On Thursday, Google will announce their OpenSocial platform—an open API for social networks. Clearly a shot at challenging Facebook. I still have little interest in building apps on top of social networks, but the APIs for profile information and social graph will be very interesting.

I think I’ve figured out why I like Movable Type—it lets me be as anal as I want to be. If I want to micromanage how the list of categories on an entry are displayed, it responds with, “Well, ok, let’s sit down and think about this. I’m sure there’s a way we can do what you want to do.”

WordPress, on the other hand, responds with, “What? That’s stupid. Why would anybody do it that way? That makes no sense. The default version is fine.”

I appreciate software that indulges my obsessions.

This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be doing of MT hacks. Clearly, no sane person would want to do what I’m doing. But hopefully you’ll find some useful information about how MT works.

Continue reading “Driving on MT: Properly Punctuated Entry Categories List”…

First, apologies to folks who read this site via feed reader: You probably just found ten new posts from me in your reader, but only one is actually new. On the one hand it’s annoying, but on the other it’s a signal that you need to go to the site and see what’s changed.

In this case, quite a lot has changed. The Sandbox theme is gone. WordPress is gone. Now I have my own design—“TreeGoat”—built atop Movable Type 4.

I don’t know about anybody else, but I sure feel better.

The last 2.5+ years with WordPress felt like my blog and I were openly hostile towards each other. We never could see eye-to-eye. It didn’t want to do what I wanted to do, and vice versa. That’s what I like about MT—it always wants to do what you want to do.

Anyway, it’s late and I should be in bed. There are no doubt things that are broken. I’m sure there are pages missing, and posts that have been carried through countless redesigns that now look bizarre. Some of those things will get fixed, others won’t. Such is life on the web. That’s why we all stopped using “under construction” signs.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I’ve never been a lawn guy. I’ve lived in the suburbs for six years, and had my own lawn to care for some years before that. But I don’t take any pride in my lawn like guys are supposed to. A well-manicured lawn means absolutely nothing to me. I secretly dream of plowing the whole thing up, salting the earth, and covering it in sand—complete with an umbrella and a beach volleyball net.

Continue reading “Mowing; or Life in the Suburbs”…