NevOn 2.0 Experimental

At last - some guidance on how to include tags in your sidebar!

Add Links to Sidebar - updated page in the MT 3.2 Knowledge Base.

As you can see on the right, I can now do it. Thanks, MT Support!

Posted by Neville at 05:26 PM | Permalink

Troubleshooting this non-sticky category issue with MT Support. This post is a quick test to see if selecting multiple categories now works.

Nope, still not. I can select one category from the drop-down list but not multiples from the 'Assign Multiple categories' link beneath that (this is in the Create New Entry or Edit Entry window).

Sarah at MT Support raised an interesting point - could it be a browser issue? I gave Sarah access to my installation and she reported that she could set multiple categories to a post. For instance, she added a second category to my post on Sunday commenting about this tags problem, republished it, and the category has stuck.

Browser issue, hmm. I use Firefox, the latest version (1.0.6). If I edit this post with Internet Explorer, either the IE7 beta 1 installed on my usual PC or IE6 on my laptop, same result - can't choose multiple categories.

So this problem hasn't been solved yet.

Posted by Neville at 05:07 PM | Permalink

I now see why none of the category settings I assign to posts have been sticking - in the Category Description box in some (not all) of the categories, there's this text: <!--tag-->

That must be something to do with an interaction between the tags plugin and MT 3.2. I guess.

What I actually know is that if I delete that text, I can now set categories for posts. So I've deleted every instance and disabled the tags plugin for now and re-published the various posts I've written where I couldn't set categories. However, the 'assign multiple categories' option doesn't seem to work as I can assign only one category.

I've filed a help ticket with MT Support.

Posted by Neville at 06:03 PM | Permalink

One of the first things I wanted to do here was to add some things to the sidebar, on the right. Link to an About page, to the FeedBurner RSS feed, list of my other blogs, etc. Simple stuff, nothing complex.

Yet I can't! Nowhere can I find a simple guide to tell me what the tags are to do this in MT version 3.2 - and those tags are different to the ones in previous versions.

So I did some guessing, looking closely at all the various "class=", <div>, etc, in the tags already in the sidebar in the main index template. Well, guessing produced some extremely peculiar appearance results as you'd have seen if you landed here an hour or so ago.

Elise Bauer's excellent Learning Movable Type has many easy-to-follow guides on doing things like this in versions prior to 3.2. If you go to the new Movable Type 3.2 Knowledge Base, you will find a page on adding links to the sidebar.

Terrific, you might think. Then you see this text:

Note: The information in this article applies to default templates from versions prior to 3.2.

Huh? This is in the version 3.2 knowledge base!

What are likely to be among the very first things someone might want to do with their new 3.2 blog? Add some links to the sidebar, I'd say.

Come on, Six Apart, this is basic stuff. Where's the guidance for this?

Posted by Neville at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday, I upgraded my Movable Type blog with the new version 3.2 released by Six Apart last week.

The upgrade itself was straightforward, quick and relatively easy, thanks to the clear installation guide in the new 3.2 manual.

So no complaints at all from the installation/upgrade point of view. Following that guide - plus an excellent mini-tutorial by Elise Bauer on upgrading - means that anyone should be able to achieve a smooth installation or upgrade no matter their skill/knowledge level with Movable Type. So if you're a complete MT newbie like me, you should be ok.

Where I have some disappointment, though, is after the install (or upgrade, in my case).

I do realize that, if you want simplicity in your blog platform, without having to be concerned at all with installing or doing anything like that, then you'd go with a hosted blog service like TypePad (for instance) as such things are taken care of for you. If you want to get under the hood, so to speak, then MT (for instance) might be your choice.

Yet I would still expect some things to be a lot easier to understand than they currently are if attracting newbies to the platform is one of Six Apart's goals.

With version 3.2, there certainly is a lot of great new functionality that would clearly attract anyone looking for a better balance of total control of their blog structure with an easier way to tweak things than with previous versions. Before, you'd need to be pretty clued in to understanding MT's tags especially, or be at least willing to acquire some essential knowledge of them and how they work.

Not for the casual user or the faint-hearted, really.

