Cerulean Studios have announced an alpha version of Trillian for the Mac, which they have gone out of their way to clarify is not a port but an entirely distinct dev project. I’m not sure how relevant Trillian will be in a Mac universe that already includes Adium. It will be really hard for Cerulean to improve on Adium – and certainly Trillian for Windows is nowhere near the quality of Adium.
Archives for October 2007
Unreadable URLs are bad
Scott Rosenberg takes up the case in his post, Terror of tinyurl.
From the earliest days of the Web to the present, there’s been a fundamental split between people who get the value of “human-readable URLs” and people who don’t.[…]
Today, though, we’re taking a step backwards, or at least sideways, in the cause of human readability, thanks to the growing popularity of the “tinyurl.”
I have had this discussion (arguing for human-readable URLs) with well-intentioned but clueless developers so many times it borders on the absurd. In fact, Nadia and I were just discussing it last night! Like Rosenberg, I understand why it’s important in the twitterverse, but outside of that relatively limited context, tinyurl is a user-hostile pain in the backside.
New Zealand’s Haka
Done!
I’ve pretty much completed the transfer to WordPress from Movable Type now, and it went very smoothly. WP is very nice to work with, and I chose a very well constructed base theme (if I do say so myself) to work from, which helped. The only dicey parts were a) matching the file naming format of the posts I imported with their old format generated by MT; and b) removing some links from my (old) post titles, which was causing problems.
There’s one major to-do yet: figuring out how to save myself from my idiotic post-title method (i.e., the title is actually the first few words of the post). I think I have the solution (using some advanced CSS and a quick template edit), so we’ll see.
As always, if you notice anything strange let me know. It should be a million times easier to leave comments here than it has been in the past while.
Excuse the mess
After upgrading MT to version 4, I’ve decided to upgrade this blog to WordPress. I’m sure MT 4 is great, and I did like some aspects of it very much, nevertheless it’s time to move. This isn’t a hugely high-traffic site, so I won’t miss not having the blog written to static files that much and frankly that had become the number one reason – besides simple inertia – for staying committed to the MT platform.The reasons to change? There are several. First, I like the themes implementation of WP a great deal. I made a huge investment in the MT3 templating system – re-implementing the whole design in pure CSS using stock MT templates. It turns out that the choices I made in doing so were more or less implemented in MT 4 – but their implementation is lower-level than mine was, and to re-do that seems daunting, so say the least.
Second, I’m frustrated that so much of the documentation for MT on the Six Apart website is still devoted to MT3. They clearly consider documentation to be an inessential feature of their software – whereas I think it’s AS important as nice things like a stable application. I’ll say it again – an application that is stable, but doesn’t have very good online documentation, is not ready for release. My experience with MT4 is that I have to do almost all of the work to figure out how to implement it myself, and quite frankly, I don’t have the time.
Third, I can’t believe that after three years of effort, there is essentially no theme structure built into MT4. I have wanted to change the look and feel here for a while, but it’s a huge leg up to start from an established theme by a designer who shares one’s own sensibilities. Right now, I can’t get that with MT4.
Don’t get me wrong, I still think MT4 is a wonderful tool – but not for this site, not at this time. And I shouldn’t overlook the fact that doing this will allow me to clear away a lot of cruft that has built up over the almost 8 years of publishing mikel.org.
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