Recently in Metasite Category

After leaving Blogger years and years ago, I tried many different blogging engines (even developing my own, so to speak). None of them were as safe as my old way of just FTPing HTML files up to my host. Movable Type was the closest since it generated HTML files—it was like a hosted version of Blogger.

The downside was (and still is) that it runs on Perl. I'm not a PHP developer by any stretch, but I can fend for myself in WordPress when I have a task in mind. Perl, though, is just inscrutable to me; I don't have time to learn it and what little I have read doesn't make sense.

So why stick with it, especially in light of the recent malware attack? I briefly toyed with Textpattern last night but the thought of redoing my blog, site, and essays in yet another CMS left me stone cold. I've been down this road before and I just don't have time for it any more.

I've got so many other better things than to endlessly tweak my Web site. Perhaps I've matured in that regard. Or maybe part of maturity and wisdom is a jaded fatigue with youth's flitting.

I apologize to anyone who has visited my blog in the last five days. I was running old Movable Type and someone exploited it. I got added to Google's malware warning service, unfortunately, so you might see some warnings until the request for review is complete.

It looks like it's time to figure out how to lock down Movable Type so that this doesn't happen again—it's such a pain to upgrade that there's always going to be some lag time between security release and updating.

To those of my readers who are tired of reading my political writings, have hope! I am working on a new blog where I plan to do all of my political blogging. I will then try to keep bblog focused on computers, programming, and technology.

The new blog will have a stable of Objectivist authors commenting on politics, society, and culture. I have high hopes for it. I'm still setting up the blog—look for an announcement in the next week or so.

[UPDATE (11/25/2008): My new blogging partner has broken the news about The New Clarion. I am so excited about this.]

With all of the linking I've been doing lately, I have noticed that it's really hard to go directly to a particular quote or part of a much-longer essay. My pointers, therefore, often require the reader to wade through a lot of detail to get to the underlying message. "If only people would dutifully place 'id' attributes throughout their paragraphs, I would be able to send my reader directly to the right place," I would think to myself.

But I don't do anything like that. How can I expect everyone else to do it if I won't lead by example? Good point, rhetorical question! With the last couple posts, I have added "id" attributes to each and every paragraph. So if you wanted to send someone to my post on why I voted for John McCain and specifically the part where I discuss the Republicans under an Obama presidency, you can view the HTML source and see that this link (http://bbrown.info/2008/10/13/why-i-voted-for-mccain.aspx#why-obama-opposition-refutation) will take you there.

After writing that last sentence, i realize that I need to make this a little more discoverable. The first task is to put in that metadata—interested parties will find it—but then I need to make it useful to anyone.

That last entry marks the 37th post this month. This is the most frequent posting rate I've maintained since October 2003! I am pleased as punch by this because I love blogging and I enjoy the long format this blog provides. I cannot believe that I've been doing this for the last six years.

After resolving to blog more, I thought it would be interesting to see how my blogging frequency stacked up in the past across all my blogs.

Blog	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	Total
bblog	1	0	46	618	169	219	124	1,177
Found on the Web	0	50	116	372	518	1,243	869	3,168
Five Browns	0	0	0	120	133	273	321	847
Total:	1	50	162	1,110	820	1,735	1,314	5,192

Wow, that's a lotta blogging. The Five Browns blog entries are approximately half or more written by my wife. All in all, though, I've got a pretty high bar to hurdle to match or exceed my previous output.

Did you see how often I've been posting lately? That's unprecedented on this blog for the last couple years! I'm going to try to keep it up; I think I was just languishing because I kept wanting to write long essays and reviews. I'll move back to the quick little entry with the occasional substantial one interspersed.

I've just deployed v1.2.3 of Quick Blog and I feel relieved. I haven't been blogging much either here or at Found on the Web because I've been furiously developing. It's been a rough few weeks as deadlines passed, features morphed, and frustration flared.

