NevOn Experimental

New home for NevOn Experimental

This is the last post on this blog hosted on TypePad.

Yesterday, I exported all the posts, comments and trackbacks here and imported that content into NevOn 2.0 Experimental, the new place for this blog using Movable Type and located on my hosted server account. A seamless process, incidentally.

I'll still be keeping this TypePad account open - my primary blog is still hosted by TypePad - but no more will be written here. Still quite a bit of work to do on the new home, but that's where I'll be writing from now on.

If you'd like to keep up with content, here are the new details:

• NevOn 2.0 Experimental - http://www.tle.us.com/weblogs/nevon/
• RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/nevon2

Note, though, that those addresses will change once I've completed the transition of my primary blog to NevOn 2.0, the new home for that blog using WordPress. As part of that transition, I'll be re-mapping domains so that www.nevon.net will be the root address.

I expect to complete all this by 1 January 2006 or sooner.

Trying out WordPress.com

As my podcasting partner Shel Holtz and I often say with tongues firmly in cheek, "We have copious spare time."

So with that in mind, I just started a new blog on WordPress.com, the new free blog hosting service launched in August by WordPress.

Very easy to set up and the admin interface is very similar indeed to that of WordPress itself, ie, what I see with this blog when I log in to it.

I received the invitation - you have to be invited - from Rob Safuto. Rob's also a multiple blogger - in addition to his excellent PodcastNYC, he also writes the highly-readable The New York Minute Show, an insider's podcast about the Big Apple, and the Red Room Chronicles, a blog about Marriott Hotels.

I'd actually received an invite from WordPress in September. But I didn't get around to activating it until last weekend - which is when I discovered that the invite expired after seven days.

Anyway, I have the new blog, just called Neville on WordPress.com. Not sure yet what I'll do with it nor how frequently I'll post to it.

Have to see how much of that copious spare time I can use.

(Cross-posted from NevOn 2.0, my WordPress experiment.)

Podcasting with an Alesis mixer

I bought a mixer on my trip to London a few days ago - an Alesis Multimix8 USB.

Among its many features are 8-channel mixing, 4 microphone/line inputs, a load of special effects as well as phantom power for a condenser microphone. Full specs here. Bundled with it is Cubase LE recording software. That's primarily intended for music mixing and I'll probably stick with Audacity for podcast voice recording.

I bought the Alesis at Maplin Electronics in Bayswater for just under 130 quid, along with a Shure C606 dynamic cardioid microphone. It all looks to be more than ample for what I want to do with audio recording for podcasting, at least at this point - an affordable hardware-based recording and mixing system that's easy to install and set up and isn't too complicated to figure out and use.

Installation was very easy - turn it on, plug the USB cable into the PC, turn on the PC and that was basically it. Windows XP saw it immediately and, after changing the default recording/playback settings in the control panel audio setup, I was good to go.

So I've been experimenting a bit today, and learning (or trying to at least) some new things. I'm sure I don't yet have the optimum settings for standard voice recording - this 5-minute test recording (MP3, 2Mb) might indicate that - so more trial-and-error testing ahead. I plan to use it when Shel and I record Monday's edition of For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report.

One issue I may encounter - echo when recording over Skype. Shel and I have had this problem for a while in our twice-weekly shows. The echo doesn't record but I certainly hear it. We think it's a mixer issue. So I wonder what will happen on Monday when I'm using this mixer and Shel's using his and we're recording over Skype...

Hedging my bets

I learned a new word recently - "slammed," your state of being when you have no time for almost anything except work, a state which seems to go on for ever. Can't yet find this definition in any dictionary, but it's quite an apt description of that state of being. Hence, no activity in this blog for nearly a month.

Re my experiments with Movable Type and WordPress, I spent a lot of time late last month in setting up the two blogs (MT here and WP here) as part of my learning process about each platform. As I've commented in this blog, I plan to use one of them as my new platform for my new primary blog - "NevOn 2.0" - which will be hosted on my own hosted server rather than through TypePad as a hosting service.

