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I thought that I’d post some brief comments about the new design of this site (later, I’ll post about the WordPress Hacks I’ve used). As much as anything, it will serve as a reminder to myself when I forget how the heck I did something. I also found that when I saw something I liked on another site, I missed an explanation of how it was done. I plan to link to this post on the About page, so that anyone who gets the same feeling coming here will have some answers.

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Mark Bernstein has been commenting on comments on blogs (if that isn’t too recursive for you). He wrote:

Comments don’t belong in weblogs.

I don’t agree, at least in a global way. First, I think that people are entitled to make whatever they want of their own weblog—it’s their own space. Some people see their weblog as a kind of considered thinking space which they want to control quite tightly. Others welcome the interesting chaos that allowing commenting can provide. I’m definitely of the latter opinion.

Perhaps I’ve just been lucky—apart from comment spam and the odd childish contribution like “u smell”¹, which I treat with the contempt and indifference they deserve, people who comment here mostly provide funny, informative and interesting contributions, and that adds greatly to this site. I suppose that if I ran a very political or controversial site, I might have more of a problem with trolls, but I still don’t think that commenting per se is bad—it all depends on how well-behaved your audience is.

¹ Actual comment, now deleted.

The comments feed seems to be behaving a little erratically, and is only updating intermittently. I’ll look into it and see if there’s a way to fix it. Anyway, the main posts feed seems to be working fine. I meant to point out yesterday that there are also feeds for the comments on individual posts, if you are following a particular discussion. The link is just above the comments form on the individual entry page.

There’s a nice round up of the available keyboard-driven launchers over at MacDevCenter. The author has some very complimentary things to say about Quicksilver, despite being a self-confessed LaunchBar addict. It’s worth a read if you’re thinking about using a launcher of some kind.

I—of course—am not at all impartial on the matter either…

I said earlier that I would write about why I’ve made the move from Movabletype to WordPress. I want to say right at the start that my decision really isn’t a criticism of Movabletype. It has served me extremely well for more than a year, and has made my life immeasurably easier. But one thing I’ve found as I’ve been keeping this blog is that your needs (and skills) change as time goes on, so that you can’t necessarily forsee what you will need in a blogging tool a year or two years down the line. The thing that prompted my itchy feet in the end was the problem of rebuilding the site.

Movabletype (MT) and WordPress (WP) have a lot of similarities (indeed, many of the new features I’ve included in my new design could have been accomplished with MT), but one fundamental difference: MT produces static web pages, and WP produces dynamic ones. This difference is an important one; every time the content of the page needs to change in a static system (which can happen quite frequently with a weblog with comments, trackbacks and so on), the entire page needs to be rebuilt. If you have monthly and category archives, those pages need to be rebuilt too. Rebuilding is pretty speedy when you have a small number of posts, but it gets slower as time goes on and you accumulate more content. However, with a dynamic system, the changes are made the instant someone reloads the page.

I tried a number of different blogging tools, but eventually settled on WP after setting up a test blog and playing with it for a while. It’s a great system—extremely easy to install and configure, and yet with a lot of scope for advanced customization. Better yet, it’s Open Source, so anyone can contribute hacks and fixes for it. It’s also free as in beer. Not that I begrudge paying for software, especially something that I depend on every day. I donated to MT when I started using it, and I consider that money very well spent.

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I’ve finished the bulk of the tinkering now, so you should see a shiny new PHP-based design, powered by WordPress. I’ll write more later on why I made the move from Movabletype, but for now I’m a bit exhausted. I’ve added redirects from the main index page of the old blog, as well as redirects for the individual archive pages, so with any luck, permalinks shouldn’t break. Your mileage may vary…

Some of the older entries look odd because I wrote them using Textile, so I’ll gradually clean them up. Let me know what you think. Oh, and don’t forget to update your RSS newsreader with the new feed addresses (see the bottom of the sidebar to the right).

