Just a quick post to start the new year.
I made some updates to the bio/about page on this site, removed the twitter link there, as I am not actively posting to Twitter at this point. I am on Mastadon here.
25 Years of Bump-dot-net
Hard to believe that this little, under-updated, site is 25 years old today.
It would be hard for me to sift through my feelings about this, the world, and the web are very different places than they were in 1997. What I can do is express some gratitude for are the people and places that this little blog was a doorway to. Meeting the other bloggers at that very first SXSW has led to years and years of inspiration and a career path that I couldn’t have even imagined the day I made that very first post.
I can only hope that I can become a better steward of this site in the coming years, and update it more in what is really starting to look like a post-Twitter world.
This Old Blog
I’ve had some time on my hands the last few weeks, as I’m currently between jobs. It’s been pretty great to have some time off. I was working at Turner for 16 years, spanning four different properties, and a myriad of projects. I’ve really enjoyed spending time with my family, and focusing on what’s important rather than immediate. I’m at the very beginning of my job search, and will likely post more about that here soon, as I need to do some work on my CV first. Turner is a very different place than the one where I started in 2003.
One project that I’ve put off for a very long time is moving this blog to more reliable and modern hosting. Additionally, I have wanted to finally move all the entries into a single CMS. With the 22nd anniversary of this site looming in a couple of weeks, now seemed as good a time as any to try and get this stuff squared away. The site has been on the current host since 2010, and with the advent of cloud hosting, I can actually reduce my cost and greatly improve the speed of the site, which is really terrible at the moment.
Previously, most of the entries that were before March 2000, when I switched the site over to Blogger/Radio Userland as a backend, were sitting in either a flat file, or on this server, which is still somehow up and running.
Over the last two weeks, I have manually been bringing those older entries over to this existing server. This will allow me to export everything from WordPress as a single set of combined entries. Unfortunately, there were a few hundred entries, and so it took quite a while.
Happily, I just finished this task. It meant having to read what the me from 20 years ago was thinking about, which was dreadful at times. It was also cathartic. I’m quite embarrassed by what younger me thought and the quality of my writing in the earliest entries was atrocious. Having said that, this won’t keep me from leaving these entries intact. I think it’s honest to leave them as is.
This migration poses some issues that still need to be resolved. For instance, most of the links in the very old posts are either dead, or resolve to domain squatters, or even to porn sites. I need to figure out a strategy.
In a similar vein, I would love for my old inbound links to all resolve to the right place, but I cannot think of a way to make sure that this will be the case in a new static generator CMS. With this entry, there will be a total of 2600 posts, so doing something manual is not really a good option. I may have to punt on that at this point.
Next up is making a version of the site with some cloud hosting, and a static CMS. This will be the part that I will enjoy the most, I am sure.
Manila Vs. Blogger
Dave asks for a comparison between Manila and Blogger. Not a subject to be taken lightly for me. To start, here are some screenshots of the editing environments(kinda big): Manila Bump Blogger Editorial Interface Existing Desktop Editing Enviroment
First, where I think they are the same. Both provide a Web based editorial environment from which to update your site. Both allow you to do this within an HTML framework of your own choosing. Blogger allows you to edit and upload regardless of where you are and where your site is hosted. Manila, today, is strictly limited to editing pages that are on a Manila server, but you can do that from any Web connection just like Blogger. I’m sure that Userland plans to add the ability to use Manila to update sites served on non-Manila servers from static HTML, or even possibly other types of dynamically served environments. Both editing environments are compelling, but Manila’s supports as many pages as you create, where Blogger is focused primarily on pages that contain Weblog entries. This ends up meaning that Manila has much wider reaching applications and can be used for every page of a site rather than just the actual Welog page. The entry interface on blogger is seperate from the actual page of content you are posting(see screen shot above.), and I think that it makes it a more friendly interface for the daily entries that it is focused on. Both environments support multiple author sites.(Which I won’t be using, but others might want to know about.)
The editorial environment on Blogger 2.0 is also more mature.(Thus the 2.0 in its name.) It features a search engine that allows you to pull up your entires with certain strings in them. When I have two hundred daily entries in this new site, it would be really useful to have this feature. Manila provides the same functionality, assuming that you have the search engine turned on and indexing your site. Blogger also allows you to preview and then edit your posting before actually publishing it to the site. I would like to see more customization of the editorial environment in both apps. I would like to have one place as a site editor with all of my links to frequently visited sites and the edit interface for the site. This is possible with Manila through some template customization, but I haven’t gotten to that stage yet.
My recommendation right now is determined by your situation. If you have an existing Weblog type site and already have a hosting environment and space, you’re better off using Blogger. It will take far less reworking to get things up and running, and you won’t have to sacrifice any other server side stuff you currently use such as PERL, Cold Fusion etc.. If you don’t have these things, the space on Userland’s Manila server offers you a chance to set things up from scratch and benefit from Userland’s ongoing improvement of their offering. If you have your own server box, you can buy Frontier and set up your own Manila framework for your self and others.(I have a retired desktop machine serving 9 sites) It’s worth mentioning that Userland has been improving their software on an almost daily basis. I have my copy of Frontier automatically update itself over the Internet every night, and those new features will appear in the interface seemingly out of nowhere. I love that.
Now, my dilemma. I like both environment’s, but I have more content on my site than just the Weblog entries, and I have some plans to add to that content so I like the fact that Manila offers me the full site editing functionality. I’m not currently using anything server side with my site, so that’s not an issue. Bump has been hosted by Mindspring since before I even had the domain name, and the hosting includes mail and dns. In order for me to move Bump to Manila, I’ll either have to bite the bullet and build that stuff for my Manila server or continue to pay Mindspring for the space without actually using it. Another issue that I haven’t touched on are my legacy Weblog entries. There is no easy way to move the two years of entries that I already have into either system’s framework. I could do this with Manila by doing it by hand in the Guest Database framework that Manila is built from, but the amount of labor that would take seems pretty monumental. So I remain undecided, but leaning towards using Manila.
Comments, Corrections, rebukes? Email me
Arthouse
I think the last three weeks constitue the longest gap in Bump’s almost two year history.(I will hit two years on November 7th.)
Some good reasons for the gap. I switched jobs, and I now work at Arthouse . It’s a great, young company. I work with, among a really talented group of people, Jack over at Saturn. My next reason was a trip out of the country. I visited St. Martin for ten days just after Hurricane Jose blessed it’s shores with 24 inches of rain. Even though it wasn’t the perfect vacation I had planned, it was good to disconnect myself for a time. I’m now slowly returning myself to my normal schedule, surfing and posting.
Dave seems to be posting more content to Scripting News on a daily basis than he has as long as I can remember. It’s an indication that there is a lot going on in the Weblog community and in Frontier development. I welcome it, but it’s taking me forever to get through all the days I missed while I was away.
Sony launched Trivial Pursuit on the Web this week. I used to love playing the board version. Too bad I don’t have enough free time right now to explore the Web version more.
On October 5th, DMOZ.org passed the million site mark.
The Beastie Boys are releasing an anthology named The Sounds of Science on November 23rd. You can also build your own two disk anthology and choose from 150 songs at this site . Ever notice that they don’t ever sell their music for television commercials?
I read the newest issue of Discover Magazine on the plane on the way back to the U.S. The cover story was a terribly scary story about Mt. Ranier’s inevitable eruption and the destruction in the greater Seattle area that would follow it. I didn’t know there were magazines still so afraid they didn’t post their whole stories to their Web site, but Discover doesn’t. Here’s a link to the one paragraph they do have up.