ready to start posting again
Archive for the 'Blogs' Category
Wordpress 2.0 is out! Let’s see, I needed to manually install PHP Markdown which used to be a default plug-in and also an upgraded version of wp-contact form. But other than that everything else just worked.
A little more tha a year ago I chose the British ‘Mod Symbol’ as this site’s favicon for no other reason except that The Who are one of my favorite bands. Hey, the site needed a bit of identity at the time (it needs even more now) and the colors worked. I started using it as my icon for iChat discussions as well, it became a part of my identity. My buddy Mark (a pilot) queried me on why I was using the RAF plane marking as my icon. I hadn’t even made the connection between the two, I figured I do some research on this at some point, but I explained the ‘Mod thing’ to him, and life was once again good.
I hadn’t seen any other sites using the Mod symbol, so I figured I was ‘the guy guy with the mod symbol identity’. That is until recently, when I was reading some comments left on the Hicksdesign site and saw a comment by Malarkey with a gravatar, a gravitar of the mod symbol. I immedialtly click over to Malarkey’s site and saw a beautfly crafted CSS/XHTML site with a giant Mod symbol as a background image in the header graphic and a Mod Symbol favicon.
So now I’m sharing the Mod symbol with Malarkey (I’m sure he doesn’t know that I’ve been using it as well). But, he’s making better use of it, put much more effort in to his (very nice) design and to top it off, he’s actualy British. I’ve been thinking about using a header graphic including the symbol for months (on the back burner of course), now, I’m not so sure.
What do I know about this symbol? A little research told me that this type of design is called a roundel. There’s a Roundels of the World site that shows UK’s Type D Roundel is the one we’re talking about. It turns out that the MoD (Ministry of Defence) had an issue with clothing (and other) companies using the RAF roundel. The courts ruled against the MoD in January of 2004 and the Roundel can be reproduced.
Moving from a Radio Userland based Blog to a different system was a painstaking process. This was one of the reasons for my long hiatus. (Yes, I did want time away, and yes I was busy enjoying myself while away from posting.) Getting the posts to an MT/WP import friendly format was difficult, then all of the data needed to be massaged quite a bit. Importing the comments yet was another level of complication. Several things needed to be done by hand rather than by scripting.
So without further adieu, here are the 10 things I won’t miss about Radio Userland:
- “Funky” HTML (good luck trying cleaning it up, Radio seems to do whatever it wants to with HTML).
- Userland’s “Web Bug” gif embedded in RU generated pages (used to create the last 24 hour referrer logs) is extremely slow to load, making your whole site seem slow even when you “self host”.
- Lack of control over code. Sure you can make your own changes to Radio’s Engine, but there’s a chance they’ll get written over in the next root update.
- Poor/Scattered Documentation - Userland should give users a free electronic copy of Roger’s book with the first year’s subscription to RU.
- Not a lot product development going on. Dave has moved on to other things leaving Userland and its applications in stagnation.
- Difficult to move you data to a different system (“lock-in”). It took me quite a while a a lot of tinkering to move my RU content to a less proprietary, more open format.
- Year old bugs have yet to be addressed.
- Client Application is a CPU hog (at least on Mac OS X and Mac OS 9).
- It’s 2004 and no still SFTP available (unless you feel like creating your own tunnel).
- Almost impossible to do anything with comments & trackback entries if they’re hosted by Userland’s servers (which by default they are and there are no easy plug-ins to other services). Moving the comments to another service is a lot more difficult than moving your posts.
- (Bonus) You’re pretty much forced to have a static pages (unless you really want to jump through some hoops) for your site (no php/python/perl/ruby interaction sorry).
A bit more compicated, but I’ve successfully moved the handful of comments that were stored on Userland’s servers into my WordPress database.
Well, I had a slight problem with post titles being duplicated to subsequent posts without titles. I believe I’ve corrected all of duplicates. I still need to play with the mod-rewrite features.
Also I going to have to spend a little time getting my own look for this site again.
I’m off to Fire Island for tonight and tomorrow. If there are any photos taken I’ll post them to the gallery.
Well, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my spring and summer away from this site. I feel refreshed. I enjoyed my summer at fire island and it’s just a few months before boarding season. I plan on picking up were I left off here back in January.
I’ve painstakingly repurposed the Radio Userland content to Movable Type format (which is what I was going to use) then imported it all into WordPress.
What you see is the result of that process. Now i’ve got to tidy everything else up.
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