New comment system - take 2

This post is just a quick heads-up (and a test actually) for the fact that I’ve switched the comment-handling system on this site again.
This time not because of spam, but because my previous “provider” —Haloscan— is going for a paid service and I’ve always used it for free and I can’t even remotely begin to justify paying for this functionality on this site. There are other reasons for switching, but this was the one that made me jump to attention and just do it.

Therefore, as you may notice, this site’s comments are now handled by the Disqus system.

Due to the nature of the writing here (more of a record of my findings, thoughts, etc,) I’m not overly concerned with losing the old comments with this transition (after all I have gone down this road before and I could never bring the previous comments along on the two or three migrations that this site has undergone anyway), but I will in time look into the possibility of importing the old comments into the new system.

That is all, the irregular programming will now continue as scheduled.

New hosting

For technical reasons regarding the server where this blog was hosted I had to have it offline for quite some time.
The fact that I wasn’t all that sure that I wanted to keep the site also helped extend the hiatus, of course.

Anyway now that the old server finally died out I had to get a move on and decided to get the site back up as it was and consider a platform change somewhere in the future, but not just now.
The move was done from a slimed-down backup I had and so it is expected that some things may be broken at this time (most notably images and videos from old blog entries). They will hopefully be restored when (if?) I can salvage the data from the old disk.

Then, in due time, I will probably upgrade the site’s software and things will break in much more interesting ways. It will be most fun, that’s for sure! :-)

Microblogging is taking the Blogging out of me

I’ve seen this happening to many other people and now I come to the conclusion that I’ve fallen for it too.

Microblogging (in it’s many forms) is definitely taking most of the blogging out of me.

Twitter (makes more sense viewed in context with my friends), Jaiku and even Flickr (which won’t be all that interesting to you unless you have an account and are my friend, because only then do you get to see most of my pictures) are getting filled with a steady stream of my thoughts and presence, but the good old blog is dwindling a bit.

The fact that I can jot things down on these services via Instant Messenger, from my phone via SMS and MMS of via their respectives web interfaces makes it just so easy to spill my guts in there that I’ve come to find the act of actually blogging cumbersome and, many times, as too much trouble to be worth the effort.

Then again, the things I microblog about aren’t really that deep or important. Or even interesting sometimes. As an old curmudgeon friend of mine (who is himself on Twitter, but only updates to friends) is fond of saying: “IRC never died, it just became Twitter” and sometimes the level of the conversations there tend to prove just that.

Still, it is fun!

Back from the dead

The site is back, after a couple of days’ hiatus caused by a major server overhaul (with many thanks to our boy Melo).

New OS, fresh install, everything is looking good. I still have to tweak a couple of things on the site, but I think it is mostly good to go.

The regularly scheduled programming should now continue.

Zeitgeist - my content from other sites

I’ve just put online a new page on the site with a kind of zeitgeist of the content I am producing around the web.

Isn’t this just sooo web 2.0-ish?

The design isn’t all there and the page sometimes hangs if any of the providers of the badges are slow or completely off (del.icio.us has been acting up just this evening as I was putting the page together), but then that’s why I put everything on this single page instead of sprinkling those elements across the whole site on sidebars or something along those lines.

And now it’s late and I’m calling it a day.

The Search is on, powered by KinoSearch

In between the “real” coding I did this weekend, I found a bit of time to finally hack on this site’s search and now, lo and behold! you have a search box on the sidebar. Yay!

The search is powered by KinoSearch (a system I had already talked about previously) and I must say I’m as impressed now as I was when I first tried it out.

Not only is it fast, but it is also ridiculously easy to work with. I still want to add a few functionalities to the site and I expect each new addition to take all of oh… 10 minutes or so to be hooked up to the search function. :-)

True, it takes up a bit of disk space but then “disk space is cheap” and you do get your space’s worth with stuff like lightning fast searching with highlighting. And no, you don’t feel the speed all that much, but that’s entirely my plugin’s code fault. It still needs a bit of love before it responds as it should.

Now let’s see how it holds up to the test of real-world usage. I’m pretty confident it will do nicely.

Moved again

I’ve moved my blog (again) to include it in my new (more structured and integrated) site.

You can read about the reasons, process, new system etc right over here.

Welcome to the all-new NunoNunes.org.

Well… ok, not all new then, I didn’t actually change the layout design, that’l come next.

Movabletype 2 blosxom

“Can this be true? Is this guy talking about moving away from Movabletype and into Blosxom in this day and age?”

I sure am and I did do it. If you want to know more about the move just read on!

Simplicity. That’s the name of the game.

Movabletype is a fine platform for blogging, to be sure —I’ve used it for my blog for many years now and I still use it for some other blogs I’m involved with on a technical decision-making capacity— but I’ve gotten a little fed-up with a few things about the way it works.

Complexity

First off, Movabletype is very complex, and getting more so as time goes by.
Each new version adds more features and, of course, introduces the added complexity necessary to support those features.

Blosxom is a script and a bunch of (totally optional, of course) plugins written in Perl (yes, this brings out the rabid squirrel in me).

