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General

New and Improved

As you may have noticed, I’ve upgraded the site number to 4.0 (it was previously 3.1). I think the changed warrent a whole number change.

I’ve had a personal website now since before the term “blog” was coined. I’ve never considered this site a “blog”. To be honest, I don’t really even like the word blog. This is just my website. With it I can post information like this, store photos, or run a shoutcast server (which I used to do…and would really like to do again if my ISP let me do it).

A “blog” to me is something that requires a great deal of effort. This is just a play thing for me and a place to put stuff . I may actually start a blog with a particular topic focus, but that’s a different discussion.

I have a hard time writting updates for this site. I’ve easily writting more updates that have never made it online than I have ones that have. Sometimes I just never hit submit before my computer reboots. Other times I just abandon it because I’m not pleased with how it sounds.

I don’t like writing about politics. There are more than enough people out there who do that, and another voice isn’t needed. Besides, I really don’t care. Politics isn’t the most important thing in life, or in our world for that matter.

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When I hear a song I like, I’ll often go a few days listening to it over and over. Right now I’m listening to “O Superman” by Laurie Anderson. I’ve heard parts of it before, but I heard the whole thing on a BBC documentary on Minimalism and it got stuck in my head (which is sort of the point of minimalism I think). The song was actually #2 on the British pop charts in 1982.

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You’ll notice a bunch of new links on the left side of the site. This is a good chunk of my bookmarks that I visit every day. My current favorite “blog” (I’m always going to put that in quotes) is Foreign Dispatches. Its written by Abiola Lapite, who is a Nigerian born Mathematician.

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Nate writes: what is better about Word Press compared to Movable Type?

  1. The plugin system is really easy. Because its open source, there are a lot of plugins that can do a lot of things. There are plugins that can change how you do posts, admin, comments, and everything.
  2. There is a big support community. There is a well developed wiki and a lot detailed FAQ’s for doing installation.
  3. MT, or at least the version I was using, didn’t allow automation of simple HTML in Firefox. I can do that with Word Press.
  4. There are no restrictions on how you can use it. The latest verion limits you to one author. Beyond that you have to pay.
  5. Link management is built in.

Usually when you change software, there is something about the old software you used that new software lacks. I can’t really think of anything MT had that WP doesn’t. (editing CSS files is a pain, but it was a pain with MT also) The process of migrating from MT to WP was also very very easy.

I can see no reason other than inertia to use MT.

By Gary

3 dimples. 7 continents. 130 countries.