Blogging

Playing With WordPress, Again

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I decided to play around with my WordPress configuration again today. I am still a customer of Typepad, but since I already have a hosted web account on Lunarpages I have had an instance of WordPress sitting around for a few months. For the longest time I have toyed with using WordPress or hosting my own Moveable Type install vs Typead. I always keep going back to Typepad because it has most of the features I want and it is just simple to use and manage. Recently I have been contenplating cutting costs and things like two hosting accounts (Typepad & Lunarpages) seems like it might be excessive. So today I decided to search through the assortment of WordPress plugin’s and see if I could get my WordPress site to look as good or better than my Typepad site. So far I think it is dam close. Is it better than my Typepad site, I don’t know. Is it good enough to save $89 a year, maybe.

I loaded up the WordPress site with the latest backup of my blog. I will continue to tweak the site and see if it is worth it to point my URL to it. The big dilemma is that all the archive links will break when moving between Typepad and WordPress. That means all the google links won’t work. For that reason I am still pondering what I want to do.

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Twitter

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About a month or two ago I signed up for Twitter. I thought it was a cool idea, but as usual most of my friends aren’t using the system so I didn’t do anything with it. About two weeks ago I had second thoughts about the system and started Tweeting anyway. I plugged in Twitter to Facebook so now whenever I Tweet my Facebook status is updated. I thought that was a cool idea. Last week I added a Twitter plugin to Typepad so my latest Tweets are now in one of the colums on my blog.

I find it cool that I can blast out a quick Twitter message from my iPhone when I am bored somewhere!

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Changes Afoot

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Since I started blogging back in March of 2003 I have had several names for my blog. I have had even more URL’s for it. From the first site I had on blogger.com, to hosting with Gus, to the several iterations of the site on Typepad. When I switched the name of the blog to Powerpedia back in April 2005, I also changed the URL to it. I did this mainly because I needed to distance my blogging from my day to day internet usage such as email, and my personal website. This was because of pressure from my employer at the time who had bad opinions about blogging. Well I should clarify that it was the CEO only who had a problem. HR, and my boss the CTO didn’t really have an issue with it, but you do what the boss wanted. This was the time I started moving posts related to work to a private blog. New posts about work that were a bit detailed went onto the private site. Even after doing that I was still a bit paranoid about “the wrong people” finding my site I went to great lengths to get rid of any direct references that would identify me. I know that is not really possible but I tried my best.

More recently I have wanted to reverse the steps I had taken to be anonymous. It was recommended to me that by saying who I am may not be such a bad thing. For one more and more people are looking into peoples web presence when recruiting. That and over the past year I have been becoming more involved in online social sites. From Linkedin for work to Facebook for friends. And yes Match.com for dating. Having a presence on the web that says who I am and displays my opinions and ideas might be a good thing. Now it can still be a bad thing, but I have always considered myself an upfront and direct person anyway so why should I care if someone researches me and finds this blog anyway? The biggest concern is what an employer or prospective employer might think. I have been sanitizing what I talk about with regard to work for ages, and the stuff I do talk about I think shows off the cool and interesting projects and the honest trials and tribulations of my job.

That being said I have moved the URL for this site to a domain name that I use for most other uses on the web. The new site URL is blog.powerz.org/. This change also breaks all old links on www.powerpedia.net/ This was inevitable. The old site layout always forced any URL for the entire site to be www.powerpedia.net/blog/ I didn’t like the added sub directory blog, but I never realized what I did to force that. After looking into the domain mapping settings in the Typepad FAQ I figured out I had setup Powerpedia.net to be the domain for all of blogs and picture blogs on the service. I didn’t really care about that so I adjusted it so the new URL just pointed to this blog. Any other sites I have on Typepad (I can have 3) will get another URL. This means that the switch from www.powerpedia.net to blog.powerz.org also caused the directory structure of the site to change. That means no old links will work. I have setup a redirector so if you type in the old main URL of powerpedia.net it will redirect you, but I doubt that RSS feeds or other links will work. That is what I get for progress!

The name of the site will still remain Powerpedia, because I like the name and it is still catchy.

