Results tagged “Blogging” from CLICK

I hadn't checked in on Ars Technica, one of the better tech news sites, in some time, and when I went to the site's journals page last night I was surprised to see the Open Ended open-source journal/blog and the Kit hardware blog get equal billing in the navigation on the Journals page.

Due to both blogs' previous absence from this navigation, I probably wasn't the only one who never knew they existed.

Open Ended still isn't getting anywhere near the level of posting that the Infinite Loop (Apple), Opposable Thumbs (games) and One Microsoft Way (subject obvious) blogs enjoy. I'm sure the open-source blog doesn't get anywhere near the amount of traffic that the more-established Ars blogs get, either.

But both Open Ended and Kit do stand to get a lot more traffic now that they're as easy to get to as the other Ars Technica blogs.

After Andrew Hurvitz moved Here in Van Nuys from Blogger to WordPress, something I've never done (moving a blog from one platform to another), I decided to do a test.

I made a backup of a Movable Type blog, which generates a giant text file, and then uploaded that file into WordPress.

It took a couple of passes to get all the entries (the operation timed out), but I had a huge WordPress blog in mere minutes.

Since the Movable Type blog was archived in a text file, all of the image links referred back to the old blog, and the images displayed in the WordPress blog were still on the old system.

But as far as entries, categories and tags go, everything moved over perfectly.

The ability to take your blog with you gives the user quite a bit of power. Aside from the problem with hosted images, it's extremely easy to move years' worth of blog entries between platforms like WordPress, Movable Type/Typepad and Blogger.

The whole concept of storing blog entries in database format and using protocols such as XML (I'm guessing) to enable data portability is a truly great thing.

It's been a week and a bit since I turned comments back on -- this time without anonymous comments allowed due to the massive volume of spam that entails -- and I've been very encouraged to see people making comments.

If you do wish to comment on an entry, once you go to an individual entry and see the "sign-in" link, clicking on that takes you to a login screen.

There you can sign up for a Movable Type account, confirm it via e-mail and then begin commenting immediately.

But we have a lot of choices as to how you sign in. You can also create and/or use an existing Typekey account. There is also the provision to use OpenID, LiveJournal or Vox accounts.

That's a lot of choices. I give the Movable Type people a lot of credit. Giving blog administrators such control over comment authentication is a great thing, and if something like OpenID ever really takes off, MT is covered.

But however you sign in, thanks again for being a part of this blog. Special thanks go out to all those who come here from LXer.

We traced most of our Movable Type woes for the Insidesocal.con blogs to a bad plug-in. Now that we've obliterated all reference to the plug-in (Feeds.app, if you must know), our new Movable Type Open Source 4.1 system is really flying.

The servers are extremely fast, it's quicker than ever to write and publish an entry (mostly due to use of MT's publishing queue option), and it's less frustrating than ever to redesign and rebuild a blog. I did one yesterday -- Inside the Kings, and the process verged on pleasant.

The best part of all this is that for the moment, I'm not pining for the trouble-free worlds of Blogger and Wordpress. Movable Type is chugging along quite nicely, and now our bloggers can concentrate on feeding the beast and building their audiences in the process.

It's a great moment. I will bask in it, if you don't mind.

I finally got around to filling in a bunch of links on the right side of the blog page. The links I chose should reveal a bit regarding what I'm all about these days. I'll probably bulk it up even more, adding some Apple-oriented items, as well as stuff that has nothing to do with desktop computers.

I've been on vacation for the past week and a bit, and I've been through some of the unpublished comments, 99.9 percent of which are usually spam. But everything's still sitting on the Movable Type server, and I'll comb through it by the end of this coming week.

I'm sure we'll be changing the comments programming at some point in the near future, but if you want your comments to appear immediately, sign up for a Typekey account and leave a comment while signed in to Typekey. Where last I left the most recent insidesocal.com blog redesign, the sign-in was broken, so you pretty much have to sign in through the Typekey site, after which the Insidesocal server will recognize your sign-in. I do plan to fix the lack of a sign-in when I return and figure out how to do it.

Anyway ... if you do get a Typekey account and sign-in and subsequently leave a comment on this blog, I will register you as a "trusted" commenter, after which your comments will publish immediately.

For those who want to know: I get maybe 500 spam comments a day, none of which are automatically published. Unfortunately, the spam filter in Movable Type 4 is pretty awful, and it pretty much marks everything as spam ... or not. I wonder how some of these spam comments get through (although I have nothing but trusted Typekey comments set to publish automatically), since I can't seem to write a comment in this system that gets past the spam filter. In other words, the thing is pretty well broken.

But again, for the time being, sign up for Typekey, log in from there (and eventually from here), post a comment and I'll set you to publish automatically.

Thanks for playing.