prolific.org

Walter V.’s second novel, ‘West‘, is out. I
couldn’t make it to his book launch due to work, so I’m going to buy one
from Scheltema today to help keep it in the Top 10, like he asks on his blog. (There’s absolutely no shame in being a hoor and the oh-so-cool detractors should lighten up.) He’s getting really
good reviews (one reviewer said it was free of the Dutch smell of
sprouts and on par with American writers’ style). Walter ’started’
writing his tales of Amsterdam suburbia on his personal site around the turn
of the century. It’s great to see him succeed like this and I can’t wait to read the book. Cult of the amateur, pah!

To speed up rebuilding on this and previous installations of Movable Type, I cut my archives in half and publish through two different blogs. #1 is the one you are looking at. #2 is ‘prolific classic’ (archives from 1998 – 2001), which resides at prolific.org/classic/

#1 Publishes fine, it shows the 3-column layout the way I want it, with sidebars. #2 Won’t show its sidebars, whatever I do. Not on the front page, not on the archive listing and not on the entry pages. I can’t figure it out and don’t see any difference in the templates. Anniwun kan halp?

I’ve also not been able to get dynamic publishing working on more than one blog. MT won’t let me publish both #1 and #2 dynamically at the same time. So now one is published static, the other dynamic.

Fixed. The problem occurred because I was publishing one blog’s archives outside the root. Hmm. I’d call that a bug.

(The first one to tell me ‘why don’t you use wordpress’ or ‘why don’t you just code your own’ gets a punch in the nose.)

Welcome to my new blog powered by Movable Type. This is the first post on my blog and was created for me automatically when I finished the installation process. But that is ok, because I will soon be creating posts of my own!

Surprise, surprise. With Jade Goody gone, the evil coven (Jo, Danielle, Jack and Cleo) are laying into Dirk Benedict and Jermaine Jackson, since they’re now afraid to go after Shilpa. Their new bullying tactics? Among other things Hiding Dirk’s (macrobiotic) food and taunting them with it, and waking him up during the night. The latest plan involves dressing Jack up as a woman. They think it will hurt Jermaine since he’s muslim. The mind boggles. Jo is full of glee as she talks about how close to ‘breaking point’ Dirk and Jermaine are.

Cleo: “He takes his macrobio diet seriously as he believes it helped him beat cancer.”
Jo: “So what.”

Yes, it’s time to burn your Sclub7 discs.

Oh, you’re not watching CBBUK? Count yourself lucky not to be drawn into this car wreck television.

Read the summaries at HJ’s TV blog.

Eachman kills the blog you know. Daily personal blogging takes place at VOX. Links, feeds and other delicacies continue to be served here.
Bring your own browser.

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.

Fabulous. Someone’s started a ‘Dunglish‘ weblog.

The Dutch are known for and pride themselves on their command of the English language, but they’re a lot less good at it than they think they are. (Have you ever heard Dutch politicians speak English? Jaw droppingly bad.) Their need to show off their skills sometimes makes for hilarious examples. Check the blog for some.

English is also thought of as ‘cool’ by copy writers, so we’re treated to mostly inapropriate and often cringeworthy English-language advertising: literal translations, grammatical errors, etc.

I’ve always thought I should keep track of them, write them down, but I never do. Now I don’t have to. Awe, as they say, some.

My English is bloody good, but it is far from perfect. I started learning English at a very young age, 6 or 7, through English speaking relatives. In primary school we started age 10, it was a new initiative of the school I was at. I believe it’s standard practice now, but I’m not sure. By the age of 12 I was more fluent than my teachers and did my school friends’ homework and their written tests. We had a ’system’. Our teacher suspected what was happening, but he couldn’t prove it and never caught us.

Sometimes I make ‘Dunglish’-type mistakes, especially when I get tired. When I’m abroad, speaking English, for more than three weeks, something happens to the language part of my brain. I’ll open my mouth and *think* I’m speaking English, but Dutch will come out and it takes a few seconds for me to realise it. A few vodka tonics fixes the problem. Do I think in English? Yes.

[Read more]

6A’s Mena asks: How are you using the tool?

An overview:

On U2log.com we have currently 11 authors, most of which are doubles or dormant. Current active authors: 4. When U2 start touring next year, our team will grow to between 6 and 10 authors.

I was going to pay for the new 3.0 release anyway, but with the recent changes to the license, it works out even better for U2log.com. I’m impatiently waiting for the personal release so we can switch ASAP. TypeKey is a godsend for our site.

But of course I use MT elsewhere too. Here at prolific.org, the free version will cover things nicely.

Then there’s gavinfriday.com (1 author, 1 blog, but possibly more in future). All MT does there is run a simple news log. I don’t really have to upgrade from 2.6, unless things change drastically with this year’s impending rethinking and redesign. Gavinfriday.com is an odd fish, in that it is an ‘official’ site, but it’s not commercial – I do not get paid for the work.

Virginprunes.com (2 authors, one blog) is completely MT driven. Static pages as well as the main news blog are all done with MT templates. No real need to upgrade, although it would be nice to be able to switch comments back on with the upcoming re-release of the band’s entire back catalogue.

Then there’s a new site I was hoping to start. 1 blog, 3 authors or more. I could use MT, or I could use Pivot. I don’t mind using other software for it. It’s nice to stick with what you know best. Eventually, I would be ok with paying for a second license for this one – it would be great if there was some sort of discount for that.

My main concern is with these multiple installations of the free version. I’m not sure I am allowed to do that – I bet I’m not.

(… and by the way, I’ve just noticed that control-shift-a (to link text in the editor) doesn’t work anymore in MT3.0)

Prolific.org (a one author, one blog site) is now running MT 3.0 (free version). Upgrading went smoothly. Some tips:

This combination of articles explains the MT 3.0 release and its perceived problems very well: