NevOn 2.0 Experimental

I've really neglected this blog. It's still just a repository (so to speak) for the posts from the original NevOn Experimental blog hosted on TypePad.

While the blog has had no posting activity for the past few months, it's had an awful lof of spam activity. I've just cleaned out the moderation queues - 218 spam comments and a whopping 1,696 spam trackbacks.

So I've just switched off all commenting and trackbacks site-wide. One of the beauties of Movable Type admin - you can do this.

So, still just a repository until I decide what to do with this blog. Regular blogging goes on at NevilleHobson.com.

Posted by Neville at 10:43 AM | Permalink

While I'm paying most attention to my new WordPress blog, I mustn't neglect this MT one.

Still in housekeeping mode today, and spending too much time this morning on sorting out an irritating problem on my desktop system with Norton Internet Security (NIS). I upgraded to the 2006 version a few weeks ago and have had problems with it since then.

These are the types of problem that are difficult to pinpoint. But they include things like whenever I shut down the PC, I get an error with the ccapp.exe part of NIS where it doesn't close on a timely basis. Or the Norton firewall keeps popping up a dialog re the MS print spooler accessing the net even though I've made changes to the permissions for that app.

irritating. The PC's currently running a disk test as part of the diagnostics I'm doing. I could do without this at the moment. Maybe I should switch back to Zone Alarm. That's running on the laptop on which I'm writing this post. Never had problems with Zone Alarm.

And while on the subject of weird things, why can I still not set multiple categories when creating a post in MT 3.2? In the post edit window, I can choose the primary category. Yet in the drop-down list to assign multiple categories, I can select them but they don't stick.

But enough ranting for the moment and back to the PC. What an end-of-year commentary to post!

Many more good things to talk about re software in particular. Later.

Posted by Neville at 11:13 AM | Permalink

I'm writing this post with Flock, the new browser that includes an extremely easy-to-use blog editor.

The software is not yet even beta - it's sort of in-between alpha and beta - so you need to be prepared for some flakiness. Nothing so far gives any indication that this tool is less than polished and complete. But I've been using it for less than 30 minutes ;)

The blog editing functionality is very good. Configuring it to access this blog was very easy. Writing a draft post with the WYSIWIG editor and then publishing it was equally easy. The editor even includes a spell checker. Well, maybe that's planned as clicking the spell button produced no action.

So, impressive. More later as I play with this.

Posted by Neville at 02:30 PM | Permalink

I've just "switched off' the original Nevon Experimental blog on TypePad. I'll not be writing there any longer; where you are now is the new home - Nevon 2.0 Experimental.

Still quite a bit of work to do here but I decided that I might as well make this move now.

This is the simple move. The big one (to me, at least) will be moving NevOn, my primary blog, to NevOn 2.0, its new home based on WordPress. When that happens, the addresses of the blogs - that one and this one - will be the same mapped addresses that the current blogs use, which are mapped to the underlying TypePad addresses.

I expect to complete all this by 1 January 2006 or sooner.

Posted by Neville at 12:28 PM | Permalink

Just imported the complete post content from my NevOn Experimental blog on TypePad. Complete success, no errors reported. A quick look through the blog seems to support that - nothing weird-looking as far as I can see.

That's impressive. Although this blog is a small one, so to speak, I was half-expecting some errors. But all smooth.

Ok, so this MT blog is almost ready to assume the NevOn Experimental role in place of the TypePad blog of the same name. About the only thing to do now is re the domain. I need to re-map that domain, but not until I make the final move with the main blog on WordPress.

Posted by Neville at 06:07 PM | Permalink

Geez, not keeping eyes on the blog for a month and I discover over 25 pieces of crap waiting in the moderation queue.

Spam comments is what I'm talking about.

Puerile comments and I'd be amazed if any normal person would be fooled into thinking any of them are genuine. But, as with email spam, I guess some people do just click on links.

But none of this crap made it to the blog.

[EDIT] Did I say 25? There were in fact over 125 (three digits) pieces of crap here. The other 100 were trapped by MT's junk filter. That works very well. A vicarious pleasure to zap 'em all.

[EDIT 2] Plus over 40 spam trackbacks! All but one were trapped by MT's junk trackback filter. Pretty good.

Posted by Neville at 01:37 PM | Permalink

I hadn't realized that it's over a month since I posted to this blog.

I'm not ignoring the blog, not at all. A time thing - lack of it, rather - is all. I've been spending more time (this weekend, anyway) on my WordPress experiment.

I will be making the move from TypePad pretty soon. And this blog will be the home for my current NevOn Experimental with my primary blog going to WordPress.

There, I've now made the complete decision!

Posted by Neville at 01:29 PM | Permalink

As my podcasting partner Shel Holtz and I often say with tongues firmly in cheek, "We have copious spare time."