Spam

This is an indirect problem. Spam —both on comments and track-backs alike— is a plague that infests all types of blogs and Six Appart do their best to cope with it, but at the end of the day the solutions they provide all depend on a lot of work for their users, either because people have to always catch up with their software’s latest release (or else lose the protection afforded by the previous version) or because even if users are in fact on the cutting edge, there is still the inherent mechanism of detection and protection that is built upon users being spammed, acting on it and that information being fed back to a master server and then scattered to other users so as to allow these later ones to be protected from the new spam.
Anyway it is always a lot of work for people getting targeted with new spam waves (as I find myself being for some reason I cannot fathom —it’s not as if I am a big time blogger or anything like that)…

This problem got so annoying in fact, that I decided to “outsource” the feature to professionals and right now I’m using Haloscan for all my feedback, both comment and track-backs.
Of course this could be easily integrated on my Movabletype platform, but if I’m not going to use this feature than it stops counting as a factor for the platform.

Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade

The Movabletype upgrade cycle I’ve mentioned before is annoying for multiple reasons. Not only because I have to do it in order to get the latest spam-protection afforded by the platform I can’t just let the software be, but also because each new version traditionally brings along with it a new licensing model that get closer each time to losing the free customers’ bit, which is definitely a must for me.

Local vs Remote

One of my main reasons for wanting to change platforms is the model that Movabletype (and most other blogging packages out there) follow of a server hosted somewhere which not only displays the content but is also used for editing it.
This is fine for a lot of uses but I don’t like to have to be on-line to edit my blog. I know there are several programs that allow me to create and edit content off-line and later “replay” the actions on to the server (I actually use one of them, namely ecto), but this only allows me to edit the content and preview it for HTML entity correction sort of thing, not for real publishing as it will appear later on the server.

Also the fact is that I still feel a lot more confortable just editing text files around (be it in my laptop or in the server via ssh) and I do believe this kind of interaction with the site will allow me to write if not more stuff, than at the very least better stuff —more thought out and relevant.

So for all these reasons and more, I’m now on Blosxom and, so far, I’m quite pleased.

New comment system

Ever since I turned off comments on this weblog people have actually been complaining to me about it.
Incredible, I get no comments (appart from spam, of course) for such a long time and then, just as I turn the system off, that’s when people want to give feedback…

Of well, such is human nature and such are the applications of Murphy’s Law to our lives and so on.

So both as a stop-gap until the new system is in place and also a a test to the system, all the feedback on this weblog (both comments and trackbacks) are now supported by Haloscan.

That’s right, I’m finaly caving in and outsourcing all the drudgery of dealing with lowest life-form on the Internet —spammers.

Let’s see how that goes, but I feel I must warn you that I did the conversion of the whole system in less than an hour and so I fully expect things to be broken here and there and I ask you to kindly point them out to me as you find them, please.

The templates are getting incredibly kludgy and unmanageable, of course, and so it really is time for a big overhaul to the weblog and maybe even the whole site?

I’ve been flirting with a radically different publishing system for the whole shebang but I just don’t know if I’m prepared for the radical change it would entail in my web-publishing habits.
But then again a radical change would probably be “a good thing” so I don’t know…

Spam (is it just me or is this getting old?)

Comment spam has increased a lot recently and I have better things to do than deal with it so starting now comments are closed —just as trackbacks have been for quite some time now— and will predictably remain so until I switch my blogging system.

How long will that take? Well, it’s anyone’s guess actually, but anyway that’s the best I can do for now.

So if you feel a sudden and uncontrollable urge to send some feedback my way regarding any of the rants I take on here just shoot me an email. You know the address, blog at the domain this blog is hosted at, but just the final part (the nunonunes dot org bit).

And now back to our regularly scheduled content.

Buh

As requested by some people, here is a new post.

Enjoy!

No more trackbacks on this weblog

That’s it, from now on trackbacks are turned off on this weblog.

If I ever decide that this feature is particularly important for a specific post I’ll enable it for that post only but as a default it is now off.

I just haven’t the time or the patience to deal with trackback spam right now. I got fed up.

Changes on portions of the site

Well, now that the Mac mini is finally here, I’m trying to get rid of the big noisy Intel tower ASAP.

Right now I’ve moved a few sites out into the geek-nest server (most notably the wiki which also suffered a software upgrade which may break things a bit) and de-activated some others.

I wanted to try out CenterStage on the mini before putting it to definite use as a server and I did. So now I know it will take a huge time for it to even start to be useful so no problems there. I’ll probably just put the mini to work this weekend, if I have the time. I’m actually active in the whole pvr/media center arena but that is a subject for another time when I’m not so sleepy.

I apologize in advance if anything breaks in the mean time in my site. Migrations usually do that! :-)

The question…

Will I ever be able to post something on my weblog and not have to re-edit it a minute later for some typo I found out after the fact or some minor point I forgot to make, I wonder?

Sheesh!

Upgrade

I almost forgot about this: I’ve upgraded this weblog’s software. It is now running on Movable Type version 3.17 (upgraded from 3.15).

As a drop-in replacement upgrade everything should be just fine and dandy. But then we all know how this things tend to go so if you notice anything wrong with the weblog do let me know. Thanks!