Version 3.2 does give you quite a bit of the TypePad-style hand-holding re blog set up and changing the look-and-feel. The new StyleCatcher feature, for instance, is an excellent concept and will go a long way to tempting newbies looking for easier options in control for their blogging needs to move or migrate to MT.

Yet it seems to me that such great features are not well implemented. My experience with StyleCatcher has been very disappointing - it doesn't seem to work both in using it and retrieving new styles from Six Apart's online library (nothing downloaded would actually be saved on my server).

Yes I know 3.2 has only just come out. But it's no longer a beta! I'd certainly expect it to be a lot easier to dive in after installation and do what you want to do with the new features and functionality. And I'd certainly expect the help system to be a bit more complete - every question-mark link I clicked on from within my MT installation got to the online MT help system with pages saying "Coming soon..." That's just not good enough.

So I'm spending far too much time scratching my head and trying to figure out why something doesn't work. It looks like quite a few others are doing their own head-scratching as well.

I contrast this experience with WordPress - total simplicity by comparison.

But I will persevere. I want to use Movable Type. It's far too much hard work from the outset, though, with just getting up and running.

Posted by Neville at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

Heh! One of the fun things about installing or upgrading software is when unexpected things happen and you have no idea why.

As you can see, this blog now has the new default Movable Type 3.2 style. Not bad, very TypePad-esque. This is what I was trying to achieve last night but couldn't, no matter what I did. With the 3.2 upgrade, I want to start from the ground, so to speak, and then do my customizations.

Understanding what I did and why I now have this result is actually important. So to seek some help, I've left this post in the Movable Type Community Forum (terrific place):

[...] One thing I've noticed. The template list includes the main stylesheet with the filename site-styles.css that sits in the root of my blog (why would it be at that location and not in the /mt directory?) Then there's another stylesheet called styles.css that's in the /mt directory. And now there's a stylesheet called base-weblog.css in the /mt/mt-static/themes/ directory. Difficult to tell which one is the one that influences the blog look.

So maybe my total newbie-ness is behind this little confusion, but can anyone provide a clue as to a) what I'm doing wrong and b) what I should be doing right?

My complete post is here.

I find that forum very helpful indeed. Interesting to see lots of posts with questions about MT 3.2's templates and tags.

[EDIT] I've also noticed that with the past three posts, the category settings haven't stuck, even though I've selected categories from the category list when creating each post. What's peculiar is that I wrote one of those posts before doing the 3.2 upgrade.

I also see that if I do select a category and save the post, the category is not showing in the category selection - what I see is 'select category' still. Not only that, the tags plugin is shown in the plugins list as enabled but it doesn't show in a post edit window.

Posted by Neville at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, the upgrade to Movable Type version 3.2 went very smoothly indeed. Very clear instructions in the new manual, easy to follow.

Only two things that caused a bit of a hiccup.

First, when uploading the files to the server by FTP, I uploaded some of them (mostly those with .pm and .tmpl extensions) as binary and not ascii. Not a problem as when I realized that error, I just re-uploaded them all again in the correct mode (which was ascii for everything except the image files).

Secondly, when logging in to MT for the first time after the install, I couldn't - all I got was a 500 server error message. A quick check of the error log on the server showed that I had granted too much permission to the mt-upgrade.cgi script. I was pretty impressed with that level of checking, ie, not letting me log in to MT with the file permission set incorrectly. Changing the permission and trying to log in again worked.

So 3.2 is successfully installed.

More comment later once I've taken a good look around. One new and very cool addition I noticed - a new plug-in called StyleCatcher that is, in essence, an interface to install new styles. From a quick look, many seem to be similar to those in TypePad. Indeed, many of the very nice enhancements to the MT interface itself are reminiscent of TypePad.

More later!

Posted by Neville at 10:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

Last month, I tried out the first public beta of the forthcoming new version 1.6 of FeedDemon, the RSS aggregator for Windows.

In my first impressions post, I commented mostly on the glitches I noticed, which weren't a big surprise given that it was the first beta.

Since then, beta 2 has come and gone and now beta 3 is available, which I've installed and am now using (and, today, installed beta 3a released yesterday). And I do like it - I've not experienced a single fault/problem/bug/crash so far.

