NevOn 2.0 Experimental

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)

Just switched style to Powell Street, a rather nice design that first appeared with the TypePad enhancements in July. It's the same style I use for my NevOn Experimental blog on TypePad.

Posted by Neville at 11:09 PM | Permalink

Not a spare minute in recent weeks to do anything with this blog, neither with the WP experimental one.

So what’s my next step? Perhaps importing the content from my primary TypePad blog, see how that goes. Surely it will be easy and seamless given that MT and TypePad are the same family, so to speak? Only one way to find out.

Soon…

Posted by Neville at 10:47 PM | Permalink

First post to this MT 3.2 blog using the ecto for Windows offline editor, version 1.7.8.

Adding this MT blog to ecto as a new profile was very simple and the profile wizard worked just fine. So I'm pleased that the setup was so straightforward.

If this post works, then I have my preferred option up and running of writing posts offline and then publishing.

The only little glitch I can see is with ecto - in the create new post window, it doesn't offer a line break option in the formatting drop-down list, just 'none.' So I have to manually add the paragraph tags to get paragraph breaks.

I had exactly the same behaviour when I installed this version to use with my TypePad blogs. But, somehow, the line break option eventually appeared. So maybe this will eventually happen here as well.

Trying out StyleCatcher 1.01, the bug fix version - and it works. This makes applying or switching styles very easy indeed if you don't want to (or don't know how to) edit your templates and style sheets to create a different look-and-feel.

I'm certainly not at the stage yet of creating my own blog design so a tool like StyleCatcher is extremely useful. A very similar concept to the way you do this in TypePad where you can create a particular look by simply selecting a design template and applying it with a couple of clicks.

So the appearance of this blog will likely change in the coming days as I experiment with different styles (the one I've just switched to is called Bryant).

I would imagine this feature will be very popular indeed with the type of MT user who looks for styles to apply rather than try and build them him or herself. Someone like me, in fact!

You can read the full details about StyleCatcher 1.01 to learn about its capabilities, and take a look at the MT 3.2 style library to see what styles are currently available. Most of these are what you have in TypePad, too. No doubt more will come in time as more users start using this handy plugin and more people develop new styles.

Posted by Neville at 01:26 AM | Permalink