Luckily, everyone here's been really supportive and understanding. I figured I would be fired after the third deadline was missed, but that turned out to be paranoid thinking on my part. Everybody just wanted the app released in a good state and as soon as it could be. I felt very reassured and optimistic about the future.

So I will resume regular posting on both blogs pretty soon.

[UPDATE (5/22/2006): Cool, my feature has inspired some adulation.]

[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy Software, Inc.]

I've created a new category called "Soda Reviews" that will chronicle my explorations through the aisles and shelves of Pop the Soda Shop. Pop the Soda Shop is a local business that sells hundreds of varieties of soda. I've been going to it for years but every time I visit as a soda amnesiac—I simply can't remember what I liked or didn't and it inevitably ends up with me experiencing déjà-bu.

This new category and commitment of my memories to Quick Blog's database should help eliminate purchases of repeat offenders and insure repeat purchases of favorites. A warning: I am not a food writer and I can't promise to bring anything to the table beyond my thoughts at first blush. My tastes are likely different than yours and I'm doing this mostly for myself.

The newest version of Quick Blog is out. We deployed it yesterday afternoon and it's got loads of new features including unlimited blogs and multiple authors. It's version 1.1 (though we forgot to increment the version within the app itself, d'oh!) and I couldn't be prouder of it.

You may have noticed a particularly ugly exception message on my blog yesterday. Unfortunately, something went wrong in deployment and so everyone's blog was displaying that lovely message. Even more unfortunately, that "something" that went wrong was my fault. I thought I would have more time to fix some bad data that had gotten into the statistics, but I didn't. And so I worked furiously for two hours to make it right.

If you were affected by it, I sincerely apologize. It won't happen again because I'm going to make an extra effort to think through the possibilities in the future. I wasn't careless; I just didn't see something that was foreseeable. I'm told that I will be lashed at the next company picnic along with any other Go Daddy-o's that caused outages. I'm pretty sure my boss was kidding.

[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy Software, Inc.]

I tried importing my archives on Friday after we launched, but there was something wrong with the handling of line breaks. It's not a tough fix, so they'll be in there soon. It feels neat to be writing this entry in a tool I helped develop. Really, really neat.

[UPDATE (12/22/2005): Archives are back. The links are all different, but at least they're here.]

Suffice it to say, I will be moving this blog over to the new product as soon as it's publicly available (well, maybe a little bit before that ;-) instead of Textpattern as I had planned.

Well, the product I'm developing is slated to be complete by the next next Thursday so that means that we're entering crunch mode. I think it's a good thing because it's going to be rather limited. At my last job, crunch mode lasted for upwards of six weeks followed by six months of total slack before we finally released. Two weeks of frenetic effort strikes me as utterly reasonable.

Point is, don't expect any entries in that time. I've already begged my pardons over at Found on the Web. A two-week absence is not particularly abnormal round these blogging parts, but I thought I'd tell you all the same.

This entry is the 1,000th one I've written. There's actually only 997 available on the Web: I've got three draft entries waiting to be finished. There's a review of Nevil Shute's Pied Piper, an analysis of QuikTrip's severely broken queueing system, and an essay on public history in the Internet age. The latter is completely done, but its tone is a little more strident than I'd like. Each will appear here eventually, so I'm counting them in my total.

This is a very important milestone to me—perhaps even more important than the Found on the Web one—because these entries are typically longer, more thoughtful, and represent more of my personality than those over there. Here, you get to know the real me: my thoughts, my desires, my being. There you might get to see what makes me laugh, makes me exclaim, makes me shake my head.

I'm also happy to report that I have not wavered from my stated policies except for the fact that Go Daddy allows for blogging about work.

Here's to the next thousand entries! May I somewhere in there finally get around to moving my entire site over to Dreamhost and Textpattern.

It appears that no comments can be posted here without my approval. I have no idea why this is so since I've completely turned off any such requirements. I'm running MovableType 3.17 for this blog and I had no such problems with 2.661.