I've been interacting with it a lot, doing all the things I usually do with the current release version 1.5 - things like toggling news items, copying them to news bins, blogging items, etc - as well as changing styles and generally giving the tyres a good kicking.

So if all this in one day is any indicator, it's looking pretty good. Many fixes, improvements and new things since beta 1 as you'd expect

A big improvement for me - the newspaper display issue that beta 1 exhibited (where the newspaper would not display news items in the same date order as the news items list, no matter what you did) has been fixed. Great!

Also it seems that one issue I had in beta 1 with synchronizing FD and NewsGator Online has been fixed. That issue was that if I deleted a channel in FD, it would get recreated when FD sync'd with NGOL. That behaviour doesn't seem to happen now - I deleted three channels yesterday; on sync this morning, FD did not retrieve those from NGOL (I haven't yet checked my NGOL to see if those channels are still there: I'd expect them to be deleted from NGOL as well).

One other thing - I have Internet Explorer 7 beta 1 for Win XP installed, which FD uses as its browser. Works absolutely fine, no issues with that. The only thing I've noticed is if I click on a link in a news item in the newspaper that takes me to the blog or site concerned, the status bar has an IE message saying that the phishing filter couldn't be loaded. But IE7 is a beta (as well!) so maybe it's more to do with that than with FD b3a.

Anyway, I think beta 3a is terrific, so looking forward to the next iteration!

Posted by Neville at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For the past few weeks, I've been trying out the first beta version of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2, and I have to say that while its functionality is pretty good, I'm a bit underwhelmed by it.

Maybe my expectation was wrong but I was expecting to see something a little more visually exciting than it currently looks. All the talk about tabbed browsing being implemented and I was thinking that I'd see something that looks like Firefox, perhaps, even Maxthon, the IE-based browser I used for some years (when it was known as MyIE) before switching to Firefox last year.

No, it's all a bit bland-looking really.

That aside, it's pretty good in its functionality. Perhaps that's the key to how it might survive in a crowded browser market - it just works. And considering it's only a beta, I am impressed that I have had no crashes or failures so far.

Two new features that I like:

1. Integrated RSS bookmarking with a little orange button simply called 'Feeds.' It works nicely in adding RSS to your Favorites, although to make it work you need to make a change in the options settings (it would be smarter to make this behaviour the default). See this post on the IE7 developer blog for detail on IE7 and RSS. A good move to call it 'Feeds' - you and I know it's RSS but who really cares what it's called when all you want to do is grab the content? 'Feeds' is a much better name and will simplify all the techie-talk surrounding new media tools like RSS and thus aid its wider take up.

2. Phishing protection that alerts you if you're about to land on a potentially fraudulent web site. (Here's an explanation of phishing.) The IE7 documentation about the phishing filter and how it works is very good, clear and simply written so that just about anybody will understand what phishing is and why protection is a good idea.

So, initial impressions from using IE7 on and off over the past few weeks. It's not my default browser and not because it's a beta. I will stick with Firefox and probably consider at IE7 again once it's actually released, although using the betas will obviously influence my thinking. Meanwhile, I'll continue playing with it.

Posted by Neville at 10:55 PM | Permalink

In parallel with my Movable Type experiment, I started a WordPress blog last week.

I was pretty much decided on MT yet friends kept saying I shouldn't dismiss WordPress. So I thought, ok, let's take a look at it. The blog is running WP version 1.5.2.

I have to say I'm pretty impressed with it. Far easier to install and set up than MT. Changing the look-and-feel is also very easy, and seems much more so than with MT.

Then on Thursday, Six Apart released version 3.2 of Movable Type. That looks impressive and I will upgrade my MT 3.17 blog to it.

So nothing decided yet.

Posted by Neville at 10:48 PM | Permalink

After months of beta testing, Six Apart launched version 3.2 of its Movable Type blog publishing and management system yesterday.

Boasting a wide range of new and improved features, this version offers static or dynamic publishing; built-in support for multiple authors, blogs, categories, and templates; automatic archiving and publishing of XML feeds; and better platform support for almost any common operating system or database; and much more.

