prolific.org

VOX, Six Apart’s new blogging tool, is now open to everyone. I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and (as you may have noticed) it’s made me forget about this here MT-powered self-made blog that I’ve had for the last 7 years. Why? Because I, like everybody else, have less time to spare and want everything to be quick and easy at this point in my life. Maybe when I retire I’ll go back to hand-coding my thoughts in Notepad, but right now, I want VOX.

Vox doesn’t do everything I want. I can’t import delicious, last.fm, upcoming, etc like I do here, but it does all the basics really well. But most importantly… all my mates are there in my own little neighbourhood! With it’s privacy features, it’s perfect for the easy, ’secret’ blogging of stuff you want only your best friends and/or your family to read. It’s free, so give it a whirl, and invite your mates or maybe your techno-phobe dad.

Hmm, that came out like a copywritten advertisement. It’s not. Honest.

So what am I gonna do with eachman.com? Well, I’m thinking of reverting back to prolific.org and making this an aggregate-only hub. I think I’ll be stripping this site of its current ‘design’ soonish.

For the past couple of weeks I have been mostly blogging at Vox, where I can set my posts to ‘private / friends / family’. Yeah, like LiveJournal, but I’ve never felt at home at LiveJournal – it doesn’t look or feel like blogging to me there, and I’ve never got my head around its bizarre GUI.

Back when I started (98/99) blogging appealed to me because of the small and friendly community of people involved in it. A couple of hundred webheads, mostly American. When blogging spread and reached The Netherlands, things quickly got nasty.

The second wave of early Dutch bloggers took delight in bullying. I quit my Dutch blog very soon after and retreated back to my English blog(s) where things were still quite peaceful. And then blogging went world wide, it went A/N, it went political, it went… fucking mental. And part of me went: ‘oh, you’re no fun anymore’.

In an article in Time Out Chicago Mena Trott says:

And that’s exactly how I feel. So I’m blogging at VOX for the smallest group of people you can imagine and it doesn’t matter because I stopped caring about readership numbers (which have dwindled dramatically) on my personal weblog quite some time ago.

I still have to figure out what to do with eachman.com, but I may just make it a link or aggregate blog.

I miss MT.

Please don’t hurt me.

If I ever get put on trial for abusing publishing tools, I will claim temporary insanity: “Your honour, I am not myself today.”

She’s switched again, it’s like musical tables!

Not much of a change design-wise, but this place now runs on Pivot, which as I mentioned before, has its own quirks:

* Entry pages live in /archive/ even if you don’t want them to
* There’s no ‘backdoor’, no blogger API – so I can’t do the ‘daily del.icio.us’ posts
* You can’t make ’static pages’ within a weblog)
* The editor loses focus sometimes (cursor goes missing, can’t select/delete text), in Firefox at least.

Let me know if anything doesn’t work as it should.

Oh dear, oh dear. Never thought something as pedestrian as me not getting on with a piece of software would launch such debate (1, 2). We seem to have stepped on some toes. It’s enough to drive this n00b away from the tool and its l33t community. For the record, let me state what I like about WordPress: 1. PHP. Yes, because it’s fast. 2. Its distinction between posts and pages. 3. It’s free.But it’s not about code or tools or plugins. It’s about blogging.

Hmm. I don’t like WordPress at all. I don’t like that I don’t have a linky blog. I hate that I have to add a plug in to be able to do something as simple as upload images. I have to click around so much, my pen tool’s worn out. And most of all I hate having 1000+ ‘draft’ posts and no way to either publish or delete them in one go. I’m not keen on its GUI either.I like the design of my site, though, even if the bulk of it isn’t mine. I just made it prettier. But WordPress has to go. Soon. Maybe I’ll go back to MT for a while, until I figure out how to port this design (with the ‘first post – different look’) to Pivot.Elsewhere, Tom Coates minimalises even more — up front, in your face, lovely.

It’s the season of giving! No it’s not, but I’m feeling generous. No, I’m not, but Flickr just awarded me a couple of free Flickr Pro accounts to give away. Want one?

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Movable Type has never worked well on prolific.org. Whether it is the 7000+ entries, or its long history of Blogger/MT exports and imports, it’s just always been a sluggish installation. U2log.com runs on the same server (eite.pair.com), is almost as large and has few problems. I’ve run MT on other pair.com servers (peswar and wokkil) and they felt a lot faster. Maybe it’s prolific.org’s database that’s not working properly. I’m not tech-savvy enough to figure that out.

I’ve been toying with Wordpress on another account and am impressed. Very easy installation (duh, one click install, a Dreamhost feature) and painless import. And that ‘no rebuilding’ thing is a cracker. I don’t think I’d run a site like U2log.com on it, but for a personal blog it should do.

Switch? Quite possibly. Maybe even on a new domain. After 5 years I am finally weary of being prolific.

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I wish there was a single search interface for all Amazon stores. I often buy either from .com or co.uk and it would save a lot of time searching. And if possible, it should generate associate links for all stores too… Maybe it’s already out there. Perhaps it could be done as a Firefox plugin.

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A few days ago I wrote a short post which later developed into a longer post. It went:

‘Steven Levy asks: “Since anyone can write a Weblog, why is the blogosphere dominated by white males?”

My answer: Because it isn’t.’

That was all and then later I started ranting why he didn’t go out and ask Anil, or Dooce, and Rachel and Firda, or Salam Pax and other Iraqi and Iranian bloggers, the entire country of Brazil, etc. etc. And then I was done ranting and I deleted the post. Which is just as well, because Derek as usual expresses himself a lot better than I can. Go read Powazek: The Big Mirror.

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