If you want to leave a comment, it won't appear immediately. I really want it to appear immediately, but MT won't let me fulfill my wishes. Until I can move to TextPattern, I'm going to have to live with this. (Luckily, this shouldn't be a problem since I've had 140 comments total in the four years I've been offering up my blog.)

Just upgraded MovableType from 2.661 to 3.17. It looks like ass. Luckily, there's finally some useful features in there like checkboxes for batch actions.

In related news, Textpattern just keeps getting better and better. I'm still moving old files over from the old ColdFusion-based system to the new TXP-based one. Once I've got all of those transferred (blog goes last since it's the most-frequently updated part of my site), then I'm going to use MovableType to generate PHP-based redirects for all past blog entries.

Once all that happens, I can finally drop the $30/month hosting for bbrown.info and move it over to the host for Found on the Web and Five Browns, among others. And my hosting bill per month will effectively drop from $49.85 per month to just $19.95 (and actually I think I prepaid for two years, so it's only $15.95 per month).

And that'll be sweet.

Didn't I say I wasn't going to blog anymore for awhile? Like eight entries ago? I said that I was going to try to focus on my s00per sekrit project, but our daughter was born April 20th and I took two weeks off from work—I just haven't had time to devote to that project so I guess I figured why not blog here?

I'll warn you, though: it could stop at any minute. So get your fill while you can.

It's been nearly a month since my last post. I've started and stopped perhaps half a dozen entries and thought about posting at least a dozen more. I have a lot to say, but not the will to say it. I now understand what shutters so many bloggers out there.

I've closed comments for all past entries and I'm going to keep them out there as a permanent archive. I'm still going to move this entire site over to TextPattern; maybe I'll feel like blogging once that's done. At this point, I don't know.

I guess I can't really say that I'm stopping blogging since Found on the Web is going gangbuster and I'm keeping a respectable pace on Five Browns. I've been working on a sekr1t project lately—it's a non-profit that truly represents the culmination of my life to this point and I hope will be my life's legacy—and I really need to devote whatever free time I would have spent blogging to it.

I've had 880 entries on this blog, so I can't imagine that this is a permanent move. I appreciate everyone who has read my blog or commented—it's been a fitful experience but I know I've grown as a person from it.

I apologize to anyone who tried to access this site yesterday and today. My current—soon to be former—host seems to have misrouted my domain for some unknown reason. All the files were in the right places, but the domain entry was pointing somewhere else. Very strange.

Long-time readers will know that I am slowly moving my sites from UplinkEarth to DreamHost—way too slowly, in fact, since I am paying $29.90/month for one and $19.95/month for the other—and simultaneously trying to set up a CMS to handle everything.

I've flitted about between different systems, liking this feature of one but this feature of another one. Last year, I finally decided to go with TextPattern. TXP, as its called, is an excellent CMS that implements separation of content from presentation and a page model that sits well with me. When I decided on it back in October, I was floored by how much better of an implementation it was than anything else out there (and I evaluated at least a dozen CMSs and perhaps five seriously).

I really liked WordPress, but it didn't meet my needs as a blogger and an essayist. There's just so many different types of content at the Bill Brown Information Center that WordPress's one-admin-per-blog and one-blog-per-directory limitations were too much. In fact, I ended up using it for Found on the Web and I couldn't be happier with it.

We're now halfway through February and TextPattern's 1.0 release has been delayed repeatedly with the last announced release date being January 10th, 2005. I can't wait forever for what could end up being a third release candidate bundled up as 1.0. In the meantime, WordPress released version 1.5 and the new version offers static pages, a major requirement of bbrown.info.

Do I remain in limbo waiting for a single developer in France to decide to finish up the 1.0 release and risk finding out that it's the same as the 1.0rc2 that's out there with a few bugfixes? Or do I prepare the migration of bbrown to WordPress with its several developers, active development, and vibrant community, hacking in what bits don't fit?

The decision seems pretty clear, doesn't it?