One of the new features that looks especially attractive is the commenter management capability which extends the simple listing of commenters with the commenter's status (whether they were banned or approved), their name, a link to their TypeKey profile, and some simple tools to approve or ban the commenter:

[...] With the new version, we've retained all of this information, but radically improved its presentation and utility and added significant detail and context to the display. This information can help you to encourage positive contributions, reduce the impact of trolls or disruptive community members, and in general know more about the people who help keep your blog active.

I plan to upgrade to 3.2 as part of my MT experiment.

(Cross-posted from NevOn.)

Posted by Neville at 01:34 PM | Permalink

I started a WordPress blog today.

After having had so many comments from friends suggesting that my dismissal of WordPress in favour of Movable Type was not a smart thing to do, I decided to take a look at WP.

So I have installed WP 1.5.2 and I'm getting that new blog going.

Installation was a breeze, certainly far easier and quicker than setting up this MT blog.

I'll be posting thoughts and comments on both blogs as I play with them. But I can say right now I am mightily impressed with WordPress, more so than with Movable Type.

WP blog: NevOn 2.0. Yes, same name but different URL ;)

[EDIT] Just added a trackback from this post to a post on the WP blog, to see how that works on the WP blog.

Posted by Neville at 08:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I've spent quite a bit of time today editing templates and style sheets, all to do with the look-and-feel of this blog.

It's certainly more appealing to my eye now to look at! New banner, changed the default typeface in the CSS, added some things to the right-hand sidebar and created an About page so that visitors will at least get a clue about me and what I do.

All this is just transitional, though, mostly to make this place just a bit easier to find your way around and read the content. So expect more changes.

Some small things I want to do asap:

• Get the item headings in the right column to range left and not be centered.
• Perhaps change the size of the post headings (these seem a bit small for headings).
• Maybe make the hyperlink underlining dotted rather than solid.
• Make a template edit so that the RSS feed includes extended post content: currently, the feed will include content only in the entry body field.
• Take a good look through the CSS re font sizes: it seems that on some pages, bulleted text is smaller than the body text.

I also added a link for subscribing to the RSS feed via FeedBurner. This is the only visible RSS link although RSS readers will auto-discover the Atom, RSS 1 and 2 feeds that are present. However, I think offering only one visible option to get the feed is much better. One thing I find on my current primary blog is that offering so many RSS subscription options adds to one's difficulty in measuring where your visitors are coming from.

Also added the Technorati stuff so that the blog will get listed and ranked over time.

So much to do... and so much time ;)

Posted by Neville at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Movable Type 3.2 is still a little while away, according to a post today by Jay Allen on the 3.2 beta blog:

We made a very hard decision today to forgo immediate release of Movable Type 3.2 in favor of another (one more!) beta. The reason behind the decision was that enough significant changes have occured in the course of fixing important bugs found in Beta-4 that we felt uncomfortable releasing without a final public test of the software.

I think it will be worth the additional wait.

Posted by Neville at 01:24 PM | Permalink

Finally able to spend a little time with my new desktop PC - a Dell Dimension XPS Gen 5. Pretty good-looking, don't you think?

It arrived at the beginning of last week and I've now got everything unpacked, sitting on my desk and in use, sort of. Key apps like Microsoft Office, FeedDemon RSS reader, etc, installed. Most docs transferred from my laptop although still loads more to do. But at least I can use the new PC from now onwards for day-to-day business.

I must say that I'm very pleased with it. I didn't order the most top-of-the-range model (no Intel Pentium D processor, for instance, just the regular 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 processor supporting Hyper-Threading Technology) as the budget didn't quite go that far. Instead I settled on a mid-range customization that provides a great balance between price and performance.

I did go for additional RAM and a great 5-speaker sound system, and I did splash out on a gorgeous 19-inch flat panel monitor - the thing you stare at all day is worth that extra investment.

