Laurabelle’s Blog

As I said in my last post on Movable Type:

I am moving my blog to WordPress and to http://blog.niceperson.org/. I haven’t quite figured out how to do the redirects automagically yet, but I’ll figure something out. In the meantime, please update your links and bookmarks.

I’m not completely sure what I’m going to do with the main site, but I have some ideas.

Problem A (automagic redirection) has now been solved with the careful application of RewriteRules. Unfortunately it’s not spot-on for the single-post pages, because Movable Type and WordPress use different algorithms for creating slugs, but that only means you’ll get the daily archive (which probably only contains one post anyway). It’s a quick, painless solution that requires no rebuilding of archives whatsoever. I’m pretty happy.

I have not deleted my Movable Type page hierarchy yet, merely moved it from archive/ to .archive/ (just in case there’s anything I haven’t anticipated). We’ll see how many 404’s I get from locations I’ve forgotten to redirect.

A friend and fellow alumna from MHC interviewed me today for an article she's writing for the Alumnae Quarterly, about students and alumnae with blogs. Apparently it's to be the cover story for either the fall or the spring issue.

Rant alert!

I don't know if this happens anywhere else, but at the iSchool there are a lot of people who call webserver logs weblogs, and it bugs the crap out of me. I've explained it to people several times, but they just don't seem to get it.

I guess people make this mistake because they don't really know what either of these things is, so they take the word that they've heard a lot recently (weblogs) and apply it to the thing they're talking about (server logs). It sounds sort of the same, right? Only they're not at all the same thing, and they shouldn't have to use the same word.

Please, someone, tell me I'm the only one who's ever heard this and that this is not going to become a widespread trend!

It looks like I won’t be upgrading to MT 3.0. Six Apart is trying to put a happy face on it, but their pricing scheme is frankly absurd, and Shelley is right that there’s no guarantee of a free version past 3.0. It’s really too bad, and I think (hope) that Ben and Mena will be unhappily surprised by the disappearance of their user base.

Some people are planning to migrate as soon as possible, others (like Shelley) are glad they beat the rush, and still others never used it in the first place. Me, I’m planning to stick with 2.65 for a while. I don’t currently need an upgrade, because I’ve already got all the features I need. In the meantime, I’ll investigate my options more thoroughly before staking my course. Maybe I’ll go with WordPress or Textpattern, or maybe I’ll just grow my own.

A student on the ichat mailing list posted today about an interesting post on a lawyer's blog about the safeness of weblogs.

Are you a young professional, excited that your blog gives you the freedom to speak out to a large audience? Well consider what a smaller and more powerful audience (i.e. your employer) might think about what you say, and how well you say it. And of course remember that while you blogging your innermost thoughts you are also creating the world's most accessible databank of stuff that can be used against you later.

Thanks to Rob's Amazing Poem Generator, niceperson.org as a poem:

Blog Blog and Mirrors as
many of clues, all right but
psychologically and only
because I have for eleven years except
where this weekend. was
capped this fulfilled it that normal
which was just met. I started rereading
it, was Harry Potter. if
only person in good route
to people I wanted to this evil
but fun event, outdoors near the...
only friend the limit on
Movable Type.

Kinda sums it all up, doesn't it?

My friend Maggie has a .plan, and she writes on it a lot. Basically, if I want to stay at all in touch with what's going on in her life, I have to read her .plan, because she very rarely emails. (Part of that's due to the fact that she has very high standards for emails, so whenever she does write them, she spends hours writing just one email.) Of course, I can't really criticize her for not writing email, because I've been a bad correspondent too. I have a .plan, and I try to update enough that Maggie feels it's worth reading semi-regularly, but I update my blog much more frequently. So I've been admonishing her to read my blog, and yesterday or the day before she did, for the first time in a while.

And of course she put comments on her .plan. Thus spake Maggie:

lbm - i can't quite fathom how blog people can have so very much to say on
a regular basis. otherwise i'd join your blog ring . . . me, i like the
perpetually expanding and disappearing .plan. the thought of archiving my
thoughts is just ... augh! why bother?
(yes, i have a webpage. but the goal there is perfection, not expansion)

This time the blogging world (or at least the part of it that I read) is afire about an article that Clay Shirky wrote on the subject of power distributions between weblogs. Basically the idea is that in the same way as 20% of the population holds 80% of the wealth, a small percentage of bloggers (the A-list) command most of the traffic. He also divides the blogging world into three tiers: the high-readership mass-media blogs, the low-readership conversation-among-friends blogs, and the in-between blogs.