NevOn Experimental

Getting MT 3.2 right is hard work

Yesterday, I upgraded my Movable Type blog with the new version 3.2 released by Six Apart last week.

The upgrade itself was straightforward, quick and relatively easy, thanks to the clear installation guide in the new 3.2 manual.

So no complaints at all from the installation/upgrade point of view. Following that guide - plus an excellent mini-tutorial by Elise Bauer on upgrading - means that anyone should be able to achieve a smooth installation or upgrade no matter their skill/knowledge level with Movable Type. So if you're a complete MT newbie like me, you should be ok.

Where I have some disappointment, though, is after the install (or upgrade, in my case).

I do realize that, if you want simplicity in your blog platform, without having to be concerned at all with installing or doing anything like that, then you'd go with a hosted blog service like TypePad (for instance) as such things are taken care of for you. If you want to get under the hood, so to speak, then MT (for instance) might be your choice.

Yet I would still expect some things to be a lot easier to understand than they currently are if attracting newbies to the platform is one of Six Apart's goals.

FeedDemon beta 3a gets close

Last month, I tried out the first public beta of the forthcoming new version 1.6 of FeedDemon, the RSS aggregator for Windows.

In my first impressions post, I commented mostly on the glitches I noticed, which weren't a big surprise given that it was the first beta.

Since then, beta 2 has come and gone and now beta 3 is available, which I've installed and am now using (and, today, installed beta 3a released yesterday). And I do like it - I've not experienced a single fault/problem/bug/crash so far.

I've been interacting with it a lot, doing all the things I usually do with the current release version 1.5 - things like toggling news items, copying them to news bins, blogging items, etc - as well as changing styles and generally giving the tyres a good kicking.

So if all this in one day is any indicator, it's looking pretty good. Many fixes, improvements and new things since beta 1 as you'd expect

A big improvement for me - the newspaper display issue that beta 1 exhibited (where the newspaper would not display news items in the same date order as the news items list, no matter what you did) has been fixed. Great!

Also it seems that one issue I had in beta 1 with synchronizing FD and NewsGator Online has been fixed. That issue was that if I deleted a channel in FD, it would get recreated when FD sync'd with NGOL. That behaviour doesn't seem to happen now - I deleted three channels yesterday; on sync this morning, FD did not retrieve those from NGOL (I haven't yet checked my NGOL to see if those channels are still there: I'd expect them to be deleted from NGOL as well).

One other thing - I have Internet Explorer 7 beta 1 for Win XP installed, which FD uses as its browser. Works absolutely fine, no issues with that. The only thing I've noticed is if I click on a link in a news item in the newspaper that takes me to the blog or site concerned, the status bar has an IE message saying that the phishing filter couldn't be loaded. But IE7 is a beta (as well!) so maybe it's more to do with that than with FD b3a.

Anyway, I think beta 3a is terrific, so looking forward to the next iteration!

Bland-looking but IE 7 works

For the past few weeks, I've been trying out the first beta version of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2, and I have to say that while its functionality is pretty good, I'm a bit underwhelmed by it.

Maybe my expectation was wrong but I was expecting to see something a little more visually exciting than it currently looks. All the talk about tabbed browsing being implemented and I was thinking that I'd see something that looks like Firefox, perhaps, even Maxthon, the IE-based browser I used for some years (when it was known as MyIE) before switching to Firefox last year.

No, it's all a bit bland-looking really.

That aside, it's pretty good in its functionality. Perhaps that's the key to how it might survive in a crowded browser market - it just works. And considering it's only a beta, I am impressed that I have had no crashes or failures so far.

Two new features that I like:

1. Integrated RSS bookmarking with a little orange button simply called 'Feeds.' It works nicely in adding RSS to your Favorites, although to make it work you need to make a change in the options settings (it would be smarter to make this behaviour the default). See this post on the IE7 developer blog for detail on IE7 and RSS. A good move to call it 'Feeds' - you and I know it's RSS but who really cares what it's called when all you want to do is grab the content? 'Feeds' is a much better name and will simplify all the techie-talk surrounding new media tools like RSS and thus aid its wider take up.

2. Phishing protection that alerts you if you're about to land on a potentially fraudulent web site. (Here's an explanation of phishing.) The IE7 documentation about the phishing filter and how it works is very good, clear and simply written so that just about anybody will understand what phishing is and why protection is a good idea.

So, initial impressions from using IE7 on and off over the past few weeks. It's not my default browser and not because it's a beta. I will stick with Firefox and probably consider at IE7 again once it's actually released, although using the betas will obviously influence my thinking. Meanwhile, I'll continue playing with it.

Trying out WordPress

In parallel with my Movable Type experiment, I started a WordPress blog last week.

I was pretty much decided on MT yet friends kept saying I shouldn't dismiss WordPress. So I thought, ok, let's take a look at it. The blog is running WP version 1.5.2.

I have to say I'm pretty impressed with it. Far easier to install and set up than MT. Changing the look-and-feel is also very easy, and seems much more so than with MT.

Then on Thursday, Six Apart released version 3.2 of Movable Type. That looks impressive and I will upgrade my MT 3.17 blog to it.

So nothing decided yet.

New Dell rig in place

Finally able to spend a little time with my new desktop PC - a Dell Dimension XPS Gen 5. Pretty good-looking, don't you think?

It arrived at the beginning of last week and I've now got everything unpacked, sitting on my desk and in use, sort of. Key apps like Microsoft Office, FeedDemon RSS reader, etc, installed. Most docs transferred from my laptop although still loads more to do. But at least I can use the new PC from now onwards for day-to-day business.

