I’ve always loved reading. In middle school, I’d sit with a novel in my lap, trying to read during class without getting caught. Going into this year, I wanted to try things that I hypothesized would make me a better writer. One of these things is reading, specifically reading and thinking about what makes a book or story work or not for me. Another of the things is blogging¹, so it made sense to me that I would start to blog what I read. I also wanted to keep track of what I read a little better. Instead of using this as another excuse to build a tool that I’m not sure I’ll actually use, I’m just using tags on the posts: sfpl for books I check-out from the the San Francisco Public Library, fiction for works of fiction, etc. I’d like to use something more structured for this (probably RDFa), but right now I have enough half finished software projects, so tags it is.

And that’s why my blog seems like a book report lately.

¹ I see blogging as a practice: something that I do with regularity, which has immediate and cumulative benefits.

You’ll notice that “yergler.net”:http://yergler.net is now powered by Word Press, along with a handful of plugins and hacks. In the development of the site, I actually did put together my own WordPress plugin, which I’ll hopefully be releasing “real soon now.” Stay tuned.

Of course, not everything’s quite up to speed yet. The photo albums are offline, as is the CVS repository. They should both be back real soon now, although CVS will be converted to Subversion. If you find something seriously amiss, let me know.

It took me a couple hours this morning, but I managed to wrangle my MT entries into WordPress, and even got my templates mostly working. I initially evaluated WP 1.02, the latest release, but decided to live on the edge and actually use the current release candidate of 1.2. Overall, it’s very impressive. What have I gained over Movable Type?

* an improved, stream-lined editting interface that doesn’t require multiple windows for assigning more than one category
* a template system that doesn’t rely on magic tags, but rather exploits the power of the underlying language (in this case PHP); this might not seem like a lot, but it’s allowed me to recreate parts of MT that WordPress doesn’t provide an interface for (like template “blocks”)
* templates that live on the filesystem, which makes editting and back up a lot easier
* oh yeah, and it’s really, really Free. “Mark Pilgrim”:http://diveintomark.org has an excellent “post”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0 on this very subject, and when smart people agree with me, I feel better.

So why not TextPattern? I have to admit, I was initially drawn to the clean lines and good looks of it’s user interface. Yet somehow, even after reading the license and seeing that it allowed redistribution, I didn’t feel good about it. And then I read “this page”:http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=505 in the TextPattern forum, and realized that if I chose TP, it’d be MT all over again: free enough for now, not free enough forever.

I’ve used MovableType for about 8 months now, with good results. I’ve played with “PyBlosxom”:http://roughingit.subtlehints.net/pyblosxom/, and been impressed with it’s customizability and general Python-ness. But the web interface of MT has kept me in place, despite my documented allergy to Perl. I’ve been meaning to write a plugin for PyBlosxom which provides support for the “Atom API”:http://www.atomenabled.org/, but haven’t had the time or motivation. I did manage to convert my “photo album”:http://pixels.yergler.net to PyBlosxom, and while it’s still not perfect, the entire posting process is going to be much better (from my perspective). So, long story short (too late, I know), I was suprised to see that MT has launched a new 3.0 “Developer’s Edition”. I was even more suprised to see the strong reactions to their newly announced pricing plan.

I don’t begrudge Six Apart’s desire to make money on Movable Type. They’ve obviously put quite a lot of effort into making it one of the easiest to use platforms around. While I love it when my software is free, I also don’t mind putting out for software that does what I want, how I want it (and even better if I can further hack it to my needs). I’m a programmer, and I need to eat, too.

That said, I also understand *some* of the reactions. Even though they’ve never attempted to disguise their licensing, Movable Type has long been easy to confuse with Open Source. And Open Source is even easier to confuse with “free” (as in Dollars). Evidence: MT is written in Perl, which is Open Source, and as such the code is by nature available. Ben and Menna were invited to present at OSCON 2002. So when you suddenly reassert (in a much more real way) your commercial nature and interests, people are naturally confused and possibly upset. I’m not sure there’s anything Six Apart could have done to prevent this; it’s sort of the nature of the beast, I think (can anyone else think of similar examples?).

Will I be shelling out for MT3? Um, no. First, my usage is so light that I still qualify for the “developer’s” edition, which is free and unsupported. But more than that, I think I want my “free” software to be truly free, if possible. So maybe I’ll write that Atom plugin for PyBlosxom so I can use any Atom-enabled client. Or maybe I’ll try “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org/. And maybe I’ll actually pay the developers of whatever Free tool I use, since that’s what I’d appreciate for my own work.

Whatever I do, it has to be soon: I can’t stand much more of the comment spam.

I knew going into the conversion that I didn’t want my entire website to look like a blog. That’s why my blog doesn’t render in the root of my domain. But I also recognized the power of formatting things as “posts.” My solution works like this. I abuse the PyBlosxom “each directory is a category” idea to create the heirarchical structure that I want. Each “entry” in the directories becomes a different page, then, in that category area. Finally, when serving the directory index, I serve the contents of the README file (if it exists) instead of the typical blog-like entry list. This allows for some really simple content management with near-instantaneous publishing.

To get the README file served, each entry as a page, and the directory tree, I wrote a handful of plugins. They’re not really documented yet, but you can find them in “cvs”:http://yergler.net/cvs/viewcvs.cgi/pyblosxom/.

I order to get the mix of dynamic and static content served the right way, I had to do some serious mod_rewrite hacking. If you find a link that doesn’t work, please, “let me know”:/contact .

*UPDATE*: I think the layout bugs in Safari have been fixed. Damn style sheet.

So I bought the camera and took lots of pictures for a few months. Of course, it tapered off soon after. But lately I’ve been wanting to record moments in my life. I think this stems from the realization that I’ve taken very few pictures this year, and yet so much has happened; we bought a house, have a new dog, etc. Things I should have recorded.

With that in mind I’ve dusted off the pictures I took over the past few years and created “My Life in Pixels”:http://pixels.yergler.net, at pixels.yergler.net. Right now it’s just what I had before, but I’m hoping that actually have a _place_ for them will help to movtivate me. Note that I still need to do some cleanup; the entry titles are just the filenames, which were generated by Gallery (way back when). Of course, cleanup isn’t nearly as fun as creation, so it’ll be a while.