Some initial impressions:

• I am mightily impressed with Dell's product ordering system here. From customizing my system on Dell's website, to my first contact with Dell's sales office here in Amsterdam, to tracking my order online at the factory in Ireland, right through to seeing the delivery progress on the carrier's website, I have no complaints at all. Indeed, I find it really impressive that Dell has organized their online ordering system to work so seamlessly in different languages in different countries. Very good indeed.
• On the system itself, it has five internal fans including one for the Nvidia GeForce 6800 PCI Express graphics card. Yet the whole thing is whisper quiet. Impressive.
• It goes like greased lightning. Everything just runs so quick. I suppose I would notice the difference when compared to my IBM ThinkPad T30 2.0Ghz laptop!
• Loads of USB 2.0 ports everywhere (2 at the front and 6 at the back) plus 2 FireWire ports (finally, high-speed sync for my iPod Mini). Also, the monitor has 2 USB ports as does the keyboard (the old 1.1 standard there, I think). So I can't see a problem now on where to plug things.
• Very cool illuminated front panel, if that's something you care about (well, I do). And you can change the colours. Nice.
• I ordered the system with Windows XP Pro SP2. When the time comes, it will run Windows Vista.

More thoughts to come as I use it some more.

Next, I need to get a bigger desk - the box is a full-size tower. Probably off to Ikea for that as they have just what I need for the office at a reasonable cost.

If I ever do need to call customer support, I'll expect great service notwithstanding the increasing number of horror stories that are emerging about Dell's service - Jeff Jarvis' experience being the most extraordinary, although Allan Jenkins has some bad news closer to home, in Denmark.

I'll bear those in mind.

[I cross posted this from NevOn Experimental, mainly because the post has a photo and I wanted to test including an image in a post here as well as doing an extended entry.]

Posted by Neville at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Finally able to spend a little time with my new desktop PC - a Dell Dimension XPS Gen 5. Pretty good-looking, don't you think?

It arrived at the beginning of last week and I've now got everything unpacked, sitting on my desk and in use, sort of. Key apps like Microsoft Office, FeedDemon RSS reader, etc, installed. Most docs transferred from my laptop although still loads more to do. But at least I can use the new PC from now onwards for day-to-day business.

I must say that I'm very pleased with it. I didn't order the most top-of-the-range model (no Intel Pentium D processor, for instance, just the regular 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 processor supporting Hyper-Threading Technology) as the budget didn't quite go that far. Instead I settled on a mid-range customization that provides a great balance between price and performance.

I did go for additional RAM and a great 5-speaker sound system, and I did splash out on a gorgeous 19-inch flat panel monitor - the thing you stare at all day is worth that extra investment.

Some initial impressions:

• I am mightily impressed with Dell's product ordering system here. From customizing my system on Dell's website, to my first contact with Dell's sales office here in Amsterdam, to tracking my order online at the factory in Ireland, right through to seeing the delivery progress on the carrier's website, I have no complaints at all. Indeed, I find it really impressive that Dell has organized their online ordering system to work so seamlessly in different languages in different countries. Very good indeed.
• On the system itself, it has five internal fans including one for the Nvidia GeForce 6800 PCI Express graphics card. Yet the whole thing is whisper quiet. Impressive.
• It goes like greased lightning. Everything just runs so quick. I suppose I would notice the difference when compared to my IBM ThinkPad T30 2.0Ghz laptop!
• Loads of USB 2.0 ports everywhere (2 at the front and 6 at the back) plus 2 FireWire ports (finally, high-speed sync for my iPod Mini). Also, the monitor has 2 USB ports as does the keyboard (the old 1.1 standard there, I think). So I can't see a problem now on where to plug things.
• Very cool illuminated front panel, if that's something you care about (well, I do). And you can change the colours. Nice.
• I ordered the system with Windows XP Pro SP2. When the time comes, it will run Windows Vista.

More thoughts to come as I use it some more.

Next, I need to get a bigger desk - the box is a full-size tower. Probably off to Ikea for that as they have just what I need for the office at a reasonable cost.

If I ever do need to call customer support, I'll expect great service notwithstanding the increasing number of horror stories that are emerging about Dell's service - Jeff Jarvis' experience being the most extraordinary, although Allan Jenkins has some bad news closer to home, in Denmark.

I'll bear those in mind.

