NevOn 2.0 Experimental

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

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)

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.

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.

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

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)

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

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

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)

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 really would love to get stuck into trying out Movable Type for myself if I could get it to run.

No progress since I successfully installed it a few days ago on a local Windows PC running as a server. As far as I can tell, what's preventing me running MT isn't MT, it's MySQL.

Running the mt-check.cgi script produces a successful result - it tells me that MT is properly installed and set up and ready to go.

When I run the mt-load.cgi script, though, it stops very early in its execution with this error message:

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

The only difference from the error I first had is that, this time, the error includes a complete user name as I have uninstalled and reinstalled MySQL a couple of times.

I posted a comment about the error in the Movable Type Community Forum. Received a helpful response that was useful in initial troubleshooting, plus a link to a thread on the MySQL bugs section which indicates that there is a bug in the version of MySQL (4.1.13) that I have installed. Based on the final comment in the thread, I downloaded and installed the v5 beta.

That didn't work, unfortunately. I'm reasonably sure there must have been a step I missed somewhere before installing the beta as it resulted in major system instability (100% CPU use, sluggish performance, lack of responsiveness in the MySQL Administrator). So I uninstalled every MySQL instance, restarted the PC a couple of times during that process and re-installed 4.1.13 again.

Still this error when mt-load.cgi runs.

I'm actually stumped now. I need to retrace all steps again to make sure that there's not something I missed somwehere or did incorrectly at any stage in the overall installation, including checking into IIS. Trouble is, that's a left-brain approach whereas I'm definitely a right-brain kind of person ;)

So back to square one with no imminent solution. There has to be one - I just haven't found it yet.

[EDIT 31/7/05] Ok, reading the comprehensive MySQL Reference Manual, section 5.6.8 Causes of Access Denied Errors, has this explanation:

If you specify a hostname when trying to connect, but get an error message where the hostname is not shown or is an IP number, it means that the MySQL server got an error when trying to resolve the IP number of the client host to a name:

shell> mysqladmin -u root -pxxxx -h some-hostname ver
Access denied for user 'root'@'' (using password: YES)

This indicates a DNS problem. To fix it, execute mysqladmin flush-hosts to reset the internal DNS hostname cache.

I did the flush-hosts command and got this error:

Access denied for user 'ODBC'@' localhost' (using password: NO)

A bit more investigating needed. Getting closer, I think.

Posted by Neville at 04:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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)