by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 12, 2007 | Front Page
Back in May 2004 Sixapart announced they were closing up Movable Type with a set of draconian licenses that essentially set out to punish the countless people who contributed to the project.
This move was met with much hatred throughout the blogging world and large amounts of people responded by simply moving on, making WordPress todays leading Open Source blogging platform.
Today it was announced that they are heading back to their roots and giving Open Source another try.
Ever since the changes with our version 3.0 launch three years ago, there have been those who are quick to judge or quick to question whether the intention of openness was ever there. And of course, we’ve since learned a lot about how to communicate better with our community, and how to build a sustainable business that we’re proud of, so that we can ensure even greater investments in Movable Type. We hope that it’s not just the
launch of MTOS that demonstrates our commitment to openness — from our
community feedback process (which has already yielded a completely new MT wiki) to our creation and promotion of open
standards for the web to our genuine interest in dialogue with the
communities we serve, we truly believe Movable Type is the most open
platform around.
I think Movable Type is a great application and I use it for my own blog, I am certainly very glad it is now Open Source and I have no real reason to move off it. But I think the damage the last few years has done to the community is immense.
When I started out with Movable Type and my blog in 2003 there were a ton of MT resources out there, when new versions came out the community literally jumped and ported extensions to it, made new themes and plugins for it and as a whole rallied behind the company. Today the situation is very different, just try and find a single good resource for MT4 themes and skins that support all the various new technologies built into it with widget sets, the new templating system etc, there are a few but nothing as amazing as there used to be. Have a look at the lack of ported plugins etc, the uptake and enthusiasm for the product is gone, WordPress is where its at today.
This could be in part due to the constant breaking of backward compatibility and reworking of template systems, changing APIs and such though I am not convinced. This situation is pretty much par for the course in the Open Source world and anyone willing to commit to contributing does so and are prepared to port at the drop of a hat.
It just isn’t happening with MT, not because Sixapart made it too difficult, not because people aren’t prepared to support a changing product but simply because Sixapart alienated its contributors.
Todays announcement lists a number of cool things the community contributed over time, it was delivered in spin that would make most political parties look like amateurs, fact is the list that they showed as community contributions, not many of those are recent, not many of those are breakthroughs that happened since 2004, why? Because everyone fell out of love with MT.
I think the move is one of desperation, I wish them all the luck in the world as I do not want to move to a new blogging platform so it is in my interest to see this work for a long time, but I am afraid that ship has sailed. I hope I live to eat my words though.
I think the overall technology – namely Perl – just doesn’t belong on the web anymore, this will no doubt be met with a lot of scorn by certain types, but the general idiocy around Perl 6 etc will sink anything that is based on it, WordPress ultimately is in a much better camp being PHP based.
But lets not sling opinion around too much – nevermind that I am still mentally recovering from the displeasure of trying to maintain a MT Enterprise installation on a really big site. To gauge the community involvement is simple, both companies publish a plugin directory on their website.
Movable type: Total Plugins: 578, ones tagged as working with MT4 68
WordPress: Total Plugins: 1277, it is not indicated if these work with some versions of WP and not with others.
So 11% of MT plugins got ported from 3 to 4, some were just not needed because the functionality were added directly to MT4 for sure – like Captcha’s – others, I guess the authors packed up and left to another platform or simply stopped blogging. Either way, it is a pretty sorry state of affairs for MT to be in.
If I had to choose a blogging platform today, and had to weigh up MT against WP, my money would be on WP without needing to spend too much time thinking about it. I recently created a new blog – now defunct – it was based on WP and my next one will also be.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 7, 2007 | Usefull Things
I’ve heard a lot about Zoho before, essentially they provide Web 2.0 style office applications – many of them completely free of charge.
I didn’t pay them too much attention really, being a mostly happy Google hostage. Today I read again about their CRM which led me to look at their other offerings. Boy was I impressed.
Initially I am just trying out Zoho Creator, it is your basic RAD database application development system, fully hosted, fully free and fully on the web and mobile.
I ofcourse had an itch to scratch, the itch being that I keep a list of my billable hours, sales, recurring bills etc all in a big old nasty VI file using VIM Outliner. This approach works but its hardly high tech or cross platform.