Posted by Neville at 10:46 PM | Permalink

The forthcoming release of Movable Type version 3.2 looks like it will be at any moment now, according to a post on Saturday by Mena Trott, co-founder of Six Apart:

We're getting pretty close to the final release version of Movable Type 3.2. Last night Jay and the rest of the team released MT 3.2 Beta 4 and they've been actively working on any remaining issues. [...] Movable Type 3.2 is a remarkable release. There's a fit and finish in the product that's really noticeable. I've always thought one of Movable Type strengths was its polish. In actuality, the new release really brings this polish to a new level.

I plan on upgrading my current 3.17 release. According to the system requirements in the new 3.2 installation guide, I've got all I need on my hosted server to run 3.2.

This seems pretty sensible to me - why spend more time on 3.17 when 3.2 is so close? And from what I've read about the beta, 3.2 will be very much worth upgrading to.

As I've only recently started an MT-based blog (this one), I'm especially keen to see what I can easily do with the new template and style sheet structures from the design and layout points of view.

Looking forward to it!

Posted by Neville at 12:58 PM | Permalink

Getting helpful comments to posts has been great and thanks to my commenters!

The first time I replied to one comment was when I noticed my first 'oops' - TypeKey wasn't working (the error message said that the blog wasn't set up for TypeKey authentication).

My mistake - I'd not included the correct URL in TypeKey's set up. Fixed a couple of days ago.

I have comment moderation enabled here by default. If you have a TypeKey login, though, you can comment straightaway, ie, no moderation and your comment will appear immediately.

The second 'oops' is related. Every time there's a comment awaiting approval, I get an email to tell me. Well, I should do. That's not working. Nothing to do with MT; it's to do with the settings on my hosting setup. Still not fixed. Hope to get that done this weekend.

Posted by Neville at 01:34 PM | Permalink

I've installed two plugins, one essential right now and the other one that definitely will be going forward.

The essential-right-now plugin is MT-Blacklist, designed to block comment and trackback spam as well as clean up previous attacks.

The second one is the new Tags plugin. This lets you use the Keywords field to enter tags to describe your entries. Tags are automatically published as category archives and new tags automatically create the appropriate category when the entry is published.

The Six Apart ProNet Plugins Directory is an excellent listing of plugins developed by MT users. One of the great things about this platform is this third-party developer network.

I'm sure I'll be in there quite a bit.

Posted by Neville at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I made some final decisions this past week about long-term blog development:

1. I chose a hosting service - Total Choice Hosting. I kept encountering TCH in my searches, on visits to forums that talk about hosting services, plus asked a few people I know who use that service. All were good comments and strong recommendations. I especially like their support forums - very active participation by TCH people there. Friendly and very helpful. Plus they know about blogs, unlike nearly all of the other hosting services I looked at. I have a gig of disk space (more than enough for the forseeable future) and plenty of bandwith - 35 gigs a month. Bandwidth's the essential thing.
2. Now that I have a host, I decided to go ahead and set up Movable Type there and not continue with it on my local Windows PC. That really was too limiting - I want to get stuck into MT in a live environment, so to speak.

I've spent quite a bit of time this evening installing and configuring MT on the server, which went surprisingly easily thanks to an excellent little guide to installing MT that TCH produced including setting up MySQL. That guide plus the comprehensive MT manual helped enormously in a smooth install and configuration. In all, less than an hour's work to install and configure MySQL and MT, then a couple of hours playing with it all.

Immediate result - NevOn 2.0, a new blog that I'll be using mainly to comment on my experiences in discovering Movable Type and what you can do with it. One post there as of today.

I intend to develop that blog into my new primary blog and move my blogs on TypePad to the new location. But I'm not rushing this at all. I'd expect things to have progressed sometime during Q4.

So I did make a clear decision to go with MT and not WordPress. I did consider WP but decided that MT was the route I would go for future blog development. A couple of reasons, one being my sense of 'attachment' to Six Apart because I've been using TypePad for the past year and it's really with that hosted blog service, based largely on MT, that has helped me get to the knowledge level I have today regarding blogs and publishing platforms.

I'm looking forward to the next few months in learning the ins and outs of MT. I will be posting most commentary about that on the new NevOn 2.0.