The next step for this site is for me to actually say who I am. I know it is no big mystery, but it is a big mental step for me to simply say my name in writing on this site and click post! That should happen soon, I hope.

Non Glamourous Blog Updates

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Since I have given my two weeks notice my boss has not asked very much of me. I have completed most of what I can hand off to other people, and now I am in limbo until my two weeks are up. I am helpful when I can be, but since my last day is tomorrow I am pretty much out of the loop already. In my somewhat spare time I have tried to keep busy. I have put some time into some much needed cleanup of my blog and website. If you read this site and know me, you know that I haven’t said who publicly. If you do know me you see huge hints at who I am, but I haven’t ever been public about it. Over the past year however I have talked less about my work and more about general technology and stuff going on in my life. I have talked about general projects I work on, but nothing detailed that would get me into trouble. This is a departure from a few years ago when I was very detailed and vocal on the blog. Those expressive posts about work have mainly been moved to a private blog I have dedicated to work that is outside the public eye.

Over the past few days I have gone through and vetted out many of the remaining detailed posts from years past that talked more about work interactions vs what projects were going on. There are still tons of posts regarding work, especially early years at “Widget Tech” (still anonymous for now), but the more personal stuff has been moved private. I still will write about anything I want, but I will be maintaining the public/private blog for the foreseeable future.

You may be wondering why this matters? Well in the near future I would like to be less anonymous and more open about who I am on this site. I will see what rules my new employer has on blogging, if any to be sure that I observe them, but above that I want to be open about who I am. Most of the people I know that do blog are public about it, so I shouldn’t let one incident many years ago prevent me from constructively expressing myself online.

On that note, I had installed WordPress on my hosted account like I mentioned I would last night. I even imported all my posts from Typepad and tried to mimic all the widgets I have on my Typepad account. The end result looked pretty good, but not good enough in my and a few close friends opinions. That means I stick with Typepad. Hey, if you know me you know I blow more than the annual subscription fee in going out on a weekend!

One change that will happen when I make my identity more public will be I will move my domain that I use publicly to this blog. I will also try to en corporate the last remnants of my “traditional” website pages into this site also. I have drafts of some pages already, and one ore two are already posted. Allot of these changes are not really important but time consuming. I used my time this week working on them. I also switched the theme again. This one is more a darker blue, and less pastel. I am not sure if I like it better or not, but it will stick around for a little while.

The Moveable Type Experiment

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Last week I had installed Moveable Type 4.1 community edition on my hosting account. This week I am uninstalling it. I liked the way it looked, and it was easy to use, but I ran into a fundamental issue with it. I cannot publish my content. I tried to import my content from Typepad to the new MT4 site I created to see how it looked before I decided if I was going to switch or not. The import worked fine, but I have not been able to publish the new content since I brought it into MT4. I don’t know if it is an issue with the server I am on at my hosting provider, an issue with the software, or some configuration issue I caused, but it just doesn’t work. I don’t think I configured anything wrong since everything works fine except for the publish. I see content going back to 2005, but the publish never completes. I have posts going back to 2003. That leads me to think the publish is just choking on the server it is on. That is a problem.

I only have a few more days to tinker with this before I don’t have free time anymore (new job starts Monday). I am going to give WordPress another try. At this point I think it is just easier to leave everything on Typepad and not worry about dealing with configurations. I like to try new stuff out, but for real world use the hosted service seems just easier.

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Trying Moveable Type 4

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I have been continuing to play around with blogging software on my web hosting account. I finally decided to no longer be lazy and try an install of Moveable Type. WordPress is was easy to install on my hosting account because my provider Site5 offers a simple install script that takes about 2 minutes to run. You need to know nothing about linux software installation. I on the other hand know a little (not much but a little) so I decided to stop procrastinating and try the personal edition of Moveable Type. I was surprised at how easy they did make the install from the last time I tried to do it. Of course that was 2 versions and several years ago.

