Category: Navel-Gazing

I just installed and sorta tested Chad Everett’s MT-Notifier. If all goes as planned, you can now subscribe to comment threads either when you post a comment or without posting a comment. I could make it possible to subscribe to all the comments posted on Popone, too, if there’s a deluge of demand, but I’m kinda not anticipating one.

Oh, and I have six gmail invites, first come first serve.

Look, ma, I upgraded to Movable Type 3.1! It’s cool. I am pondering my commenting options; it seems not impossible that I will set the blog to post TypeKey-authenticated comments immediately while screening non-TypeKey-authenticated comments; the legitimate non-TK comments would still get posted, just with a bit of a delay. Or maybe not, since I haven’t had a ton of comment spam recently. Thoughts, bearing in mind that the easiest thing for all of you (no screening, no worries) requires more effort on my part (deleting spam comments)?

Some time ago:

For some odd reason I’m not really comfortable posting long ranty things to my LiveJournal. There’s something weird going on in my head there. I think it’s because I have this constant awareness that I’m dropping an acrid pissed off political rant in the middle of a couple of dozen nice peaceful friends pages, between a perfectly harmless quiz answer and a thoughtful introspective discussion of someone

And that’s what passes for interesting for me. Five del.icio.us links per box, one box between each pair of entries, most recent links first. All my stuff. I want a slightly lighter grey for the box color, or darker, or something. I’ll fiddle later.

Also later: a big box somewhere containing just the 10 most recent del.icio.us links overall.

I’ve been using del.icio.us for a week and a bit now and it feels like a habit, so I will point out my personal little bookmark clickstream. The cool thing is that I can subscribe to your clickstream and get a friends page that aggregates the bookmarks of the people I find interesting. This works for me.

At some point fairly soon I may hook this up to this weblog in some interesting manner. In the meantime it’s a good way to keep track of evanescent interests. And if you have a del.icio.us account that you don’t mind sharing, share it in comments.

Minor blogroll readjustment: people whose blogs I read because they are a friend (among a multitude of other estimable qualities) have been moved to my Bloglines account. If you would like to share my brainspace in this regard, you can read those blogs there in one easy-to-manage chunk.

Since I posted my pieces on the upcoming draft and Congress.org, I’ve gotten 687 hits on the first and 493 on the second. Total traffic: 1180 hits, most of which is probably not everyday visitors who saw it on the front page anyhow.

Over half of those came within the first couple of days; the counter-meme spread very nicely within LiveJournal. These days I’m getting hits from message boards of various stripes. I got few links from blogs outside LiveJournal, interestingly. I think it’s because the original rumor didn’t spread much in the blogosphere.

Go Liralen! Go Cera! Go Ambar! The Population: Too team has proofread 7,000 pages for Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreaders. That is an awful lot of text and I am deeply pleased to have had a small part in getting such productive proofreaders involved in the project.

If anyone’s interested in proofreading for a good cause, check PGDP out. You only have to do a page at a time, there’s no commitment, it’s really easy, and every little bit helps.

So let’s take a look at the new Movable Type Personal Edition license. Not the whole thing, just excerpts. I’ll stick this in a cut so as to avoid annoying all the nice people who’re wondering when I’m gonna talk about politics or gaming again.

Except for one bit which is so funny and sad that I have to highlight it. A number of people are pointing out that we should expect to pay for good software. I completely agree. However, I also believe that software companies should be expected to write reasonable license agreements, and a license agreement that’s violated by a default installation of the software is not entirely reasonable.

You must maintain, on every page generated by the Software, an operable link to http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ , with the link text “Powered by Movable Type”, as specified by Six Apart, unless otherwise stated in the terms included with your copy of the Software.

This is ridiculous. Once I pay $70 for software, I expect to be able to use it without a credit link. I do not have to include a “generated with Microsoft Word” credit on every document I write in Word.

Also, the default Movable Type templates do not include the credit link on pages other than the front page. So just to be clear: everyone who buys the personal edition of Movable Type and installs it will be in violation of the license unless they carefully modify a minimum of ten templates.

On to the other stuff.

Timothy Appnel says, “The delineation between TypePad and MT have become clear with this release — TypePad is for general users wanting to blog and Movable Type is for developers and professional organizations wanting to do more then just weblogging.”

This may be true from Six Apart’s point of view. However, it is not clearly true from the point of view of Movable Type users. I am not a developer or a professional organization; I am a general user who wants to blog. I also want to use Textile and subcategories and threaded comments and so on. Six Apart has provided me with a simple way to add plugins to my blog; they have put that capacity in the hands of semi-technical general users. They have created a user base which will not be satisfied with TypePad as a general blogging solution.

I don’t know if Timothy’s assumptions about delineations match what Six Apart thinks, but if so, it’s going to be important for Six Apart to take a look at the user base and make sure their categories match the real categories.

Disclaimer: I think Six Apart is a good company and I really like their product.