Posted by Neville at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Welcome to NevOn 2.0!

This is the first post of a new blog, a place that will develop over time into my primary blog as I develop it and eventually import my current blogs from TypePad.

This blog runs Movable Type version 3.17 and is hosted by Total Choice Hosting, the new place for my blogs and some other things with whom I signed up a few days ago.

Lots to do and lots to learn about MT. This blog looks pretty plain vanilla at the moment - just using out-of-the-box templates, etc, as installed. Expect to see changes to appearance and other things in the coming weeks.

I plan to post commentaries on progress with blog development as well as other kinds of chit chat. My blogs on TypePad - NevOn and NevOn Experimental - remain there and will do until the moment comes to move everything here. I don't expect that to be anytime soon, likely sometime in Q4.

More later.

Posted by Neville at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)

Last night, I was reviewing the various documentation for the Windows Vista beta 1 programme - release notes, readme, and setup guide. Although I am a participant in this testing programme, I haven't yet installed the beta nor downloaded it from the beta site. It's a 2.4 gig download (yes, gigs not megs) and I need to find a good chunk of dedicated time to actually get it.

But I've not yet decided whether to install and test this first beta. Mainly, I'm not sure I can dedicate my test PC for this right now because I'll need to do one of two things:

1. either install Windows Vista as the sole OS on that machine; or
2. partition the hard drive and install it in one of the partitions and so have the machine as a dual-boot machine.

Unlike Windows XP Service Pack 2 which I tested prior to its release last year, the Windows Vista beta cannot be installed as an upgrade to XP - you have to install it fresh, so to speak, what the setup guide calls a 'custom' installation (meaning a clean installation).

And, my test PC is the one on which I've just set up my Movable Type learning experiment! I really don't want to have to start over with all that installation again.

Last week, I ordered a new desktop PC from Dell - a Dimension XPS Gen 5 - on which I was expecting delivery sometime early next week. But, the order status on Dell's website now shows estimated delivery as the first week in September (due, I gather, to delays with the flat-panel monitor which are in big demand in Europe). So I won't have all the hardware I need until then.

But maybe this is a good thing. By the time September comes around, there will be lots of learning reported about Windows Vista beta 1 which will be helpful to every tester. Meanwhile, Paul Thurrott has an excellent series of reviews of beta 1.

One beta I do intend to test straightaway is the Internet Explorer 7 beta 1 standalone version for Windows XP SP2 (it also comes as part of the Vista beta). I'm curious in particular to see how the RSS integration works and see how the tabs look.

Posted by Neville at 07:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ok! Finally up and running with Movable Type!

Not getting MT 3.17 to run until now was definitely a MySQL configuration issue - but not wholly. I've solved the overall issue that prevented MT running at all, but I don't really know what the heart of the problem actually was. And the solution is a workaround and not the right long term solution.

The error I kept getting every time I ran the mt-load.cgi script was puzzling. But that was only one part of the problem. The other part concerned the MySQL Administrator and saving user settings in User Administration. What happened was that no matter what I did, I couldn't save any settings: every time I tried, I got this error:

Error while storing the user information. The user might have been deleted. Please refresh the user list.

A helpful pointer in a post in the Movable Type Community Forum took me to a bug report at MySQL with many users commenting on this error message. A bit of digging from there took me to a discussion thread in the MySQL Forums, where I tried the offered solution - uninstall the version of MySQL Administrator I had (1.1.0-rc) and download and install an earlier version (1.0.21).

So I did that - and saving user settings now works. So I was able to assign the MT schema privileges to the user I'd set up, and actually save those settings.

Yet running mt-load.cgi again still produced the same error message as before:

Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Access denied for user
'mt_user'@'localhost (using password: YES)

Then I tried something else - I edited the mt.cfg file to show the user as 'root.' And this time, running mt-load.cgi produced a successful result, showing that system initialization is now complete. Next, running mt.cgi was successful and I was able to log in to my new MT installation on a local PC. Fantastic!

So there's still something with 'mt-user' where it's not configured correctly somewhere. I will look into that, but at least I can now get moving with Movable Type.

Posted by Neville at 06:21 PM | Permalink