A couple months back I had a job change that took me out of state and brought my family back to where many of our extended family members live. We’ve been staying with my gracious in-laws for that time, looking for a place of our own. It looks like everything’s likely to go through at this point, and I’m optimistic that we may yet have all our stuff moved up and be able to establish familiar routines again.
That’s all to say that I’m hoping to have more time for blogging in the coming weeks. I’ve got some good stuff to share on a number of topics. Cya.
Merlin Mann has an interesting take on podcasting here:
Flash: “Podfading” ravages the landscape of logorrheic bloggers
Me? I like the idea that a podcast is simply another way to post. Nothing more. Same way that Flickr and del.icio.us — to name just a couple — let me share something in a way that isn’t a traditional blog post, recording audio lets me (try to) make a certain point in my own way and with tone (and, one hopes, personality) that are a contrast with typically dry blog writing. But maybe that’s just me.
Agreed. 100%. I view the Zdot podcast as an extension of my blog. It lets me speak about things I’d rather speak about, and write about things I’d rather write about. My frequency isn’t tied to a radio show paradigm, but to my interests. It seems this works well for most of my listeners, too.
I’ve had my head down on a project for the last few months — thus the silence. Martin Fowler’s recent note about Anecdotal Evidence brought me out of it.
MF Bliki: AnecdotalEvidence
Some people would extend this – saying you can’t really talk about an idea until you’ve seen it on multiple projects. While this is nice, I don’t agree that it’s necessary. Just reporting on one particular thing you discovered on a project is useful because it provides raw material for others. Someone else might be in a similar position and your idea gives them something to try. Someone else may have done a similar thing and when they write about their experiences they report theirs on top of yours.
I’ve always been a bit hesitant to share stuff I’m in the middle of doing. Revisions throughout the process often make the end result quite different from where I started. Instead of holding back until I’ve found something I like, I’ll start talking about stuff I’m in the middle of. Hopefully you’ll help me out as you have advice for me to take.
With 19 GB of bandwidth served in just 20 days (thanks for listening to my podcast, everyone), I’m glad I’ve switched providers. I converted my site over to the new ISP at the beginning of the month, and things have gone quite well. I’ve got a new WordPress installation (that I absolutely LOVE), my old blog entries are all in (except a few from mid 2003 that I lost along the way), and I’ve switched from categories to tags. For more on the discussion of why tags are great, see this post and others by him. Still to come: a better look and feel, and integration with my Furl, del.icio.us, and Flickr stuff.
OK. I’ve gone from MoveableType to Blogger to Blosxom to Pebble, back to Blogger, and now to WordPress. I’m impressed with the interface. It’s much easier to work with than most other systems I’ve been on.
I’ve tried to structure the permalinks so that they’re easy to port to another system later on. I’ve eliminated the dates from them altogether. I figure I’d prefer to make my titles unique anyway, and you shouldn’t have to know the date of a post to link to it. Let me know if you’d like to see it differently.
So my next set of work is to bring all my old posts in. I’ve never caught any of my blogs up to date yet, so cross your fingers. I just might do it.
UPDATE: I’ve changed my permalink structure back to the traditional /archives/year/month/day format since it had some unexpected side effects. My calendar no longer had valid links for day summaries, and I really want that. I just supposed (naively, I guess) that archive links to months and days would always force a date structure on the URL but the truly permanent link could be constructed without any date information using a purely unique identifier. Maybe I’ve just been staring a Russel Beattie‘s permalinks too long.
Ok. I’ve got my most popular article ported over to Blogger. I now have my domain registrar pointing my domain name at a server I own running Apache. I use URL rewriting to ensure old article permalinks still work. I also use the mod_proxy to send all requests to Blogger. I host my own images, since Blogger doesn’t host any.
I’ll be backporting my entries for a while, then tweaking my templates. After that, I’ve got some great stuff to write on my recent work with using Spring, JMS, and threads to process hundreds of thousands of messages.
Thanks for you patience. With some of my recent postings about standardizing Eclipse plugins I’ve had more traffic than normal. My tiny VPS hasn’t been able to keep up with the traffic. I’ll be finding a more permanent fix soon.
This piece —
Alternatively, if you’re taking a laptop, you can have Pebble up and running on Tomcat in 5 minutes.
From Simon Brown’s JavaOne tips got me thinking. I could use Pebble to edit my blog anywhere, and use Subversion to keep it syncrhonized. I think it would work. All the config and data files for Pebble are text (XML), and they all live in one directory hierarchy. I can use a local installation of Pebble on my laptop, at work, and at home. I can use Subversion to keep them in sync, and ultimately decide when a group of edits goes to my public blog site. Perhaps I’ll try it.
It seems like Dave and Andy do this, but they edit the source files directly. I know that bloxsom supposedly supoports using Subversion, but I never got it to work. Blosxom uses files as well, but Pebble vs. blosxom is meat for another post.
