Summer Sunrise

Originally published at Five Acres with a View. You can comment here or there.

The winds were high before dawn this morning, which frequently leads to spectacular sunrises. It was already warm when I walked the dogs at 8:30, so it looks as though it will be another hot day.

New Weblog

Originally published at Five Acres with a View. You can comment here or there.

I was very pleased with TypePad. However, because we had a lot of information on our existing website, as well as my old weblog, I decided to see if I could install Movable Type, which is the software predecessor of TypePad. It took me about six hours to get it working so I could log in. This included finding my way around a new web host, copying files from our old host, and and cooking dinner. I wouldn’t recommend the experience to anyone who hadn’t had some experience with Perl and/or Unix and/or SQL.

I exported my posts to the TypePad beta, and imported them into my new weblog with no difficulty. I haven’t yet started to customize the templates and cascading style sheets, because I wanted to get the basic mechanics working first.

Propagation

Originally published at Five Acres with a View. You can comment here or there.

Despite years of hearing the term domain name propagation, it still reminds me vaguely of gardening. However, I am astonished that, a little over 24 hours after I made the request to Network Solutions, our domain name has been propagated to our little corner of the Internet.

We have had this domain name for about nine years now. When we got an internet dialup account in 1994, Jack decided that he wanted us to have a domain name. (Things were so primitive then that Jack took our desktop computer down to the ISP office so they could install the software we would need.) I thought it was a complete waste to get the stardel.com domain, but have to admit that the domain name has survived four or five different service providers over the years. I have had my stardel email address for the same length of time, which may not be a record, but is a very long time. Of course the downside is that it is on every spam list in the universe, since I was sending email before anyone even thought about protecting their email address. I can still remember my shock at the first p*rn*graphic email I received.

Deciding

When I last wrote here, I was trying to decide between various weblogging platforms, with LiveJournal thrown in as well. At one point, I found myself wanting it all: my TypePad journal, the year old weblog maintained by my own scripts and LiveJournal to boot. I had tried blogger, but it didn't have anything that TypePad didn't have. I was also fond of my fotolog that I update once a day, most days.

TypePad, when added to the web host costs we already incur, turned out to be too expensive. I decided to find another web host, move our web site there, and cross my fingers and hope I could get Movable Type to install.

It worked: six hours later, I logged into my very own Movable Type installation. If I knew then what I know now, it would have taken about two hours. Not bad for a first attempt.

I decided to ditch the weblog application I developed myself, though I will keep the files around: Coffee and Oranges. Our old host will go as well: we no longer need them for dialup, and our website was getting rather large for their concept of a personal site anyway. I also decided to keep going with LiveJournal, because I like the community features. I can link to graphics on my website, so that works out well. I will also keep updating fotolog, because I find something to enjoy every time I go there. Besides, my mother likes it, and my sister uploads to it occasionally as well. My new weblog is named the same as my beta TypePad weblog: Five Acres with a View.

I've also set up a skeleton weblog for my husband, which is another reason I thought it would be nice to have my own installation. I am trying to educate him on standards compliant html 4.01 using CSS for presentation, but he has been writing html for years, so it may be a bit of a struggle.

Zempt

Originally published at Five Acres with a View. You can comment here or there.

Now that I have decided to go with the Movable Type application, I am taking another look at Zempt :: Multi-platform posting for Movable Type. On my visit to the website, I noticed that they have a bookmarklet that will start Zempt, similar to the Post to MT bookmarklet. Zempt also includes a spell checker.