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

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 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)

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

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

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.

Continue reading "Getting MT 3.2 right is hard work" »

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

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

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 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)

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

I've had some helpful suggestions for the next step in the evolution of my blogs (do I stay with TypePad, upgrading to the Pro service level, or switch to a hosted server solution and run my own blogs).

In combining those suggestions with ones I've already had, plus my own thinking, things are leaning towards the hosted server solution. And I would very likely use Movable Type for my blogs; more on that in a minute.

So I've been looking around to see what's out there.

My first choice would be GoDaddy. My experience with them - I've bought domains there - is very good and their offerings for hosted space are also good. The only negative at the moment is that they don't seem too clued in about using their hosting service for running blogs, judging by the responses from their support team to my emails asking about Movable Type support.

I'm also looking at Bluehost and Midphase, two hosting services that seem to have rave reviews by users. Both offer very attractive deals. I used the recommendations from the Hosting Comparison site which has some great reviews of the various offerings out there.

I did look at PowWeb, but was a bit put off by lots of negative comments from users in their own support forum.

So, decisions to be made soon.

Meanwhile, I'm trying out Movable Type version 3.17 which I have as part of my membership in the Six Apart Professional Network.

I'm trying MT out on a local computer, set up as a server so it will run. I followed Six Apart's excellent step-by-step instructions for installing it on a Windows PC.

Still a bit of learning to do, though - while the MT install went perfectly, the MT-check script which ran on my first use this morning produced this error:

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

Need to figure out what I did wrong in the configuration, which I suspect is more to do with the MySQL setup and access rights to the database than with MT.

Also getting some great knowledge from Learning Movable Type, a truly excellent resource by Elise Bauer.

Stay tuned...

Posted by Neville at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Tomorrow, 24 July, marks the one-year anniversary of when I first started my primary blog on TypePad. I actually started blogging in December 2002, with a BlogSpot blog, but it wasn't until a year ago that I really got into gear, so to speak, and became a regular blogger.

In January, I made a major design change to the main blog and started this blog, where you're reading this post. The design on the main blog has been in its current form since then.

When Six Apart upgraded the TypePad service earlier this month and included a raft of new design templates and themes, that got me thinking again about the look-and-feel of both of my blogs and is it to time to change. So with this blog, I applied one of the new designs (the Powell Street 2-column left template) which is what you see today.

I didn't apply any of the new designs to my primary blog. The main reason is that the blog currently uses a customized version of a standard 3-column template which I've changed quite a bit. So applying one of the new design templates would mean that I'd need to spend quite a bit of time in customizing that, and doing it on the live blog.

While I'm quite willing to spend time on customizing, the idea caused me to think more about getting direct access to the template HTML code and creating something a bit more unique from the design and layout points of view.

Continue reading "Rethinking weblog structures and design" »

Posted by Neville at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (2)

This weekend, Six Apart is doing major upgrading of the TypePad hosted blog service to roll out a wide range of new features (see the post today on my main blog for some details).

One of those features is a raft of new templates. So I'm experimenting a bit with that. I've just changed the look of this blog, using the new Powell Street theme.

I like it. Do you?

It's just a two-column layout (I had three columns before) which is one of the new pre-defined themes choices under Cool Themes. I haven't included all the various different typelists I have, including a very lengthy blogroll (that's still on my main blog). I've used all the template defaults and not, as I did before, adjusted things like column widths, colours, etc.

Changing layouts on the fly on this blog is easy, much more so than making such changes on my main blog which uses a heavily-customized template. Plus I don't want to make experimental changes there - that's why I have this blog ;)

There might be more changes as I play around with this, so don't get too used to any theme at the moment.

Technorati tag: typepad

Posted by Neville at 06:30 PM | Permalink

Since last September, I've been using ecto for Windows as the tool for creating content for my blogs. Ecto is an offline editing and publishing application - you create all your blog posts offline, on your PC, and then publish them to your blog at your convenience. It supports a wide range of blogging platforms including TypePad, the one I use. It was originally developed for the Mac platform.

During all of this year, I've been using version 1.0.8.4 in spite of a number of upgrades that the developers have released. The big one was 1.5/1.6 back in March which fixed bugs, added some new functionality and changed the look and feel of the application. I didn't like those versions, mostly from the look and feel point of view (and mainly to do with all the separate windows everywhere), so I've stuck with 1.0.8.4.

Today, I'm writing this post with the latest version 1.7.1, released early last month. It's a bugfix update from version 1.7 released at the end of May which introduced a significant number of improvements.

It could be that I will permanently leave 1.0.8.4 behind as, on my first looks, version 1.7.1 is very good indeed. I very much like the appearance and the way in which I can interact with the app. The only thing right now that didn't seem to work from install was when I created my profile to log in to my TypePad account - on retrieving posts from my blogs, it displays all the titles but not the actual post content. Yet 1.0.8.4 does do that.

I also use BlogJet, switching between the two now and again. BlogJet is wholly WYSIWYG but I prefer ecto's partial code view with a preview window that you use to see how your post will look when posted.

I think many people would prefer BlogJet for its simplicity and ease of use. Ecto, though, is my preferred application.

Let's see how it goes with 1.7.1.

Posted by Neville at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I started another new blog today, one that will help me focus some thoughts about podcasting and related tech themes. The new blog is hosted on Big Contact and it's simply called nevontech.

I found out about this service from PodcastNYC, a great place for podsafe music.

One of the very cool benefits that Big Contact gives you is a web-based MP3 player, what they call a channel player. It aggregates all your blog posts that link to MP3 files and gives you a playlist of those MP3 files with the content of your blog posts as the sort of show notes for reach MP3. This means you can get a sense of what each MP3 is about, whether it's a podcast or just music, before you click on that play button.

Once you launch the player (it appears in a pop-up window or new tab), it starts streaming the first MP3 file (so broadband is a good idea) and starts playing it. Pretty neat.

There is some code on the Big Contact site that I can include here so that you can directly launch the player. Unfortunately, that code doesn't work. I've emailed Big Contact about it and I hope to get it up here at some point.

I also discovered a rather neat Flash-based MP3 player. Produced by Jeroen Wijering, it's very nicely put together and dead easy to add your own list of MP3 content to the XML-based playlist. Take a look at my little experiment - this lists some of the For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report podcasts we've done this month that you can play with this player.

Similar concept to Big Contact's channel player - when it loads, it starts streaming the first MP3. You can configure it to start playing automatically or wait for a click.

Go on, give it a go!

[UPDATE 29/5/05] I had a detailed and very helpful reply from Nat at Big Contact about launching the MP3 player, as well as resolving an issue with MP3 sampling rates (separate post).

The link for the player works fine. You can try it here -

Why didn't it work yesterday? Not sure. I wrote this original post offline in ecto for Windows and tested the link in ecto's preview window. That's when it didn't work. But it works fine now.

Posted by Neville at 07:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)