Moveable Type

Hosting Changes

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All my thinking about changing domain names led me to another bigger change. For the past few years I have been using wordpress.com to post my blog. Before that I mainly hosted on TypePad for years. in between I played around with movable type, and WordPress. In 2009 my started using WordPress.com it was free, and they offered services cheaper then TypePad if I wanted any. At the time I wasn’t walking a lot and the easy dollars or so year just for bloging seemed like a lot from TypePad. With my recent revival to writing I was making changes to my site. Unfortunately any real changes that I wanted to make on wordpress.com would require several add-on purchases. At that point I looked at the price of a true hosting provider. I signed up for one, only to cancel the trial account within an hour. I then continue to waffle and signed up for another hosting provider. The second provider bluehost.com hey pretty decent rate for a 2 year package. It was pretty simple to set up all my content on the new provider and add both my new domain name and my old one to point to that site.

For the most of the life of my blog I’ve been on TypePad, but I have over the years used several different hosting providers on and off. In recent years using Google apps and other web services for free or small fees having my own hosted account didn’t seem like it was worth it. By simply decreasing my Google apps for business mail quota I was able to go from the paid plan to the free plan. That cost savings alone offsets the price of the new hosting plan per year, so I figured why not give it a try. I like the additional flexibility I can have with my own website. I am already playing around with media wiki again, and some WordPress plug-ins that I could not get on the hosted account.

Having my own FTP account should also come in handy. I can remember at least two or three instances in the past several months that I’ve needed it, most recently two weeks ago.

Now I just have to see if I continue writing to make these changes worth it. I told MC yesterday I would love to be able to carve out 30 minutes night to just sit and write. I always found that pretty therapeutic to do that. It helped me unwind from the day. I just haven’t done it in years. Of course it’s my luck that I decide to really get into this again right before I have a baby. That means pretty much no free time at all. On the flip side it would be nice to have time to document what the baby does, and other milestones. I think years from now that would be nice to have. I always said I like to write for me.

I will see how it goes over the next few weeks.

The WordPress Plunge

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I have talked about it a ton of times over several years but I am finally taking the leap and moving my blog to WordPress. I have been very happy with Typepad over the years but the flexibility of WordPress is bringing me over. I tried to build an instance of Moveable Type to port my blog into but I had issues with it on two different hosting providers. WordPress was easy to setup, almost too easy since I started and stopped working on a site at least a half a dozen times. I finally found and configured all of the widgets I wanted that I have with Typepad. I also found decent themes that make the site look good.

As I write this my hosting provider Lunar Pages is making some minor DNS changes so I they can host the DNS for my powerz.org domain yet I can continue to host my mail elsewhere. That will enable the URL I currently point to Typepad to point to my hosting account with all my other domain names. Actually since I am writing this entry on my WordPress site, by the time you read this I will already be running on the new site.

The good news for me is if I change my mind or end up not being happy with my choice to move to WordPress, I can always move back to Typepad. I paid for the service through the beginning of November. I know bad timing on my part, but I will wait till the Fall to cancel just in case I get cold feet.

One noticeable downside of my new setup is I see a bit of sluggishness with my site loading. I am not sure if it is the server my account is on, or if it is just wordpress being slow?

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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new blog server

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Ok after all the work I did fixing my moveabletype server, I have moved my blog to Gus’ server. He was kind enough to let me run my blog on that box so I can free up my server to continue my linux education. I was afraid of damaging my blog while I messed with linux. The new blog looks the same as the old one, it is just on a different server. I just ordered a new style sheet for the blog, but wont have that for a day or so. Blogstyle’s is a great site, but I hate having to pay for stuff.

I have to say the import/export features on Moveable-type are fantastic. getting the data from one blog server to another took like 10 minutes total. Setting up the server took longer than the actual import. It was great. Exporting is also a great way to backup your blog entries. I will do that on regular intervals now.

Now I am off to play with exchange 2003. News on that later, if I get it working correctly.

My website

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If I haven’t blogged enough today, here is more stuff I have going on.

