Ruminations

In trite list form:

  • Technology has not yielded a true future-proof solution when it comes to data. Even the nerd approved open source community is moving slowly. This is a huge problem facing digital migration.
  • I stewed on this rummaging through a 10 year old box of cassette tapes. I found an 18 year old Walkman®, put batteries in it, plugged my brand new headphones in and previewed about 20 tapes. The data wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t lost. Another unlost thing: I am a better composer than performer. A sad truth I realized about 11 years ago, but didn’t say anything. There is no open source solution for shitty musical performance.
  • I am a packrat. This is bad.
  • I threw the worst printer I’ve ever used into a dumpster so hard the case shattered and the parts flew. “Free” printers = years of bullshit. Highly fantastic and highly recommended.
  • I’m finally starting to understand PHP. I couldn’t create something wonderful, but I sure can be dangerous.
  • I migrated to WordPress as an experiment after getting a naff Typekey token. I had wanted to see how it handles server loads, comments etc. I agree with everything that Matt Haughey mentions here. The comments on that post are also helpful. WordPress has come a long way since the early days and I’m not pissed at Movable Type or Six Apart. Just playing around.
  • I’m still having issues with my archives not being resolved from things like Google searches or from incoming links from others. This is not a CMS issue as much as it is a desire to be friendly to visitors and wondering what my host does with htaccess, mod_rewrite, etc. I had a reader send me a smart 404 script that served up my index page. I may try to hack on that a bit… see above for possible reasons why I shouldn’t.
  • WordPress feels a lot like Movable Type did in 2002-3 in terms of community, buzz and whatnot. Fun plugins galore. I may dork about with some of them. The theme manager is a bit wanky. Either that or the plug-in I’m using for my archives page is causing unauthorized and undesired theme dorking.
  • I love the stretchy edit field in the posting box. I don’t like that I lose that if I turn off the WYSIWYG option. I want no WSYIWYG with stretchy edit field. Or how about a check box for that feature? I like how MT 3.3 has a clicky box on it’s edit field that expands the field by increments.
  • I’m looking at other solutions, just to play. I think Textpattern is a front-runner, but I’m looking at Django and Mephisto. What I really want is something that can handle a lot of commenters hitting a site and doesn’t break a server. This wouldn’t be a problem that this site deals with, but another, better and heavier trafficked site. Anybody have any thoughts?
  • Textpattern has this awesome importer for Movable Type that hits the database. It’s FAST AS SHIT. And pretty sweet. The last few times I’ve played with this, all the typekey commenters get imported as full-on contributors, but it’s a 10 minute fix to turn them into something else or delete them from the system. I love the image handling of Textpattern as well. I wish other platforms were as sweet.
  • Going through a lot of old work and looking a archives of this site as a reference, I’ve discovered another painful truth about myself. I rarely take the time to polish the work all the way. When I do take the time, the results make me smile. When I don’t and the work is there to show all the errors, the cut corners and the failure of effort… the pain is hard to bear. Cassettes seem an especially hurtful medium in this regard along with site archives.
  • I’m kind of grumpy. I think this will end soon.