So with that in mind, I just started a new blog on WordPress.com, the new free blog hosting service launched in August by WordPress.

Very easy to set up and the admin interface is very similar indeed to that of WordPress itself, ie, what I see with this blog when I log in to it.

I received the invitation - you have to be invited - from Rob Safuto. Rob's also a multiple blogger - in addition to his excellent PodcastNYC, he also writes the highly-readable The New York Minute Show, an insider's podcast about the Big Apple, and the Red Room Chronicles, a blog about Marriott Hotels.

I'd actually received an invite from WordPress in September. But I didn't get around to activating it until last weekend - which is when I discovered that the invite expired after seven days.

Anyway, I have the new blog, just called Neville on WordPress.com. Not sure yet what I'll do with it nor how frequently I'll post to it.

Have to see how much of that copious spare time I can use.

(Cross-posted from NevOn 2.0, my WordPress experiment.)

Posted by Neville at 01:20 PM | Permalink

I bought a mixer on my trip to London a few days ago - an Alesis Multimix8 USB.

Among its many features are 8-channel mixing, 4 microphone/line inputs, a load of special effects as well as phantom power for a condenser microphone. Full specs here. Bundled with it is Cubase LE recording software. That's primarily intended for music mixing and I'll probably stick with Audacity for podcast voice recording.

I bought the Alesis at Maplin Electronics in Bayswater for just under 130 quid, along with a Shure C606 dynamic cardioid microphone. It all looks to be more than ample for what I want to do with audio recording for podcasting, at least at this point - an affordable hardware-based recording and mixing system that's easy to install and set up and isn't too complicated to figure out and use.

Installation was very easy - turn it on, plug the USB cable into the PC, turn on the PC and that was basically it. Windows XP saw it immediately and, after changing the default recording/playback settings in the control panel audio setup, I was good to go.

So I've been experimenting a bit today, and learning (or trying to at least) some new things. I'm sure I don't yet have the optimum settings for standard voice recording - this 5-minute test recording (MP3, 2Mb) might indicate that - so more trial-and-error testing ahead. I plan to use it when Shel and I record Monday's edition of For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report.

One issue I may encounter - echo when recording over Skype. Shel and I have had this problem for a while in our twice-weekly shows. The echo doesn't record but I certainly hear it. We think it's a mixer issue. So I wonder what will happen on Monday when I'm using this mixer and Shel's using his and we're recording over Skype...

Posted by Neville at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I learned a new word recently - "slammed," your state of being when you have no time for almost anything except work, a state which seems to go on for ever. Can't yet find this definition in any dictionary, but it's quite an apt description of that state of being. Hence, no activity in this blog for nearly a month.

Re my experiments with Movable Type and WordPress, I spent a lot of time late last month in setting up the two blogs (MT here and WP here) as part of my learning process about each platform. As I've commented in this blog, I plan to use one of them as my new platform for my new primary blog - "NevOn 2.0" - which will be hosted on my own hosted server rather than through TypePad as a hosting service.

Even though I've not had time this past month to physically do much with those experimental blogs, I have been thinking a lot about my next steps.

This is what's in my mind right now - I will use WordPress as my primary blog platform.

My limited experience so far shows me very clearly that WordPress is much easier to use than Movable Type. So for my primary blog, I want a platform that enables me to achieve most of what I want to do, especially with look and feel, without constant recourse to help files or asking others for help. I read a good review in eWeek about WordPress.

Yet I still want to get to know Movable Type more, especially as in my perception it is more likely to be the platform that you'd want to go with if you were considering blogging within the enterprise, in particular with multiple blogs and/or multiple authors. As I talk to a lot of companies about corporate blogging, it's important to me that I can speak from a position of hands-on experience when discussing platforms. Then there are the plans announced by Six Apart last week on Project Comet, their vision for the future of blogs and platforms. Very interesting indeed.

So I'm going to hedge my bets.

What I'm thinking is that I'll develop my primary blog on WordPress and use Movable Type for secondary blogs like this one, NevOn Experimental (so maybe it was a subconscious reason why I switched styles yesterday on my MT experimental blog to match the style of this blog).

A major point still to decide - do I import all the content from my main blog to the new WordPress one, or not? Same with this blog to the MT one. Or do I leave them where they are and in effect start again with the new blogs? I've got a paid TypePad subscription through until the end of July 2006 so leaving them here isn't a problem for at least another 10 months.

The other thing, too, is the nevon.net domain name. That's currently mapped to both these TypePad blogs. I will re-map the domain to the new blog meaning that both of these TypePad blogs will revert to the underlying TypePad addresses. That will no doubt affect anyone who's bookmarked any specific blog posts, but I can't see how to avoid that.

I need to make a firm decision sooner rather than later, and then just do it...

Posted by Neville at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)