Year: 2004

Categories
Technology Weblogging

For those about to move to WordPress or Textpattern…

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Six Apart released new pricing information today, and no matter how you package it, it’s not going to have people happy.

Yes, there will be a free version of Movable Type 3.0.

Mena Trott writes, but what she doesn’t say in the page is that free only works if you have one weblog author and three weblogs.

One of the reasons people haven’t moved to WordPress or other weblogging tools is lack of support for multiple weblogs–yet. Movable Type provided this, and it was simple to create a new weblog and add new authors, and many of us have done so. We didn’t see that this was going to be an issue someday. There was a major storm headed our way, and we never saw it coming.

I’ve created weblogs for multiple authors, and I’ve created multiple weblogs on one installation of MT. I have enough weblogs on my current installation that if I had stayed with Movable Type, and moved to 3.0, I’d have to go with a commercial license, and be paying upwards of $600.00. No, I didn’t see this coming. There wasn’t a clue.

All along we’ve said that we’d pay for a pro version of MT that provided what we needed. Several people understood that this new release wouldn’t have everything we asked for, but it was still free. Now we find out the caveats, the hammer dropping.

If it was just a ding to the toe, people would hop about and grumble a bit, and probably pay. But damn, this is a sledgehammer.

Nothing wrong with making a profit. But all the $20,000.00 contests in the world won’t make up for the fact that you don’t encourage people to use a product a certain way, and then charge them what are, frankly, extremely high fees–the highest in the business by my figuring–to upgrade to a new version.

If I were still a MT user now, I’d be furious. Now that I’m not, frankly, I feel a bit smug.

I need to return quickly to my Survival Guide to LAMP series. I expect a lot of movement to Textpattern and WordPress about now, and folks might be wanting help. But no fears–I won’t charge you to read my writing.

Yet.

update 

Hee. I like Steve’s take on the license.

By the way, I want you all to know that I made a prediction in Phil Ringnalda’s weblog earlier this week, saying that WordPress and Textpattern would surpass MT in users in a year. This was before the pricing announcement, so I want you to have some respect for my crystal ball reading ability.

Second update

Just caught this. The following are what you get, specifically, with the paid version of MT 3.0 that are conspicuously missing from the free version:

# Application updates and fixes (not including major upgrades)
# A guaranteed path to future versions

I think that after MT 3.0, you can probably kiss free versions of MT good-bye. I see the TypePad/TypeKey writing on the wall.

third update

From Paul Freeman I found out that you have to be registered with TypeKey in order to download the free version.

We were assured that TypeKey wasn’t required for Movable Type. I specifically remember this being said.

I also didn’t realize the physical limitations of the free version–one installation only, and no installation on multi-CPU machines. Most hosted environments are multiple CPU machines. Does this mean even if you are a single author/single weblog user, but hosted, you still can’t use MT?

update four

Looks like the trackback for the Six Apart entry is broken at 79, but you can get links at Technorati.

Categories
Weblogging

Sing in Harmony

In the mornings I catch up on my weblog reading through Bloglines. I’ve developed the habit recently of reading full content feeds within the tool rather than clicking through. I feel guilty about this because I’ve been critical in the past about full content RSS feeds, and about reading entire posts in aggregators rather than go to the person’s site.

Reading a person’s writing in an aggregator, I said, strips away their personality. Each bit of writing looks just like the others, and each is read, bang-bang-bang, one after another without a break or a pause to prepare ourselves for the next writing. The juxtaposition of one weblogger writing about the horrors of war, followed immediately by another writing about their cat and dental cleaning, jars and clashes when the subjects are so obviously different. However, it’s worse when the subjects are the same, and there’s only a mouse click’s amount of time between. The writing will blur and lose it’s distinctive edge, and you won’t be able to distinguish when one voice stops and another starts.

Today, I clicked on the Emptybottle link and read the following in a writing titled On the Turning Away:

But not turning away can lead into an addictive room of mirrors. Bearing witness changes from a duty and a rite to a habit and a vice. The feed only gets notice when we unhook it, and we’re not fed the world by our umbilicals, we’re pulled further out of it. Schroedinger’s cat doesn’t die unless we see it happen, but if we’re watching it on video, it doesn’t really matter which way it goes. Kill ‘em all and let god sort ‘em out.

