prolific.org

Remember when changing CMS was news?

Got fed up with Movable Type (most notably the lack of new themes/styles and its slowness on my host), so it’s time to get fed up with Wordpress again. The problem I have with Wordpress is that I don’t know it well enough to be able to change much, but then I no longer know MT well enough either. Same difference.

I’m using a barely altered theme by Derek Punsalan, which I’ll hopefully find time to personalise a bit more.

I’m gonna party like it’s my birthday. Cause it is.

Sorry for the mess around here, but I’m never going to finish it if I don’t just go live and fix it as we go along. So, comments are unstyled, individual page are incomplete and archives may or may not be working, etc, etc.

But: I’m so happy to be back on Movable Type after my Wordpress and Pivot adventures. You have to work with the tools that suit you best and I’ve found out the hard way that MT is that tool for me. Unfortunately, most developers seem to have switched to Wordpress and I don’t think MT is marketed at personal publishers anymore which makes it harder for me to find solutions or plugins. But even without that online support I know my way around MT best.

The reason I switched from MT was that it didn’t seem to handle my extremely large archive very well and rebuilding had become a real chore. This newer version of MT however does a better job, I think the server Pair has me on now is a little faster too. I’ve also lightened the load by dividing 7 years (!) of archives over four different weblogs.

So anyway, birthday, I’m not up to much, I think I need a hairdo…

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?

[Read more]

Huh? What? Eachman who?

You are looking at the new prolific.org, now known as eachman.com (as in ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’.) It isn’t ideal yet (there’s a lot of stuff just plain wrong behind the scene), the design is a reworking of someone else’s template and WordPress is a little, well, let’s say ‘primitive’ compared to MT, but I’m going to go with it for now. Maybe I’ll switch back, maybe I won’t.

I suppose this is my birthday present to myself. Turning 42 is different from turning 41 or 43. I’ve been looking forward to it with some trepidation, for some time now. Having had some health scares, though none too seriously, in recent months, didn’t help. (And, do, I, like, the, comma, just, a, little, too, much?)

(Here’s where I thought I’d do a ‘read more’ thingy, but there seems to be no obvious way to do that in WordPress.)

My mum died when she was 42 (in 1975… 30 years ago) and so reaching this age is somewhat of a milestone. I’m not sure what to think. Maybe I want some answers, but I’m not sure what the questions are. All I know is, I’m not half as grown up as she was at the time. At least I think I’m not, but how I remember her is not necessarily the way she really was.

Enough gloom. Time for a nice cup of tea and a hearty: ‘happy birthday to me’.

Update 1: Trust Dreamhost to ‘plan’ downtime the day I move my site. (Had to move at least one of my sites away from Pair, since we’re bursting at the seams there.)
Update 2: My laptop arrived this morning, and yes, Dutch OS. Grr.
Update 3: So, has anyone ever moved their WordPress site to Pivot?

[Read more]

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.

[Read more]