to – this is my first post of 2011, and we’re two weeks into the new year – the fact that it’s still going at all is a bit of a miracle, considering how long I persist with things. About the only other thing that I’ve stuck with for a long time is Flickr, which I’ve been using regularly for over 6 years.

9 years ago, this blog was hosted on a bit of free web space hosted by a company which now no longer exists, and I managed it using Blogger (back before the Google buyout). I was living at home with my parents, studying towards my A-levels, and using their computer, which ran the then newfangled Windows XP. Albeit, not very well – the computer was already three years old.

Nowadays, I live with my partner Christine, and work full-time, at the university that I ended up being a student at later that year. I use my own computer (one of three that I own), which runs Mac OS X – something that would have irked my 17-year-old self who was more interested in Windows and Linux and who thought Mac users were deluded zealots who paid over the odds for overpriced, incompatible computers just because they looked nice.

It’s been an interesting journey, and one that I hope will not end any time soon. Looking forward to this year, I’m planning to change to Melody once version 1.0 is out (it’s approaching release candidate stage) – this would only be the second time I’ve completely changed blogging package and would end an 8 1/2 year run with Movable Type. I’m also looking at a new template and better integration of my photos from Flickr and my tweets from Twitter, seeing as I’m more active on those sites than I am here.

So, happy 9th birthday blog. Many happy returns.

Melody

by

Just recently announced is Melody, a new open source content management system based around the blog concept that is derived from Movable Type, the software that has powered this site for nearly 7 years. It has been developed with Six Apart’s blessing, and by several former 6A employees; its development is guided by the Open Melody Software Group which counts Anil Dash from 6A as one of its directors.

The system will stay API-compatible with MT, so that plugins will still work, but may drop support for lesser used features like Trackback and PostgreSQL databases (Update: These may be spun off into plugins, not dropped altogether – see comments). Focus will be on improving development and support of weblog themes (which has always been a little clunky in MT), but ultimately the aim is to generate a community around Melody which guides the development process. MT will stay on as a product of 6A, and while there will be some code-swapping between the two Melody is essentially a fork.

It all sounds like good news and I wish the team every success with the development of Melody – once a more stable release is available I may well switch to it. WordPress has, rightly or wrongly, stolen the limelight from MT in recent years so a proper, community-driven open source alternative could pull users back to the MT/Melody platform.

(Incidentally the default user name for a new MT installation is ‘Melody’ – not sure whether that was used as an inspiration or not)

5 Years of Blogging

by

5 years ago, I started a blog. It wasn’t particularly good, or even particularly interesting, but it was out there, on the internet.

5 years on, and it’s still here. It’s changed somewhat – the URL, the design, the back-end system have all changed – but it’s still my blog and I’m still the one posting it. Had you told me 5 years ago that I’d still be doing this, I’d have been surprised.

I’m not going to do anything big, or announce anything major today – for a start it has come at a really bad time 🙂 . But I just want to take the opportunity to thank everyone for reading this, especially those who have been reading from the early days.

Incidentally, I finally finished my dissertation yesterday, and had it laser-printed today, ready to hand in tomorrow. That’s one chapter of my life I’m very glad to have behind me 🙂 .

4 years

by

At about 6 minutes past 5pm on the 14th January 2002, I wrote this entry. 4 years, 4821 entries, 6689 comments, 757 trackback pings and a whole shedload of spam later and it’s my fourth blogiversary.

Four years is a, to put it bluntly, a bloody long time, and I’m really pleased that I’ve been able to keep it going this long. So many of my projects in the past have come and go – this is one that I’ve managed to stick with and it makes me proud to think it’s still going strong. I have no intentions of giving up now.

Most of all, I’d like to thank all of you who have commented and trackbacked over the years, especially people like Andy, Kim, Ben, Richy and Ciaran who have been commenting here almost from the beginning. It’s the feedback I get, more than anything, that keeps me going, so keep it up and I should still be here in another 4 years time 🙂 .

The blog has also been with me through some interesting times. Back in January 2002 I was a 17-year-old college student. Since then I’ve had my 18th and 21st birthdays, left home, been to university, got a degree and started another one, met Hari and visited lots of new places, met lots of new people and done many new things. I can’t guarantee that my life will stay interesting but at least if it doesn’t I have a good record of when it was.

And the blog itself has changed – back in 2002, there were no comments, trackbacks or RSS feeds, and I was posting using Blogger to some webspace that only had 100MB of monthly bandwidth. Now I use 100MB in about 6 hours, the site is powered by Movable Type, and I’ve graduated from RSS to Atom for all my feeds. I also started the sideblog in November 2003 which has been doing well too, despite a few quiet periods.
I don’t regret starting this blog one bit – through it, I’ve made many new friends and got a lot of enjoyment.

Here’s to another 4 years! 🙂

Previous anniversary posts: 2003, 2004 and 2005 (when I nearly forgot).

Why I’m not switching to WordPress

by

Now that I’ve announced the book, I’ve had a couple of emails on the lines of “So I’m guessing you’re not switching to WordPress now, huh?”, and indeed I’m not. The book, however, is not the only thing that’s keeping me with MT and I’d like to use this (rather long) entry as a list of reasons why I’m not likely to switch any time soon.

Firstly, MT is what I’m used to. As of the middle of next month, I’ll have been using it for 2 years – whereas I’ve been using WordPress for less than 3 months. It’s the same reason why I use Windows as opposed to Linux – sure, Linux may be more secure and less likely to crash, but I know how Windows works and I feel comfortable in that environment.

Secondly, there’s the templating system, which I’m afraid to say, sucks. Again, maybe I’m just used to how MT works, but altering the way comments display in WordPress requires a lot more time and knowledge than it does in MT. In MT, the templates are totally separate from the MT source code – in WordPress, that separation isn’t so finely defined. Indeed, when you edit wp-comments.php (in 1.2) you’re faced with a 20 lines of PHP that you can’t edit before being able to dig in. And even then, you get comments like “if you delete this the sky will fall on your head” – hardly reassuring for a newbie.

Want to alter how the RSS feeds display? Then you have to edit a page with lots of PHP code which can’t be removed for fear of the sky falling on your head, and with a warning about this being an integral part of WordPress. You also need to know what the file is called since it’s not linked in the WordPress interface. Adding new pages, especially new types of feeds, seems to require a good understanding of PHP – adding a new template in MT is far, far easier.

WordPress isn’t all bad though, and it’s a whole load easier to install than MT is. In fact, a newbie to blogging* would be better off installing WordPress than MT, and includes nice blog-centric features like a links manager. But if you want to control how your site displays and don’t know much PHP then MT is the way to go, in my opinion.

(* = a newbie to blogging would really be better off on a service like Blogger or Typepad, but if they wanted something they could run themselves, WP would be easier than MT)

WordPress also wins on the comments front, despite what I said above, since it has much better comment management features built-in (although in 1.2 they are rather hidden away). That said, MT is brilliant once you have MT-Blacklist installed, since it deals with all the duplicate comments and spam perfectly, but that isn’t included out of the box (though it will be available with MT 3.1).

Rebuilds seem to be a bone of contention with some – if your web server isn’t so fast, they can take forever. I’ve never really had that problem as my host’s servers seem to run well (and I have optimised MT a bit to make it faster) but some people do find that rebuilds take forever for them. With that in mind, I suggest you wait for MT3.1 which adds support for dynamic pages. This will give you the best of both worlds – pages that get requested often like your indexes and feeds can be static, whereas other pages can be generated on the fly as needed. Sure, you can install a caching plug-in for WordPress but it’s not something that’s there out of the box (in 1.2, at least). The result is that rebuilds will be much quicker since only 2 or 3 files are being regenerated each time, plus, unlike in WordPress, you won’t have the PHP preprocessor kicking in and doing an SQL query every single time someone requests your RSS feed.

Rebuilds are also quicker in MT3.x due to its more efficient use of SQL queries and background tasks. Since upgrading to MT3, this site has been a whole lot faster, though I am working a new search script to replace mt-search which is a little slow.

Both packages have plug-ins and while WordPress kicks MT2.x’s arse in that respect, MT3.x does have much better plug-in support and many more hooks to allow developers to integrate their plug-ins with the MT interface without needing to modify the MT source code (detect a theme here?). For example, with MT-Blacklist installed, the comments mass editor has a ‘despam’ link added for running comments through the blacklist and removing the bad ones. As more plug-ins designed for MT3.x are released I’m sure we’ll see some truly great plug-ins that integrate tightly with MT.

MT’s help is better. There are some very extensive help documents provided with MT, whereas WP has a few links back to its rather sparse documentation pages on its web site. There’s also the wiki but like many wikis it suffers from a lack of structure, and some areas are quite patchy, in my opinion. Trying to have information only display on an individual entry page meant having to use a seemingly undocumented PHP function, for example. Apparently the #wordpress chat room is a good source of help but I’m not comfortable with asking for help in chat rooms and it assumes that you have an IRC client and that you’re on a connection that doesn’t block IRC like my university does.

This is getting quite long but as you can see, I have my reasons for not switching. What this isn’t is a “WordPress sucks and I can’t believe you all use it” rant, it is merely pointing out that WP is not for me. I’m sure that when WP reaches maturity it’ll be much better and I may give it another look when it hits 2.1 or something, but I’ve yet to be totally impressed. MT is at 3.01 now and feels much more mature than WordPress does. That said, my test install isn’t about to disappear any time soon, though a test install is what what it will remain.

I’ll leave comments open on here – I know this may seem controversial to some of you so please play nice.

Going into print

by
The cover of the book 'Hacking Movable Type'

If you read Ben Hammersley and Jay Allen, you may have seen references to “the book” recently. This is Hacking Movable Type (sponsored link), a 500+ page guide to getting deep down and dirty with MT and customising it to the extreme. And now I think it’s time to let you know that I’m writing a couple of chapters for it.

It’s very much a group effort – as well as myself, Jay and Ben, there are contributions from Matt Haughey, Brad Choate and David Raynes amongst others, and the foreword to the book is being written by Ben and Mena Trott themselves. As arguably the least known of any of those, I’m naturally flattered to be involved in such a project.

The book is still very much a work in progress but will be out later this year. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you want to pre-order it, the ISBN is 076457499X and the publisher is John Wiley & Sons.