I am working on setting up my photo website on my new Windows 2003 server. it is really my old Windows 2000 server I have cleaned off and installed 2003. I am playing around with both IIS 6.0 and Apache. I am also working on my VMWare project mentioned a few days ago. No luck with moveabletype just yet, so my existing Red Hat server still remains.

Even-though I am using IIS again I am refraining from the temptation of using Front-page server extensions again. It took me forever to get rid of them (probably not really gone, but I like deluding myself) so I don’t want to put them back. I am going to continue to use Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Moving my photo album is taking a while over the 802.11b link. I have over 750 megs of images now. I may go back and re-run the iphoto exports to shrink some of those files, but for now the archive only gets bigger!

Moveabletype, linux, and vmware

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I am still a huge fan of Moveabletype. That is of course what currently runs my blog. I want to keep using it running on my Red Hat 9.0 Server I built. The only problem is the place I want to put it in my new apartment requires a wireless connection. My new Win2003 server works fine with Wifi, but I am having trouble finding drivers for the card I got to work with Red Hat. For now the server sits next to my desk, but I don’t want to leave it there. I am trying to hid as much electronic crap as possible from visible sight. I want 1 computer out. And that computer will be my desktop, not my server!

I am playing around with running red hat on VMWare on the Windows 2003 server. I am a huge fan of VMWare, but I have not really been using it to it’s full potential. I started using it allot more this week, and I am finding that I love it even more. The only problem is that I need more ram on my work machine to get it to run really well with more than 1 os running at a time.

But back to my idea. So I had a red hat VMware system already built. I configured apache and threw on moveabletype. I am getting some driver error when I try to start moveabletype’s prep file. I need an expert (friend) to look at it. I am going through my config files to verify things are correct.

To cover my bases I am also installing a Windows 2000 Server instance on VMWare also to play around with moveabletype on windows. I don’t plan to use it, but I want to see if it will work and I don’t want to mess up my system I just built so a vmware instance is the best way to test it. All I need to do is make a backup of the file before doing anything and I have a complete OS backed up. Wednesday at work I took an entire vmware OS file and moved it to a different computer and it worked without doing anything special. That totally ROCKS!

I will post results of my ongoing testing. Hopefully this will work and I can keep moveabletype on red hat and consolidate everything to 1 server and just run the vmware software. I will see.

Cosmetic updates to the blog

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OK, so I decided to update the main style sheet that give this blog its look and feel. It is a minor change. Some colors and the font are different. Next step is to acutely customize the stock sheets mt offers. I also threw on some vanity logo’s to identify what software I use to build the blog.

I also fixed a bug I had on the blog. I was unable to do updates last night due to dns issues. When I changed the master domain I used for this blog I forgot to change the moveable type config. That meant when I pointed to the new site name I lost the ability to make changes since Moveable Type thought that the server was down. it was a 2 second fix, but I need to keep track of these changes.

Apache, Moveable type lives! IIS, Frontpage are on life support!!!

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Ok, after less trouble than I though (but with some problems) I am now hosting my own blog on a linux server running moveabletype and apache. My boss was awesome in giving up time to help me configure this. I had alot done by myself, but it still didn’t work right. So I called the man who knows linux. this is the same person forcing me to learn it, but I needed the swift kick in the ass to do that. Thanks, enough but kissing since I know he reads this!

The nity gritty of it all is I installed Red Hat 9.0 on an old dell desktop I have. Pumped 380+ megs of ram into it first of course. and then downloaded movabletype. that program kicks ass. I just finished importing all my old blogger.com entries into the new system. All I have to do is figure out how to properly back this thing up. I also got the offline posting app on my powerbook to work. I am writing on it right now. It is Kung-Log. I also downloaded w.bloggar to do the same thing on my XP box if I need to.

The next major step is to port my website over from IIS & frontpage to apache. that may be time consuming. I did have a copy of my site running on a win32 install of apache a few weeks ago as a test. seemed to display the current pages fine. I will just have problems with the indexing and other frontpage centric features.

As much as it was painful I actually enjoyed tinkering with red hat. I have ton’s to learn, but I learned it is not impossible to do.

Now that the technical stuff about this setup is written I can write about the past few days in the next post!