After five years of blogging I’ve decided to publish all my blog posts as a graphic novel with me as caped superhero. My superpower would be the perfectly timed wisecrack. Just kidding. I do want to make a change though. I’m going to focus my blog more on photography and see what happens.

There are three things I’m passionate and deeply interested in. (These, of course, do not include the really important things in life like my new wife and family and friends. Just to be clear.)

These three things are:

1. Writing software (my day job)
2. Reading (both Fiction and Non-Fiction)
3. Writing
4. Photography

Ok, that’s four things. Notice that math isn’t one of those three things.

And then there’s blogging. Where does that fall in this list? Certainly number three. But where else? All. None. Some. Which is exactly the problem.

Everything I’ve read about creating a successful blog (usually on a successful blog) suggests that the blog should specialize in something. Pick a topic. Any topic. And run with it. Right there, Mike’s blog equals blogging fail. My blog is too schizophrenic.

Here’s a great post on writing a blog by Penelope Trunk (whom I’m a big fan of).

I’m not sure how this will work out, but as I said it’s an experiment. I’m going to leave my posting of whacky youtube videos and random links to my twittering and try to write about where my life intersects with photography. That said, I’m going to try to do it in a way that doesn’t bore those of you not so interested in photography.

I hope you stick with me and keep reading, thanks.

Thanks Reeves for the photo.

During setup it posts and then deletes a test post. This is really really really REALLY lametastically lame. For me any post to my blog notifies in order, feedburner, twitter, the White House, the NSA, Homeland Security, and Roger the one arm middle school street crossing guard near my house. That’s literally mega quad bazillions of people.

Did I mention how lame this is?

All you evil doers, knock off all that evil!

Yes, WordPress for iPhone, I’m talking to you.

C’mer…. Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you. Just come here for a second…

Slap.

You can go now.

I found the WordPress iPhone Application to be very klunky. I gave it a review of 3 out of 5 stars in the iPhone app store.

1. There’s a list of blogs you choose from when it starts, which is lame because I only have one blog. Why do I have to hit an extra item? Start up time is critical for useability. Don’t get in the way of me getting my post written.
2. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to actually post to my blog. Turns out you have to set the “Status” to “Published” and then hit the “Save” button. This is really lame. I ended going back and forth from the drafts list and getting a bit irritated. There should be a big “Post Now!!!1!” button.
3. I can’t set the size of my pictures. I hate this. This is, in fact, a deal buster for me. The new version of Ecto does something cool – it allows you to see a cssTag for your pictures. I’d love to see this application do something similar. Or at least have a setting where I can set the maximum size for my pictures.
4. I kept getting lost when choosing a picture to add to the post. There’s some really weird back and forth behavior here. This needs to be streamlined and is particularly awkward.
5. The application needs to show some inline indication of where the added photos will end up. I couldn’t tell how my post was going to be laid out. There’s a “Preview” button, but this is also lame because there’s some boilerplate text at the end of the preview saying how the pictures will be appended to the post. Um, isn’t this a preview? How does this help me? My advice? Lose the preview, and make the editing more WYSIWYG. Previews, imo, are workarounds for lame design.
6. There should be default categories and tags, etc. Make it so I just start the app, enter a title, enter the text, maybe add a picture and hit the post button. Budda-Boom, done. Over and out. It’s too complicated right now to write a post – too much navigating around doing crap I don’t want to do.

I think this application was designed like a desktop application instead of an iphone application. I think it needs some work. That said, it did actually work. Which is a good thing, and for something like this, a great starting point.


There are more pictures of the application, here.

Trying out the new WordPress iPhone application.

For your enjoyment, here’s a dog on a (mutha-effing) plane.

We had to turn on all wildcard matching in IIS on the server to get this working. But now it does, and it’s sweet!

So the url for the picture below is http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/content/binary/jacky.jpg but the picture is actually on my new site at http://blog.mikefullerton.com/wp-content/oldcontent/jacky.jpg. I think this is exceeding cool. So now if you go to google images and search for mikefullerton.com, all the pictures still load! NICE.

One of the challenges of moving a website is preserving the permalinks – links to your stuff from elsewhere on the web. This is important if you wish to retain any page rankings in the search engines as well as just keeping stuff people have linked to you working. This is a big challenge when moving something as complex as a blog site like mine from one web technology to another, e.g. from dasBlog to wordpress. You really need to do a permanent redirect, so the search engines know that the resource in question has actually moved.

What I’ve done is write a custom ASP.net website that does permanent redirects for every single one of my 650 blog posts, as well as date and category views. So links like the folllowing work:

Example of a random post:
http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/2007/11/13/TinySuperheroDogsFlyVeryLow.aspx

Example of a month view:
http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/default,month,2005-09.aspx

Example of a category view:
http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/categoryview,category,cars.aspx

I also implemented redirect support for images that are linked to my site, so that images with URLs like this:

http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/content/binary/jacky.jpg should be permanently redirected to http://blog.mikefullerton.com/wp-content/oldcontent/jacky.jpg. This is the only part I don’t have working yet. It works fine on my development machine at home, but barfs on the actual server. I’m not sure why yet. Binaries in wordpress are normally loaded into the mySql database, but for my old content I decided just to have a folder for the old posts.

This was a fun little project I did in one day. If you’re interested in using this redirector website, let me know. Right now it’s hand tuned to redirect dasBlog to wordpress, but that could be abstracted a bit more for another blogging engine.

More on this later. I want to post about how I actually moved the site, which was infinitely more difficult and frustrating.

Please let me know if you have any problems.

