Feeling like it’s time to shake things up and start again. Stay tuned.

Lately I’ve been putting more thought into wiping the slate clean with this blog and starting anew. If you’ve been reading me for awhile, you might remember that I toyed with the idea of moving to Expression Engine because it’s what we use to drive MPOW’s web site, and learning the ins and outs of the system would make it easier for me to support it in the long run. That project stalled because I didn’t have the technical skills and PHP chops to export all of my WordPress entries and pull them into EE with the URLs, categories, tags, and media intact. I still haven’t figured that out, but I didn’t want that to be the reason I put off the project any longer.

I also don’t want to be locked into one theme framework for the life of this blog. Thesis has served me well but because of the way I use the framework to associate images with blog posts, I’d have to do a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes to make sure that the images would still show up in any new theme I used. A daunting prospect for someone who doesn’t have programming and/or WordPress chops.

What I’m thinking is that I’ll move all of the content here to a subdomain (most likely archives.cecily.info) and start with a new DB, a fresh EE install, and a new look and feel. I’d like to be able to do this before the summer is over, but seeing as how it’s already July 25, I don’t know how realistic that is. I’d also like not to lose any search engine juice, but I’m not exactly sure what I need to do to make sure than any URLs that are currently here redirect to the new subdomain. If anyone has any tips on that, I’d love to hear them.

Every once in awhile it’s good to shake things up, to push yourself past the limits of what is familiar and comfortable. Or so I’ve heard.

Over the last month, I’ve seen a marked increase in traffic to this blog.  Hi! *waves*

I was just poking around in Google Analytics when I noticed that I was seeing quite a bit of traffic from some unexpected places. I’m aware that most of my readers are based in Canada and the United States, but imagine my surprise to see users from the UK (especially in and around London),  Germany, Australia, and France. And you could’ve knocked me over with a feather when I saw site visits from Zambia, Egypt, and Algeria.

If you’re new to this blog, or even if you’ve been a long time reader, say hi and tell me where you’re based in the comments. What brought you here? What do you like best about this blog? Tell me more about my eyes, won’t you? C’mon, don’t be shy!

I’m grateful for each and every reader I get. Thank you for spending some of your precious time with me.

I’ve decided to put a few short-form posts of interesting quotes, photographs, and flotsam that I run across while I’m on the web over at misc.cecily.info. It’s a tumblelog, so if you’re on Tumblr, feel free to follow me.

As you’ve probably heard if you’re a WordPress user (or even if you’re not), WordPress 2.9 has been released, and one of the things people seem most excited about is the ability to upgrade plugins in a batch, instead of one at a time. I wanted to try this out on another domain, and went looking for the upgrade function in what seemed to me to be like the logical location, the Plugins section. I was surprised (and annoyed) to find out that it wasn’t there.

After clicking through Plugins, and all the subcategories under Settings, I turned to Google to find the answer to where this elusive new feature was hiding. It turns out that someone at Automattic thought that placing the feature under Tools > Upgrade made more sense. I thought about this for awhile, I mean really thought about it, and the best that I could come up with is that someone figured that because upgrading a plugin doesn’t count as an add-on, but rather as a core feature of WordPress’ system, that it made more sense to place this “tool” with the other system tools.

The only problem with that is that there’s already a well-defined area in the system hierarchy that is labeled “Plugins”, and this area gives of a far more intuitive information scent than the “Tools” area.

Below is a short video of the Plugin upgrade in progress. As you can see, the upgrade itself is fairly seamless, even if it was a little hard to find.

For the record, I am a content management system’s worst nightmare.

Earlier this morning, I broke Typepad when I tried to delete a blog. I finally got a microblog up and running over there, but I was curious to compare the experience of running a microblog at WordPress.com versus Typepad. I have several blogs at WordPress.com – including a mirror of this site – but rather than lose my skeskali.wordpress.com domain, I decided I wanted to bulk delete some entries and start over with new content.

I set the display to 300 entries, toggled the select switch, and tried to bulk delete more than 300 entries at once. What do you think happened?

I rule.

I’m putting this one after the jump, because it’ll throw off the flow of the front page if I don’t.

So this morning, I tried deleting my default Typepad blog so that I could set up a new one. The system became unresponsive, so I did the one thing that you’re never supposed to do – I clicked the “Delete Blog” link again. After bringing Safari to its knees, Typepad then displayed this whopper in my browser window.

This is one impressive error message. And by “impressive”, I mean “scary”.

I was catching up on my news feeds when I came across this tragic story about a Surrey, BC man who died of a drug overdose on the eve of his wedding. Like a lot of newspapers, The Vancouver Sun incorporated blog-like features on its website to enhance readers’ experiences. One of the features is a related stories widget that creates relationships with the main story and other stories from the Vancouver Sun and media outlets from around the world.

Check out the related story highlighted in this screen capture:

screen capture from vancouversun.com

I clicked through to the story to see if it had anything to do with the victim, his family, or his fiancee (none of whom have been named), but nothing about this NME story has anything to do with the Vancouver Sun piece.

Somebody’s metadata needs tweaking.

I switched web hosts a few days ago, and as you may have noticed, I also switched blogging engines (part of the eventual move to Expression Engine which is still very much in the works..).

One of my largest complaints about Movable Type is the amount of time it takes to rebuild your blog after publishing. I posted a screenshot that illustrates how long it took to rebuild Movable Type entries on Dreamhost’s Private Server. One of the factors that will help me decide which host I ultimately stick with is the responsiveness of the server, and whether it can actually handle the load caused by a Movable Type rebuild.

Because I’m indecisive, I signed up with two separate hosting companies: Bluefur Hosting, which is based here in the Vancouver area, and Pair Networks, an American company. I’ve had some experience with Pair before, and only left them because Dreamhost was offering a better deal at the time. All these years later I still carry a soft spot in my heart for Pair because they were the first web host I used when I registered my first domain back in 1998.

I set up Movable Type on my Bluefur account and on my Pair account, making sure to install the same themes, and plugins, and keeping an eye on settings and options. I exported entries from WordPress and imported them into each Movable Type blog. Below are the results of my very informal test.

First, Bluefur:

Next, Pair:

While I really like being able to pay in Canadian dollars, time is money, even on a very small blog like mine. I have a few more days to make up my mind. In the meantime, I’ll be going through Bluefur’s website to see if there’s a package that might give me somewhat better performance at a comparable price to what I’m paying at Pair.

I’ve been interested in trying to get a lifestream going on this blog for a while now, but could never get it to work for a variety of reasons. I tried the WordPress Lifestream Plugin, and while I got it installed, it refused to publish fresh updates. I tried Movable Type’s Action Streams which worked well, but once I switched web hosts, I also couldn’t get it to publish fresh updates, which I suspect has more to do with my general peevishness when it comes to Movable Type than the plugin itself.
I’d heard about Sweetcron, and had seen it in action on a couple of sites, and it looked promising. I’ve been having a lot of anxiety about my technical skills (or lack thereof) lately, so I was hesitant to try yet another lifestream system that I would abandon out of frustration. However, after reading this tutorial at NetTuts, I felt a little more comfortable with at least trying the installation.

In just under ten minutes, I had Sweetcron installed. A more technically proficient person could probably have it installed in five. After spending a few minutes tweaking some of the CSS, I ended up with Bite-sized Cecily Chunks for all (?) to enjoy.
The application is deceptively simple, but if you’re an adventurous sort, you can make use of Sweetcron’s API to enhance the functionality.