The point is I was able to get the software installed with no major issues. So far it looks good. I am comparing Moveable Type with WordPress, and my currently hosted blog at Typepad. What I am noticing is that Typepad has allot more bells and whistles built in, vs either of the other platforms. For example, the widgets make life easy. Moveable Type & WordPress both have widgets but neither of them are as nice as what Typepad offers. That of course is only my opinion.

The verdict? Well it is probably too early to say, but besides the cost involved in hosting my blog with a service provider like Typepad on top of my normal mail and site hosting I think that Typepad is still better. The major sticking point I have right now is that I cannot use custom themes with the current package I have on Typepad. I don’t really want to pay the extra fee per year to get the ability to use custom theme’s, but I want to play around with them. I am leaning to just trying out the themes I want on the MT4 install I just did, and if I find one I really like I can always pay to upgrade Typepad.

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Blog Theme Change

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My previous theme on this blog has been around in some for or another for a few years. I have wanted to change it for some time but frankly I hadn’t found a better one to switch to. I had used a stock theme from Typepad for a while but the column for the blog content was too small even on a large monitor. Because of that I kept going back to my old custom blue theme. It at least had a flexible column setup so if you read the site on a larger window the columns would resize to fit accordingly. Well I finally found a new theme that I wanted to give a try. It isn’t as flexible as what i had but it doesn’t suck as much as the other ones i have tried. It also looks nice! It was this or try the radicle option of doing my blog over in WordPress on my regular hosted site account (that is still something i am pondering).

Hosting Changes Afoot

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It’s September, so that means hosting provider changes! I don’t know why but both my blog hosting service as well as my general website hosting provider were both setup in September. That means annual fee’s are around the corner, so if i want to make changes i have to do it soon. Well Typepad did have an issue about 2 years ago so I now renew in November for them, but my hosting provider Site5 renews in about a week. I need to decide if i want to renew with them for another year or make changes to my hosting services.

I would like to cut back the amount i am paying for web services so i am thinking about alternatives. I like Site5 but my needs have changed over time. I ended up not using their free setups of linux apps like WordPress. I used Gallery for a while but just recently messed up my config and didn’t really use it enough to warrant the expense. With a blog site like this one on Typepad, having another site is a bit redundant especially if i don’t ever update it. Typepad now offers the ability to setup regular pages on my blog so i might create a version of my regular site here. That means i only have to get an email provider and keep Typepad as my main web presence. I have also been thinking of buying Flickr Pro so i can use it like i was going to use the Gallery application. With the cost of the mail hosting, and Flickr Pro, vs regular hosting with Site5 i am saving a few bucks. I am getting less features, but I am getting better functions out of the features I am using, so I am planning my migration away from Site5. The only thing that takes a little thinking is how to move my mail to a new provider without loosing any mail. Fingers crossed.

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New Widget

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I just turned on the Snap Shot widget on this site. I have seen it on several sites before and it is really cool, so i researched it and found that Typepad offers it on my blog so now i have it also. Cool addition to my site, so I wanted to write about it.

4th Anniversary

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As amazing as it seems to me, today is the 4th anniversary of me starting this blog. I have had a few hosting providers. Bloggar for a few weeks, then I tried it myself, then Gus’ server, and now Typepad. This blog was not the first time I ever wrote a journal about my life, but it was the first time I published those thoughts for anyone to see. Who would have guessed that I would get sighted in an online article or two, referenced by official blogs of some of the tech companies I write about, and my personal favorite emailed by the Chairman of the board of a company that I bashed their product. It has been an interesting 4 years. There have been times when I thought I wouldn’t continue to write this thing, but then there are other times like tonight when I sit here writing way past when I wanted to goto bed for the simple fact that I want to take what I am thinking and put it down on “paper”.

The amazing thing is I started writing this site for myself, and didn’t care if anyone read it. I still feel that way but I get a kick out of hearing from friends or strangers that read the site. Looking at how people find the site on google and other search engines is also interesting. Of course that isn’t as interesting as me finding my own site while searching for topics on google. It is never good when your search result for something brings up your site as a top search because you were previously blogging about an issue that you can’t find a resolution for.

Hear is to another 4 years of me documenting what I find interesting in my world. Or just writing about whatever comes into my head as I sit at the keyboard!

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