So we watch. We stagger from table to buffet table, dyspeptic and enervated, mildly turgid under our loosened belts. We snap and grin with our cams and camphones, and our photos are products that refer to themselves, not us. Our kaleidoscopic images proxy the world, and let us maintain the illusion that we aren’t really a part of it, and that the bad things are happening over there. That those chants and tribal signifiers that make us feel so good and so strong and so right actually mean something other than ‘go team’.

When I finished, I clicked the next active link, which happens to be Halley’s Comment (’H’ following ‘E’), and read the following in a writing titled, You Really Don’t Have to Look:

We were talking about the disturbing pictures in the papers and on TV that you can barely avoid, and can get you DOWN big time, but I HAVE BEEN avoiding them. I’ve been taking time to make my house pretty, organize my finances, care for my son, care for myself, write, read, make new friends. Especially helping my kid avoid the barrage of dreadful images. My mom used to tell us when we drove by an auto accident on the roadside, “You really don’t have to look.”

About that whole full content feed and losing distinctive voice thing: I was wrong.

Categories
Connecting

Meet me in St. Louis

Woo, boys and girls, but I’m a hot property today.

Not only do I have an invite from Ev to attend a Blogger party with several thousand of his closest friends, but I also received a geniune, semi-personal, group email from Tim O’Reilly–yessir the O’Reilly man himself–to attend none other than Web Conference 2.0 this fall. Unfortunately, I don’t live in California so I can’t make the Blogger party. And I don’t have a couple of thousand dollars to register for Web Conference 2.0, so I’ll have to pass.

But if I did, I’d be truly A Listin’, on my way to the brass ring, boys and girls. Yes, indeed, I would be gold. Pure gold. If you’re nice, I’d let you kiss the hem of my low rider boot cut black jeans.

But since I can’t attend the Blogger Fest or Web Conference 2.0, I thought I would see about bringing the A List here to us in Missouri. Dave Winer has decided to stay in the States this summer and look for a place where the vote is undecided; to apply his vote where it would be most useful. Why, I just can’t think of a better place for Dave than right here in beautiful St. Louis.

Just think, Dave: This is the birthplace of Mark Twain himself, as well as the starting point for the Lewis & Clark expedition to the West. It’s not exactly the population center of the country, but it’s only a few hours away.

We’re less than a day’s drive from New Orleans, San Antonio/Dallas/Houstan, Chicago, Denver, Oklahoma City, Baton Rouge, Kansas City, Louisville, Indianapolis, Columbus, and various other cities I can’t think of right off hand; most of which are located in states that are swing states.

And there’s a thriving St. Louis blogger group that’s getting together this weekend for blues and brew on Friday, and bowling on Sunday. Not to mention that this year is the 100 year anniversary of the 1904 World’s Fair, which served as inspiration for the movie, Meet me in St. Louis; they’ve even built a replica of the World’s Fair ferris wheel for celebrations this summer. But the bigger event is the celebrations for the 200 year old anniversary of the Lewis & Clark expedition.

The country’s two largest rivers meet and greet here, and riverboats still ply the waterways. North and South each have a foot here, as does East and West. No other state blends all aspects of this country as Missouri does, and I’ve lived in a goodly number of them.

Cost of living is low, food is great, people are friendly, state is pretty, music is classic St. Lou blues, we have the last Victorian walking park in the US, the Arch, significant historical and literary roots, and it isn’t California, New York, Washington DC, or Boston. We be fresh meat. Just ignore the fact that both Rush Limbaugh and Ashcroft came from here. Or don’t ignore it–take the fight to their territory.

And if you’re nice, we’ll even see if we can’t throw a tornado or two, just for you, Dave.

Categories
Critters Just Shelley

My micro world

I have to take Zoe in today to get her teeth cleaned. I hate having to do this. She’s an older cat and she’s had seizures in the past and I worry every time she’s under general anesthesia. However, as the vet said, this is something that can’t be put off. But I hate doing it.

What’s worse is she knows it’s coming. When she doesn’t get fed in the morning and her water is taken away the night before, she knows she has to go into the vet. She gets very quiet and very hurt looking, and then she crawls up into my lap and presses as tight as she can to me, and talks softly in her little chatter. Every once in a while, she trembles a bit and presses closer.

Before we adopted Zoe we had a cat, Boots, who was one of three boys born to another cat we were taking care of for a friend. Boots was an amazing cat, huge, close to 20 pounds. He kept getting into one scrape after another, including getting hit by a car and losing sight in one eye.

