An Experiment in Bloggery

Well, after about 5 hours of hacking, I got a ruby script together to migrate all my data from Typo 4.11 to WordPress, so the site is back from the dead, and now running on an engine that DreamHost is actually happy with.

Update: The conversion script is now available here or at GitHub.

Typo 4.0 is out! Many thanks to Scott Laird for his wonderful work on Akismet support and the new gem installer.

Last night I updated Notification Watcher to be a Universal binary. I also updated the project for Xcode 2.2. You can find it over at tildesoft.com.

On a side note, I really need to re-design tildesoft to actually look semi-decent. I’ve been meaning to do this for ages, but I am not a designer. Anybody have any ideas?

Well, I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my blog from the Typo stable release to the HEAD of the svn trunk. I wasn’t going to do this for a while, because of the complexity in keeping site-specific changes away from my Typo hacking, but I ran across this article that explained how to use svk to manage all this for me, and now I’m testing it out. Hopefully everything will work fine, but if anything weird goes on, you’ll know why.

Typo trunk has a bunch of nifty stuff. The most noticeable is the new look, although I do plan on changing it at some point. Another thing that was just added is cached pages (and by just added I mean added yesterday). This is why the “Posted 27 days ago” timestamps are gone, although we’re looking into re-adding that with JavaScript (Update: this has now been re-added). There’s some other stuff in here, like support for SmartyPants, emails on the comments, and more.

If you notice anything wrong that doesn’t go away shortly, please, leave a comment telling me what the problem is, or if comments are a problem, send me an email about it.

Well, imagine my surprise when I discovered that a bunch of my old entries no longer worked right in Typo? The problem is, out of the box, Typo doesn’t bother showing the extended portions of entries, even though it does store them. So I sat down and started poking around the internals of Typo and got it to not only show the extended part, but also to let me edit the extended part from the admin interface. And it didn’t take very long at all, because of how powerful and flexible Ruby on Rails is.

And then, after that, I read up on mod_rewrite and added rewrite rules to get all the old MT URLs to point to the right place. Hopefully I didn’t miss anything.

If you can see this post, you’ll notice that everything’s changed. Not only has the entire look of the blog changed, but so has the server the blog is hosted on. This blog is now being hosted by DreamHost, and the blog system I’m using is Typo. Play around with it — I think you’ll find it’s very cool. For example, you can do live searches, posting a comment is live too, and everything should also be nice and zippy. The first two are because of the new Typo engine (which uses Ruby on Rails, an excellent web application framework), and the last is a combination of Typo and the new server.

So hopefully, with this new blog in place, I’ll actually be motivated to start posting again. I’m sure if I have anybody that still reads this (and by reads I mean is subscribed in their newsreader), you’ll be happy to hear this.

As most of you readers know (if I even have any readers) the programming aspect of my life lives at www.tildesoft.com. And if you’ve ever looked at the site, it’s ugly. So’s the name “TildeSoft”. I’ve been wanting to redesign the site (and scrap the name) for a while now, but I still have yet to come up with either a good site design or a better name.

So this is a call to anybody who happens to come across this blog (or, on the off chance that I actually have people who read this thing, you guys). If you have either a good idea for a better name or a mockup (or just an idea) for a good site design, please, tell me.

On a related note, I probably should re-do this blog design too, since it’s closely based off of one of the default MT templates. If you have any ideas for this too, I’d also love to hear them.

Please note that I’m perfectly able to code my own site, I’m just looking for ideas here, not code.

It’s been quite a while since my last blog post (not counting the last one, which was a copy&paste post, it’s been almost 2 months). One reason is because I haven’t wanted to take the time to report on everything that’s happened since then. So I won’t. I may go back and fill in some gaps, but for now I’ll try and just start posting about current things again.

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, I know. I really should start posting again. I just don’t have much to talk about. Here’s an update on my current status:

Colloquy

Colloquy is a Mac OS X IRC client. It’s not as powerful as some others, notably X-Chat Aqua, but it’s the only one that’s actually well-designed from a UI standpoint (it looks like an Aqua IRC client should look). Colloquy is also really nice from a code standpoint. For instance, the way it does Styles. It has several different styles, and they all look fairly different. The way it’s done is everything is rendered in a WebView using Safari’s WebKit. It translates the IRC traffic into an XML log and uses XSLT to translate the log into an XHTML document and renders that in the WebView. For new messages it uses JavaScript to append the message to the end of the document. This makes it really flexible and really powerful. Here’s a screenshot of my favorite style, called Meinzer:

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Well, today I just realized that I screwed up the templates and comments were being displayed without the name/link of the author. It’s now been fixed.