So I created a small Creator app that lists my clients, hours billed, sales items, recurring invoice items and some reports for listing invoiced and un-invoiced of each. Some screenshots of my app:
Adding a client
Adding an invoice line
Report of unbilled time
Bulk mark items as invoiced
You can click on the images for larger versions.
This is pretty impressive, you can really imagine coding a standalone version of this for some would be fun, for me it wouldn’t be a challenge and so it would be dead boring and probably take many hours that is better spent on billable work. I’d also be stuck with something else to maintain in code rather than a snazy point-and-click UI.
So how long did this app take me? Not more than 2 hours end to end, free hosting, and it’s available online via my blackberry for adding items etc while on the road.
Creator also has an API like all good Web 2.0 stuff and so it is really easy for you to integrate something into this, but you could also just embed a specific report or specific input field into any page of your choice via a simple iframe.
This is a great solution for small little web apps like this, soon in Q1 2008 they will also integrate the database from Creator into the Reports app then you can do some really nice multi dimensional reports, graphs and such.
I’d recommend checking out Zoho apps. As always be sure to read the T’s and C’s though before handing over too much overly sensitive data.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 6, 2007 | Front Page
If you are seeing this then you’re arriving at my blogs new home. It is now hosting using Movable Type 4 as apposed to 3.
I have to say I am very impressed with MT4, the user interface and additions like widgets and widget sets has a big impact in the general ability to customize things, previously I had to rely on a whole lot of PHP snippets to do what I wanted, I’m glad to say there is no actual PHP code in here except for my few photo galleries etc. URL’s though have to include the .php bit to keep my links valid.
The migration as a whole took maybe 3 or 4 hours, but this included moving my wiki, galleries and maps to a new server as well.
A few things have fallen away now, I have only one RSS feed for everything where previously I had one for photography related stuff, one for non photography and one for everything. I had very few subscribers to the specific ones so I figured there is little point in keeping them around.
MT4 finally has proper tags support and a tag cloud, I’ll start using it but will need to go through my almost 400 old entries to add tags if I really want it to be useful, so still not sure if I’ll make the effort.
It’s probably only for my own sake, but I’ve made a screenshot showing a full copy of my old blog here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 5, 2007 | Front Page
Yesterday while trying to get a i386 DomU going on my x86_64 Xen server I ran into some hassles with ‘No space left on device’ errors.
Anyone who sees that would immediately go for the df command, but it would be futile in this instance.
What happens is that the xenstore – where it stores meta files state of the running VMs – gets corrupt,
You can try and run ‘xenstore-control check’ it will also give some b/s answer kind of suggesting all is well, it’s not, check /var/log/messages and you’ll see stuff like:
xenstored: corruption detected by connection 0: \
err No such file or directory: Write failed
xenstored: clean_store: '/local/domain/0/backend/vbd/16/51712/sectors' is orphaned!
At this point you’re pretty much screwed, try and reboot and xend won’t even run, no VM’s will start.
Fixing it is pretty easy in the end once you’ve done tons of Googling and found the 2 year old bug in the Xen bugtracker about this exact problem – complete with the xen guys trying to close it in a routine ‘cleanup of tickets’ rather than actually fixing the bug.
First, shut down all things Xen, if you can even boot from a non Xen kernel. Once you’re sure its all down just delete /var/lib/xenstored/tdb* and reboot, it should all be fine after that.
You must be sure you don’t have xenstored running while doing this, else it will write its in-memory corrupted state back to disk when you reboot and it will look like your fix didn’t work.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 2, 2007 | Front Page
The CentOS team today released CentOS 5.1. This is good news there has been a ton of bug fixes upstream.
It is still trickling out to a few mirrors so should be available everywhere soon, I updated my 2 development servers using:
yum –disablerepo=\* –enablerepo=base –enablerepo=updates update
And so far it is all good, be aware that there seems to be a small issue with /etc/redhat-release still showing things as it was with 5.0, but this will probably be fixed soon as there has already been mentions of this on the forums.
As always, read the release notes before you upgrade as there are some outstanding issues you should know about.
Well done, the Wiki has also recently had a layout upgrade and it is all starting to look much more professional than before.