Boots ended up having stomach problems, and had to have surgery a couple of times, but he’d always pull through. Then one spring we noticed that he was losing weight and getting quieter, and not eating as well. We took him into the vet and they diagnosed stomach cancer and recommended surgery. They also suggested that we take him home for a few days and just spend time with him before the operation.

He looked like a young kitten again from the weight loss. His eyes were huge in his face, and he was so vulnerable.

The day of the surgery the vet said for us to go to work, he’d call and let us know when the operation was over. (Neither Rob’s company nor mine was amenable to time off ‘just for a cat’.) Later that morning, Rob called me and he was crying so hard I couldn’t understand him. It was a shock, because I never heard Rob cry before.

He said that the doctor called and the cancer was very advanced. They could try to continue the surgery, but the chance of him surviving was only about 20 percent and if they weren’t successful, Boots would continue in a great deal of pain. We had to make a decision: continue or allow them to just let Boots drift off to a permanent sleep.

Rob couldn’t make the decision; he was especially close to Boots. I called the doctor and we talked, and he said I had to decide quickly–Boots was still under anesthesia. So I chose not to let him suffer. But all I could think of the rest of the day is that Boots didn’t understand why he was going into the vet, and he didn’t understand why we weren’t there with him, and this was his last memory.

I am writing about Zoe and having her teeth cleaned. My priorities are wrong. She’s just a cat and this isn’t about Iraq, where people are dying and the world has gone to hell. Where’s my civic duty, and don’t I have more important things to write about?

But she’s part of my micro world where my actions have direct cause and effect. I can’t control what I can’t touch, but I can touch her.

updateThe vet is holding on doing Zoe’s teeth until tomorrow, in order to do additional tests today to make sure that the general anesthesia won’t trigger another seizure. As much as Zoe’s teeth need cleaning, we’re all hesitant with her medical history. So poor little girl has to stay at the Vet’s tonight. The clinic is not charging us for either the kennel or the extra tests, since these weren’t anticipated.

The people at the clinic are just wonderful. I’ve always wished that I could have a vet for my doctor.

Zoe

Categories
Writing

Pink feathers and sequins

The APress book deal is off, an event long time coming. We’re just working out the details now about the advance. The whys and wherefores aren’t important other than this necessitates some changes in my life.

I’ve just signed with a book agent (please don’t ask me her name, the relationship is new) to help me shop around another book idea. I won’t tell you what it’s about, or when I get a deal–I’ve learned my lesson about not talking about books until they’re on the street. I will say it’s not the same as the one for APress.

I am returning to my Developing ASP Components roots and focusing on more traditional tech writing. My audience is still similar to the audience for the LAMP series–interested and adventurous non-tech or non-geek tech. However, I’ll leave the poetry to the poets.

I feel that the Practical RDF book is primarily this type of writing, though I do wax poetically a bit in the first chapter. However, I have to give kudos to the reviewers and Simon St. Laurent for helping me keep on track. The credit for much of the success for this book has to go to them, while I, unfortunately, have to accept credit for the typos–I am an impatient proof reader sometimes when I’m tired, or anxious to finish.

I still have The Internet for Poets, and I think it’s a killer book and organization, but for now I’ll put it aside in favor of more easily consumable books: just as interesting, but perhaps not quite as out there.

Oh, the joys of being a writer, and why we do this. I read once that you know you’re a writer when you can’t imagine yourself being anything else. I know that some webloggers hope to make a career out of professional writing, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps they, too, can’t imagine doing anything else, but for some I believe it’s because they think this career is glamorous or profitable, and that you’ll become famous and respected. They might think it’s cool to work at home all the time.

The truth is you work 15 hour days with the hope that you might earn enough to pay the bills next month–if you drop health insurance and let the car payment slide–all the while listening to your roommate talk about what a great lunch he and his co-workers today, just before he settles down to a night of TV or reading. When you go to the vet to have your cat checked out and they ask what you do and you answer writer, they go, “Uhm, that’s nice”, because if they don’t recognize your name, they assume you’re just another writer wannabe. So next time you go to have your cat’s teeth cleaned, you take one of your books with you so you can slam it down on the counter–see this book has cats on it, is your excuse, so that the receptionist can see that you really are a writer.

I am not rich, or famous, and sometimes I tire of my own company when I look out my window at people having lives. But yes, I am glamorous. Do I have to design a black sequined, pink feathered boa, nippleless breasted, nose diamonded weblog to prove this?

I’d rather leave this to the guys