Blogging

I like to read my favorite blogs via their RSS feeds. However, because I sometimes read them on my computer at work, my desktop at home and on my laptop, I am rapidly discovering that my reading experience is being diminished by the hassle of keeping all my feeds in sync. Read More

Movable Type is a great program. Its customizability and its flexibility make it possible to do just about anything when it comes to using it to power your web site. Read More

Ack! I’ve just had to reinstall MT and it’s been a real pain to do. It became necessary after I wrote a post and when I tried to publish it, MT totally crashed on me. Some frantic scouring of the support forums showed me that the likely cause was that I had ran out of space on my web server and as a consequence, my MT database had become corrupted.
I upgraded my web hosting account to solve the first issue, but then couldn’t find a way to repair my database – the only option seemed to be a complete reinstall. So, I exported my entries and saved my custom templates and proceeded through the laborious task of installing MT.
Some gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair later, I had it installed. For a while, I couldn’t work out why no styles or images were showing for the MT screens – I had the right path entered in mt.cfg. Over to the support boards I headed again, to discover that the line in mt.cfg is commented out by default – doh! That is so easy to miss – I wish there was a mention of it in the documentation.
Anyway, finally my installation was up and running and so I reimported my archives…only to discover that for some reason they had only been exported up to mid-January. So now I’ve lost about a third of my posts, including a couple that took quite a bit of time and effort to write – aaagh!!!
Jeez, this is frustrating. It’s almost like starting from scratch again. Oh well, at least this time, there shouldn’t be any more problems [fingers crossed].

Just because something’s written on a web site doesn’t mean that it’s true. Keith reminds us of this in his thoughtful post, Web of Misinformation. Whitespace has a good discussion on this as well.
The moral of this story? Know your author, question everything and learn to separate opinion from act.

Contentious is running a contest to come up with a catchier name for RSS that isn’t a three letter acronym. I haven’t got any great ideas of my own, but I thought I’d spread the word.

Update: Although it’s not free ($20 per year subscription), “Attensa for Outlook”:http://www.attensa.com/products/outlook/ looks like a nice alternative to IntraVnews, which I’ve reviewed below. They certainly seem to like it at “Performancing”:http://performancing.com/node/1105.

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