feedEntries tagged with “Blogging”
Last night, I relocated this blog from my long-time hosting company ICDSoft to my slice at Slicehost. Due to DNS changes, and a fresh environment, this blog (in particular comments) was broken for about 12 hours. Things should be okay now.
So far, I have been using Movable Type's default CAPTCHA plugin. Today I switched to reCAPTCHA. The instructions provided by John Carter did not work for me. Here is the approach I followed to enable reCAPTCHA on this blog.
While searching Technorati, I noticed that its tagging mechanism for the tag "http" brings up the following links, none of which are related to "http". The only thing relevant to http is that all these posts have links starting with "http://...", as indicated by the highlighted "http".
While it can be argued that this is a bug in Technorati's feed parsing engine, there is a larger question here. If I really want to search for a keyword, I would use a typical search engine to find relevant content. Tagging, on the other hand, lets users mark content based on how they see it. The question is, should tagging me left to humans?
After some hesitation, I have upgraded this blog to Movable Type 4.0 Beta 6 today. The upgrade process itself went smoothly without errors. I had to disable to some old Movable Type plugins (e.g. Brad Choate's SQL plugin) and remove relevant tags from my templates to successfully rebuild a couple of entries. This release is feature rich, but one key feature missing is a way to upgrade/transform old templates to the new style to take advantage of all the new features more easily. In the absence of this ability, I am going to have some time exploring the new default templates. There are still a few bugs, but overall, it is an impressive and major enhancement to Movable Type.
I was curious to see how good various blog readers are at HTTP content-negotiation, and over the weekend, I tried some experimentation. Content-negotiation in HTTP 1.1 is a very useful feature which lets the web server tailor the response based on certain HTTP request headers. One popular example is to serve localized content based on the Accept-Language header. I set to try out a similar style negotiation based on what kind of content the client is capable of processing - in my case the clients are blog readers, and the results were disappointing.
I have been running a web site at this domain since 1999, and started blogging in 2004. Overall, I am pleased with my blogging experience, and feel that I should have started this sooner. Blogs make it easier to write often, and take care of a lot of details of publishing, such as styles/formatting, uploading files, providing links, and finally, making it easy for others to reach my blog entries. While setting up a blog is fairly easy, making it usable takes some effort. Here is my list of blog usability issues.
Here is a way to display a paginated list of movable type blog entries using Ajax. Take a look at the sidebar on the home page of this site. You will notice that it includes a list of entries (most recent first). After these entries there is a link to browse older entries. I reworked my blog this morning to build a paginated view of past entries using Ajax. The link for older entries fetches older entries and updates the page. Read on for more details.
After a long hibernation, I moved all my past articles to the new site.
Nuts and Bolts of Transaction Processing