I must say that I'm very pleased with it. I didn't order the most top-of-the-range model (no Intel Pentium D processor, for instance, just the regular 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 processor supporting Hyper-Threading Technology) as the budget didn't quite go that far. Instead I settled on a mid-range customization that provides a great balance between price and performance.

I did go for additional RAM and a great 5-speaker sound system, and I did splash out on a gorgeous 19-inch flat panel monitor - the thing you stare at all day is worth that extra investment.

Some initial impressions:

New host and Movable Type

I made some final decisions this past week about long-term blog development:

1. I chose a hosting service - Total Choice Hosting. I kept encountering TCH in my searches, on visits to forums that talk about hosting services, plus asked a few people I know who use that service. All were good comments and strong recommendations. I especially like their support forums - very active participation by TCH people there. Friendly and very helpful. Plus they know about blogs, unlike nearly all of the other hosting services I looked at. I have a gig of disk space (more than enough for the forseeable future) and plenty of bandwith - 35 gigs a month. Bandwidth's the essential thing.
2. Now that I have a host, I decided to go ahead and set up Movable Type there and not continue with it on my local Windows PC. That really was too limiting - I want to get stuck into MT in a live environment, so to speak.

I've spent quite a bit of time this evening installing and configuring MT on the server, which went surprisingly easily thanks to an excellent little guide to installing MT that TCH produced including setting up MySQL. That guide plus the comprehensive MT manual helped enormously in a smooth install and configuration. In all, less than an hour's work to install and configure MySQL and MT, then a couple of hours playing with it all.

Immediate result - NevOn 2.0, a new blog that I'll be using mainly to comment on my experiences in discovering Movable Type and what you can do with it. One post there as of today.

I intend to develop that blog into my new primary blog and move my blogs on TypePad to the new location. But I'm not rushing this at all. I'd expect things to have progressed sometime during Q4.

So I did make a clear decision to go with MT and not WordPress. I did consider WP but decided that MT was the route I would go for future blog development. A couple of reasons, one being my sense of 'attachment' to Six Apart because I've been using TypePad for the past year and it's really with that hosted blog service, based largely on MT, that has helped me get to the knowledge level I have today regarding blogs and publishing platforms.

I'm looking forward to the next few months in learning the ins and outs of MT. I will be posting most commentary about that on the new NevOn 2.0.

Looking over Windows Vista

Last night, I was reviewing the various documentation for the Windows Vista beta 1 programme - release notes, readme, and setup guide. Although I am a participant in this testing programme, I haven't yet installed the beta nor downloaded it from the beta site. It's a 2.4 gig download (yes, gigs not megs) and I need to find a good chunk of dedicated time to actually get it.

But I've not yet decided whether to install and test this first beta. Mainly, I'm not sure I can dedicate my test PC for this right now because I'll need to do one of two things:

1. either install Windows Vista as the sole OS on that machine; or
2. partition the hard drive and install it in one of the partitions and so have the machine as a dual-boot machine.

Unlike Windows XP Service Pack 2 which I tested prior to its release last year, the Windows Vista beta cannot be installed as an upgrade to XP - you have to install it fresh, so to speak, what the setup guide calls a 'custom' installation (meaning a clean installation).

And, my test PC is the one on which I've just set up my Movable Type learning experiment! I really don't want to have to start over with all that installation again.

Last week, I ordered a new desktop PC from Dell - a Dimension XPS Gen 5 - on which I was expecting delivery sometime early next week. But, the order status on Dell's website now shows estimated delivery as the first week in September (due, I gather, to delays with the flat-panel monitor which are in big demand in Europe). So I won't have all the hardware I need until then.

But maybe this is a good thing. By the time September comes around, there will be lots of learning reported about Windows Vista beta 1 which will be helpful to every tester. Meanwhile, Paul Thurrott has an excellent series of reviews of beta 1.

One beta I do intend to test straightaway is the Internet Explorer 7 beta 1 standalone version for Windows XP SP2 (it also comes as part of the Vista beta). I'm curious in particular to see how the RSS integration works and see how the tabs look.

Movable Type and MySQL now tango!

Ok! Finally up and running with Movable Type!

Not getting MT 3.17 to run until now was definitely a MySQL configuration issue - but not wholly. I've solved the overall issue that prevented MT running at all, but I don't really know what the heart of the problem actually was. And the solution is a workaround and not the right long term solution.

The error I kept getting every time I ran the mt-load.cgi script was puzzling. But that was only one part of the problem. The other part concerned the MySQL Administrator and saving user settings in User Administration. What happened was that no matter what I did, I couldn't save any settings: every time I tried, I got this error:

Error while storing the user information. The user might have been deleted. Please refresh the user list.

A helpful pointer in a post in the Movable Type Community Forum took me to a bug report at MySQL with many users commenting on this error message. A bit of digging from there took me to a discussion thread in the MySQL Forums, where I tried the offered solution - uninstall the version of MySQL Administrator I had (1.1.0-rc) and download and install an earlier version (1.0.21).

So I did that - and saving user settings now works. So I was able to assign the MT schema privileges to the user I'd set up, and actually save those settings.

Yet running mt-load.cgi again still produced the same error message as before:

Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Access denied for user
'mt_user'@'localhost (using password: YES)

Then I tried something else - I edited the mt.cfg file to show the user as 'root.' And this time, running mt-load.cgi produced a successful result, showing that system initialization is now complete. Next, running mt.cgi was successful and I was able to log in to my new MT installation on a local PC. Fantastic!

So there's still something with 'mt-user' where it's not configured correctly somewhere. I will look into that, but at least I can now get moving with Movable Type.