Category: Weblogs

I moved to Lunarpages in August 2003 and bought a year’s worth of service because they supported Movable Type, the weblog software I was interested in using. A few months ago, they decided, without warning or notice, that they would no longer allow new Movable Type installations. They cited security and performance concerns, though without the sort of details that would actually allow these concerns to be addressed.

They stated that grandfathered MT installations would still be allowed, so I figured that I had until August to find another host. Yesterday, they, without warning, took away my access to the main script that runs my weblog. Needless to say, I am not pleased.

When I went to the Movable Type site to pull down the 3.0 release so I could at least run it on my desktop, I found that they have made drastic changes to the license. They have increased the price, and limited the number of authors and weblogs that can be used by an instance of an installation. Their product Movable Type was definitely in competition with their Typepad service, and the terms of the new license seem calculated to reduce its attraction as an alternative. I am now looking at WordPress, a GPL weblog platform. I practiced installing it on my desktop, then migrated it to my web host. It seems easier to install than Movable Type, but perhaps I am just a lot more practiced at installing web software now.

Muddy River has some “photos”:http://muddyriver.typepad.com/hearth/2004/04/two_more_from_o.html, including some “ocean scenes”:http://muddyriver.typepad.com/hearth/2004/04/ocean_city.html of a recent trip to Ocean City Maryland. This was a favorite family vacation spot when I was a child, though later I started going to Rehobeth Beach, Delaware instead.

This morning, I made some minor changes to my weblog, including a “Squidfingers”:http://www.squidfingers.com/patterns/ inspired background that I created with “The Gimp”:http://www.gimp.org/.

I’ve been reading the weblog, Kevin Kelly — Cool Tools, for a while now. The weblog reminds me a lot of the Whole Earth Catalog in its heyday, both in its choice of subject matter and in its tone. One of the items today was a review of a pruning saw. We still have the one I used to carry on trail rides back in Maryland. We rode in heavily wooded areas, and there were always tree branches drooping hazardously over the bridle trails. I used the pruning saw from the back of the remarkably phlegmatic horses.

Want to take a ski trip without the cost and cold? Visit Ed Book’s journal starting with February 6th, 2004.

Today, “Emese’s Photo Blog”:http://www.sciencemeetsart.com/emese/blog/ features Cliffs by the Cabrillo National Monument.

Photojunkie Zine : The Best of 2003 Photoblogs has a lot of links to cool photos and the weblogs that originally published them.

Sacred Ordinary writes about seeing the Green Flash. I’ve never been near the ocean enough to have much chance to see it, so I am very envious. I did see an “icebow”:http://www.bluetail.com/~joe/misc/icebow.html one morning, though.

The Shifted Librarian has a short tutorial on how to get started using RSS feeds. She recommends “Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com, which I have been using for three months.

Via today’s “Langa List”:http://www.langa.com I discovered the Daily Rotation which acts as a headline aggregator for a variety of technical magazines and weblogs. It has some limited customizing features (based on cookies) but does not require a userid.