TheTrenchcoat Chronicles

Tag: Blogging

  • Calling all blog developers

    Calling all blog developers

    Since it’s Friday and hardly anyone reads this between Friday and Sunday, I’m doing this for my own benefit.

    This is a call to all blog software developers. You may think that your blog software is the greatest, but it’s not. What we need is some standards across all blog software platforms.

    Importing and Exporting: Stop locking people into your software. You may think that people would never stop using your software, but there’s always another software around the corner that just might be better than yours. Since most blogs will import entries from Movable Type, I think they should all export in the MT format as well. Right now, I’m stuck in WordPress. Not that there’s anything wrong with WP, but I just don’t like being tied into one software format. I’ve tried the WP to MT export scripts, but so far, I have yet to get one to import properly.

    Subscribing to comments: When I leave a comment on someone else’s blog it’s nice to receive an e-mail when someone else replies to it. A lot of blog developers think this is unnecessary and an RSS reader should be used instead. That’s all well and good, but only a small minority use RSS readers. Plus, I don’t want a line in my RSS reader for each comment I’ve subscribed to. I’ve left thousands of comments on hundreds of blogs. I don’t want a line on my RSS reader for each of those comments that I’ve left. This is a standard feature on PMachine and Serendipity. A plugin is available for WordPress. There used to be one for MT but since they went to 3.0 I don’t know.

    Permalinks: The URL’s to blog entries should be uniform so when someone moves from one platform to another, their URL’s will stay the same. Personally, I think WordPress’ URLs are the best. It goes domain/archives/date/entry-title. Seems simple enough to implement.

    Toggle options: While the developers may think something is a great option or feature, the user may not. Since I’m not a PHP or Perl guru, I would rather just click a button to turn a function on or off and not have to alter any code. For example, in WordPress, if you want a pop-up comment window you have to remove part of the code. Granted, it’s labeled real easily within the code, but I’d rather not mess with the code. In Serendipity, trackbacks are automatically pinged whether you want them to be or not. To turn it off, you have to alter the code. While I may be comfortable doing that, someone else may not be.

    Not that any of these platforms are bad, with the possible exception of MT 3.0, but I just think there should be some kind of blog industry standards. Trust me, if I had the time to learn how to write scripts I would at least try to develop my own. (Hmmmm. TrenchBlog? Trenchpress? Movable Trench?)

  • Movable Type meets the Resistable Price

    Movable Type meets the Resistable Price

    In case you haven’t heard, Movable Type has released version 3.0. The problem is, there are some catches.

    First of all, they’re now charging some steep prices. There is a free version, but it only allows one author on 3 weblogs. This sucks for some of the group blogs I read that are on MT. There’s now no way to upgrade from 2.XX to 3.0 and have multiple authors without having to pay. And there are no available versions of 2.XX left to download.

    I understand that Six Apart is a business, and they are entitled to make as much money as they want, but I think they are in the process of disillusioning what used to be a very loyal fan base.

    I used MT for two years and was very happy with it. However, I got tired of waiting for 3.0 and as my entries grew in number, it took forever to do a rebuild of my site any time I did some kind of modification to it.

    So not too long ago, I made the jump to WordPress. For once, my timing is impeccable. It’s free open-source software which could even be used for commercial use.

    No limit to users. It does not support multiple blogs, but I now believe it’s better that if you’re running multiple blogs to have them be independent of each other. Importing my MT entries took no time and was a snap. WP comes with a built-in MT entry importer.

    The documentation for WP isn’t as extensive as MT’s used to be, but you can usually find what information you need from the user forums. Be warned, though, just because you were a wiz at MT does not make you a WP expert. They are written in two entirely different codes. But as I said, you can usually find what you’re looking for in the user forum.

    MT used to be the standard. I thank them for the years of service, but the ship is sinking, and this rat jumped off a long time ago.

  • Happy Anniversary

    Happy Anniversary

    Tomorrow, September 28, in the year of our Lord 2002, marks the 5th anniversary of my website in some form or another. And since I don’t post on Saturdays right now, I’m going to celebrate today. It all started 5 years ago on a crappy little Tripod site that was started for me by a woman who called herself Sentira. She was the artist behind the original “TheTrenchcoat” picture. So Sentira if you’re out there somewhere reading this, thank you. And since that day I’ve been addicted to making and maintaining my websites.

    First, there was “The Lair of TheTrenchcoat” which also contained some of my (ugh)poetry. Then I started writing more, and I split the site in two and had The Lair plus “The Written Works of TheTrenchcoat” which were two completely different sites. Then Columbine happened, and I landed on the front page of the Washington comPost, so I decided to lie low. I changed the site to “Patrick Black: The Usual Suspect”. Then I changed it to “Suspect’s Symphony of Sychosis”. And eventually, I changed it to “The Written Works of the 13th Suspect”. After a while, I got tired of being a suspect and wanted to be a good guy again. So then I started “Patrick Black’s No Cure for Cancer” which for the first time featured a rant section. Then a friend of mine told me about Namezero which at the time was offering free top-level domain names. So I registered TheTrenchcoat.Org and split the sites up again into “The Written Works of TheTrenchcoat” and “The Gospel According to Vigilante 13”. Having 2 different names for the same persona didn’t last long, and I changed it to “The Gospel of TheTrenchcoat”. And those two stayed that way for a while. Then I tried my hand at a Real Audio music site called “Radio Free Trenchcoat” so now I had three separate sites. Then in April 2001, I signed up with Xanga and registered the domain name of thetrenchcoat.com. The idea was to have the Xanga site be a portal to my other three sites. That didn’t work out. So I combined “Gospel” and “Written” into “TheTrenchcoat Anthology” under thetrenchcoat.com and killed the music site. Then I found out how to host my own blog and added it to “The Anthology”. I made the blog the front page of the site, which is now what you see before you…”TheTrenchcoat Chronicles”. And in another year I’ll probably be calling it something else.

    And I’ve used several different web hosts as well. Tripod, Geocities, WBS/Go.com, Angelfire, Freeservers, 0catch, and V3 Space. And let me tell you, a paid host is the way to go.