Even though I've not had time this past month to physically do much with those experimental blogs, I have been thinking a lot about my next steps.

This is what's in my mind right now - I will use WordPress as my primary blog platform.

My limited experience so far shows me very clearly that WordPress is much easier to use than Movable Type. So for my primary blog, I want a platform that enables me to achieve most of what I want to do, especially with look and feel, without constant recourse to help files or asking others for help. I read a good review in eWeek about WordPress.

Yet I still want to get to know Movable Type more, especially as in my perception it is more likely to be the platform that you'd want to go with if you were considering blogging within the enterprise, in particular with multiple blogs and/or multiple authors. As I talk to a lot of companies about corporate blogging, it's important to me that I can speak from a position of hands-on experience when discussing platforms. Then there are the plans announced by Six Apart last week on Project Comet, their vision for the future of blogs and platforms. Very interesting indeed.

So I'm going to hedge my bets.

What I'm thinking is that I'll develop my primary blog on WordPress and use Movable Type for secondary blogs like this one, NevOn Experimental (so maybe it was a subconscious reason why I switched styles yesterday on my MT experimental blog to match the style of this blog).

A major point still to decide - do I import all the content from my main blog to the new WordPress one, or not? Same with this blog to the MT one. Or do I leave them where they are and in effect start again with the new blogs? I've got a paid TypePad subscription through until the end of July 2006 so leaving them here isn't a problem for at least another 10 months.

The other thing, too, is the nevon.net domain name. That's currently mapped to both these TypePad blogs. I will re-map the domain to the new blog meaning that both of these TypePad blogs will revert to the underlying TypePad addresses. That will no doubt affect anyone who's bookmarked any specific blog posts, but I can't see how to avoid that.

I need to make a firm decision sooner rather than later, and then just do it...

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.

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 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.

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.

MySQL and Movable Type don't tango

I really would love to get stuck into trying out Movable Type for myself if I could get it to run.

No progress since I successfully installed it a few days ago on a local Windows PC running as a server. As far as I can tell, what's preventing me running MT isn't MT, it's MySQL.

Running the mt-check.cgi script produces a successful result - it tells me that MT is properly installed and set up and ready to go.

When I run the mt-load.cgi script, though, it stops very early in its execution with this error message:

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

The only difference from the error I first had is that, this time, the error includes a complete user name as I have uninstalled and reinstalled MySQL a couple of times.

I posted a comment about the error in the Movable Type Community Forum. Received a helpful response that was useful in initial troubleshooting, plus a link to a thread on the MySQL bugs section which indicates that there is a bug in the version of MySQL (4.1.13) that I have installed. Based on the final comment in the thread, I downloaded and installed the v5 beta.

That didn't work, unfortunately. I'm reasonably sure there must have been a step I missed somewhere before installing the beta as it resulted in major system instability (100% CPU use, sluggish performance, lack of responsiveness in the MySQL Administrator). So I uninstalled every MySQL instance, restarted the PC a couple of times during that process and re-installed 4.1.13 again.

Still this error when mt-load.cgi runs.

I'm actually stumped now. I need to retrace all steps again to make sure that there's not something I missed somwehere or did incorrectly at any stage in the overall installation, including checking into IIS. Trouble is, that's a left-brain approach whereas I'm definitely a right-brain kind of person ;)

So back to square one with no imminent solution. There has to be one - I just haven't found it yet.

[EDIT 31/7/05] Ok, reading the comprehensive MySQL Reference Manual, section 5.6.8 Causes of Access Denied Errors, has this explanation:

If you specify a hostname when trying to connect, but get an error message where the hostname is not shown or is an IP number, it means that the MySQL server got an error when trying to resolve the IP number of the client host to a name:

shell> mysqladmin -u root -pxxxx -h some-hostname ver
Access denied for user 'root'@'' (using password: YES)

This indicates a DNS problem. To fix it, execute mysqladmin flush-hosts to reset the internal DNS hostname cache.

I did the flush-hosts command and got this error:

Access denied for user 'ODBC'@' localhost' (using password: NO)

A bit more investigating needed. Getting closer, I think.