I’ve moved my blog to blog.mikefullerton.com from www.mikefullerton.com/blog. I’ve managed to move all of my content (including comments) from my old blog to the new blog. The old blog was running on dasBlog and the new site is running on wordpress. This was an unbelievably difficult task actually, and it took me weeks to figure out how to do it. I wrote two tools in c# and made some bug fixes in a php open source importer for wordpress, and spent several hours hand tuning html to accomplish this. I also had to figure out how to host a subdomain at a different hosting company, for which I chose bluehost.com. The reason I needed to do this is fluidhosting can’t host a php site in my Windows (for ASP.NET) account and be able to give me the permalink style I wanted because of a limitation in IIS on windows. Ok, sorry, I bored the crap out of myself with that last bit.

I’ll post more on this later, right now I’m completely wasted. I’m super excited to have this up and running.

Note: if you’re using an aggregator like Google Reader, then you shouldn’t have to do anything as I’ve been using feedburner for a while to manage my RSS feed. If you read my blog and you surf to it manually, 1992 called and wants its websites with no images back. I’m not even sure what that means. But I totally burned you. Snap.

Blogo is new blogging software for Mac OS X. I used it for a few minutes and I give it the thumbs down. I didn’t like it for the following reasons:

1. Blogo didn’t download my category list and give me a way that I could see to choose a category for my post. This by itself is an instant deal buster. I’m already out. Done. Kaput. And I’m a bit shocked this is missing, frankly.

2. Blogo is not WYSIWYG. It sort of is, but if you’re dealing with a photo, then it inserts a little icon that represents the photo. This is frankly lame. I don’t want a “Preview.” I want to edit the actual post. I understand this is a hard problem to solve. But other people have solved it. If you want to be a player in this space, solve it, and solve it well. Get rid of the edit and preview metaphor. It sucks. It sucks big time.

3. Blogo posted a temporary post to my blog to get the styles of my blog to render an accurate preview. It then failed to delete the post. I had to log into my website and delete it manually. The problem with this is it will immediately get sucked up by feedburner and show up in people aggragators. This is really really lame. And it didn’t tell me it was going to do this. If it did, I would have said, no fricking way you piece of poop. You lame piece of poop.

4. Editing in Blogo is freaking weird (and missing features like numbered lists). I had a picture in my post. I deleted the picture like fifty times just trying to delete a blank line above the picture in my post. Then I realized I had to drag down to the bottom of the post. WTHIAHB!? (What the hell in a hand basket?) Also really, really, REALLY lame. And frustrating. And just, well, silly. Why reinvent the wheel here? Try working like every other application on the planet, then we’ll talk.

One of the biggest barriers in the way of me posting to my blog is convenience. It’s got to be drop dead easy. Logging into a web page to post is way too painful. Also, it’s way too easy to loose your post if something weird happens. Which happens way too frequently. This is why using a blog posting application is the way to go. First and foremost, you have support for drafts. Save often. Then come back to it.

I’ve recently switched my computer life back to Macintosh. One of the first things I did was look for the best tools for the stuff I do frequently, like post to my blog. Here’s what I discovered.

Bottom line – Ecto is the program to use if you blog on Mac OS X. It has all the required features. WYSWYG editing. Support for all the blogging engines (even Das Blog, which I use). It also has some nice integration with Apple technologies like iTunes and iPhoto. It also has a Amazon.com feature that looks cool, but I haven’t really used it yet. Ecto also has a plugin architecture. For example there are plugins for posting to twitter and flickr.

There are two items I’d like added to the Ecto toolbar – “insert picture” and “insert link”. Ecto supports both of these fine, it’s just a bit awkward to invoke these from the menus. I’ve spent too much time hunting around trying to find the UI to do this. Of course I can drag a picture into my post from the Finder, but this typically isn’t how I want to do things. Ecto costs $17.95, which I gladly paid. I’ve been using Ecto for a while now, and it’s never crashed, and I don’t recall having any problems with it at all. This is a great track record.

I tried Mars Edit as well, and it looks like a fine program but it lacks WSYWYG editing which, for me, is a instant deal buster. And I understand HTML. I think this was be really painful for a less technical person to use. I will certainly look at Mars Edit again when it supports WSYWYG. I really like the Mars Edit icon though, so it has that going for it. Mars Edit costs $29.95, which I think is about twice as expensive as it should be.

As an aside, if you use Windows, there’s no better tool than Windows Live Writer. This program is one of my favorite Microsoft applications ever. In fact before I found Ecto, I blogged with Windows Live Writer from Windows XP running in Parallels on my Mac Book Pro. I think this is the gold standard for all blogging applications to judge themselves by. Oh and by the way, Windows Live Writer is free.

I’m having doubts about the FictionBlog (fictionblog.mikefullerton.com). While I’ve definitely been posting to the fiction blog, I’m not really getting much of a response in readership there. Maybe I’m just not pinging to the right places, or getting the word out into the intertubes about it, or maybe it’ll just take more time.

In addition to the small readership, its kind of a pain having two blogs. Well, it was an experiment (so there’s that). Either way, I plan to continue writing my fiction blog posts, but maybe they’d be okay within appropriate categories on my main blog. I worry that my blog has a bit of a identity crisis, but maybe that’s ok since it’s really about the things in my life that are important to me. Some of them anyway. And people can skip over the posts that they aren’t interested in. I do this all the time when I visit blogs.

What do you folks think? If you wouldn’t mind, would you please leave a comment and let me know what your thoughts are? I’d appreciate it. Also feel free to say why you didn’t go read the fictionblog if you’d like – this would be interesting information for me. Only about two or three of you made the trek over to it.

thanks