Ewan's Corner

Ewan McPhail's blog and soapbox – sporadically blogging since 2003

Posts Tagged movabletype

WordPress rocks. There, I said it.

Dec 31

Posted by ewan in weblog | 2 Comments

wordpress I’ve moved from MovableType to WordPress, and so far the experience has (with one notable exception) been great. I feel dirty without Perl running the show (reliance on all this PHP code seems so… messy :-)

I’ve been a happy MovableType user since January 2005 (Blogger/Pyra before that, and hand-rolled HTML before then) but methinks it’s time for a change.

Favourite WP features:

  1. Great admin console (especially when Google Gears integration is enabled – even better in Chrome – for blazing speed). Last time I looked at WP the admin console was terrible, but huge improvements have obviously been made and it is now generally faster/easier to navigate than MovableType’s equivalent.
  2. Plugins galore. This highlights the power of a large and active community for the platform – you can quickly and easily find a plugin for almost every need (and installation is trivial, no need for FTP etc). The fact that MovableType still doesn’t include (or have a _free_ plugin) to allow commenters to subscribe to replies via email blows my mind.
  3. Complete integration with Windows Live Writer, my favourite post writing tool for Windows (on a Linux box the admin console is perfectly acceptable). Live Writer could be used for MovableType, but support wasn’t complete (you couldn’t edit tags, upload images without configuring FTP, and a few other niggles)
  4. WordPress for BlackBerry. Happiness.
  5. Tons of themes. I’m don’t care too much about visuals, but they are important – and MT themes (at least free ones) are scarce.

My gripes:

  1. The release of WordPress 2.9 (my first impression) seems to have been rushed for Christmas, and includes 3 potentially nasty bugs (main one for me was curl transport being broken which breaks WP cron, future posting, pings, plugins like LifeStream etc). Easily fixed (again, thumbs up to an active and proactive community), but caused me some frustration tracking down why my LifeStream wouldn’t update automatically for example.
  2. Consistency is a pain at times – plugin writers can add menus in a variety of places, plugin quality varies, and even the admin console has some usability issues in places. I suppose I’ve been spoilt by MT’s attention to detail and consistency.
  3. I don’t like condescending installers :-)

WordPress was also slightly easier to install locally for experimentation via XAMPP.

I’ll wait for the (twice postponed) release of MovableType 5 on Jan 5th and compare them then.

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Movable Type 4 has landed

Aug 16

Posted by ewan in weblog | No Comments

mt4-bug-mt-white MT4 is here – time for an upgrade :-) Simply the best publishing platform there is – absolutely free (for personal use), full support for paid versions, excellent documentation, totally extensible (great plugin community), easy to use and setup, OpenID support, I’ll stop now.

Update:

Upgrade complete – it was a piece of cake (the only thing which took any time was the templates – I recreated them from scratch using the MT4 defaults since my templates were a mix and match of stuff from years ago, modified with each new MT release).

The only gotcha for me was permalink filenames – the MT4 default replaces spaces in titles with dashes (so the published archive filename for this entry was “movable-type-4-has-landed.php” despite the basename in the db being “movable_type_4_has…”). A simple change to the Entry archive mapping fixed that.

New functionality rocks – far better admin interface (the listing screens in particular are brilliant), a file/asset manager (finally), WYSIWYG editor (I still prefer Windows Live Writer, but hey) with Textile, Live Preview built in instead of being a separate plugin (others too), standalone page support, OpenID support (plus user registration), email notifications for thread updates and better feed support for admin / management.

Links:

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Movable Type 3.2 rocks

Sep 13

Posted by ewan in weblog | 1 Comment

I’ve upgraded to MT 3.2 – what a pleasure. The upgrade was a breeze (as they claim, the easiest ever), the new admin interface is fantastic, and the new features are great. Plugins galore!
I’m still working on my templates (i reverted from my somewhat custom templates to the 3.2 defaults) so let the style madness begin – the new StyleCatcher plugin makes switching between styles (from the MT style library and others) a piece of cake. Now the only problem is to choose the one I like most, and stick with it…
I could tinker with this setup all night and love every minute of it, my wife is addicted to cooking shows, each to their own :-)

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Welcome to MT, and go Huygens go!

Jan 14

Posted by ewan in out there, weblog | No Comments

My new hosting domain is now setup (or at least i’ve got it up and running – i’ll never be finished setting it up :-) and MovableType is running, so welcome to my new MT blog. Please use this URL from now on : http://blog.ewanscorner.com/, and update your RSS / ATOM feeds please :-)
I’ve imported all my old Blogger posts (i’m not happy with the formatting, but that’s an issue for another day) – so thanks for all the good times Blogger, and hats off to you Pyra, but it’s time to move on. Using the default template for now, until i have enough spare time to design my own…
And in the news, the Huygens probe – with any luck – lands on Saturn’s fascinating moon Titan today! We live in exciting times :-) See the ESA timeline for details, but in my timezone (SAT, GMT+2) it looks like this:

  1. 07h51 – electronics on, transmitter on in low-power mode
  2. 12h13 – technical entry into Titan’s atmosphere begins (1270 km up)
  3. 12h17 – pilot parachute deploys, rear cover released shortly afterwards (should be 180 km up, moving at under 400 m/s)
  4. 12h18 – Front shield released, Huygens begins transmitting to Cassini (about 160 km above the surface of Titan). First images and data recorded.
  5. 12h32 – main parachute separates, drogue chute deploys. Tons of data being captured :-)
  6. 12h49 – Surface proximity sensor activated – Huygens should now be able to tell it’s distance from the surface (around 60 km) via radar, as well as it’s spin rate. Timing gets fuzzy from here on.
  7. 13h57 – Begins sampling atmosphere using the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer. Descent should take 137 minutes (+-15 minutes) in total. Cameras and instruments should see the entire panorama as the probe rotates.
  8. 14h30 – Main camera activates a light – the Spectral Radiometer lamp.
  9. 14h34-ish – touchdown (or splashdown) at around 5 m/s (ouch). Surface Science Package captures as much data as possible in the remaining 3 minutes of battery life.
  10. 16h44 – Huygens landing site drops below horison for Cassini, and no more data can be received by Cassini. EOM.
  11. 17h14 – Cassini turns high gain antenna to Earth, and begins transmitting data. World listens carefully for repeated data.

I’m holding thumbs that Huygens has better luck than the ill-fated Beagle did on Mars.

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