Through Green Fairy, I’ve just discovered Wordsmith’s wonderful Word-a-Day site. She mentioned a couple of brilliant words that I hadn’t heard of before. I’m now going to have to find excuses to slip them into casual conversation:

Strikhedonia - The pleasure of being able to say ‘to hell with it’

Sphallolalia - Flirtatious talk that leads nowhere

Sphallolalia–it even sounds seductive.

I love words, and one of my favourite books is a dictionary of words for which no words exist: the excellent Deeper Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. All of Douglas Adams’ books make me roar out loud with laughter, but this one is useful and funny. For example, haven’t you always wanted a word for ‘an agonizing situation in which there is only one possible decision but you still can’t take it’ (Abalemma, n.)? It’s one of those books that makes you constantly read bits out to anyone else who happens to be in the room (there ought to be a word for that but there isn’t), so I could quote sections ad nauseam, but I’ll try to restrict myself to just a few favourites:

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I found this great (and funny) phrasing of a moral dilemma today (via jb’s blog). After I’d read it (and laughed my head off), I remembered that I’d seen something similar ages ago, but I still got suckered in.

I’m going to do something very British here, and talk about the weather. But the reason I’m doing so is because of the very un-British weather we’ve been having today—with me so far?

The weather in Britain is generally defined by its moderation. It doesn’t get very hot, it doesn’t get very cold, and it often drizzles half-heartedly for days on end rather than having a jolly good downpour and getting it all over with. I don’t know what has been going on for the past two days, but it seems as if the British weather has been trying on some tropical weather systems for size, just for kicks. I was off-sick today, and feeling very wan after only two hours of sleep last night (I’ll spare you the details), so I watched the sudden changes in the weather with the words what the hell is going on forming on my lips.

First, it was very bright and sunny, with barely a breath of wind. Then—without so much as a by-your-leave—a huge wind blew up, a ground-shaking clap of thunder made me jump out of my chair, and hailstones the size of beans pummelled the earth for few minutes. Then everything abruptly stopped, the sun came out, and the wind completely stopped. This pattern cycled two or three times during the day. It’s just not on.

Several weeks ago, the Plecostomus fish in our tank at work died (it seems to be a difficult time for fish), and the tank has been getting progressively more obscured by algae growing on the glass. Plecostomuses (or perhaps Plecostomi?) feed on algae by scraping it off with their sucker-like mouths, and are ruthlessly efficient at keeping the tank clean. David has a nice picture of his pleco, George, doing just that here.

When I came in this morning, I was surprised to see a huge (well, 15 cm long) new pleco in the tank, busily suckering its way around the glass. It’s a mesmerising sight from the other side, watching the mouthparts working away at a frantic pace. I once had to catch our former pleco when we had to drain the tank temporarily. I don’t recommend it as an experience; it suckered itself on to my palm and started rasping away, making me go “Yeurghh!”. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it was a mildly unpleasant surprise.

Now we have to think of a name for New Pleco.

I’ve just watched a wonderful short documentary about the photographer Simon Norfolk. He’s a war photographer now, but not in the usual photojournalist sense. He goes into war zones after the battle is over and takes stunningly beautiful–but also very humane–photographs of the effect of war on the landscape with a large format landscape camera. He consciously uses the language of Classical landscape painting: a beautiful landscape in the background, glowing light on the horizon, a ruined building, and an innocent shepherd boy in the foreground. The colours are rich, and he brings out all the detail and texture of these ravaged landscapes.

The photographs are shocking, but not because they are gory or graphic; they show the full devastion that war leaves in its wake, in all its beautiful, horrifying detail. I’m always fascinated by the way artists talk about and approach their work. In the film he visited a site in Bosnia where mass graves containing over 600 bodies had been found. Mounds and pits were formed by the excavation, and the water in the hollows had frozen over. Simon decided not to take the landscape–which would have been just documenting the site in a rather cold way–but focused on the air bubbles trapped in the ice. They made him think that people might still be trapped underneath, imprisoned, waiting to be revealed like the truth when the ice melted in the spring. The results were abstract and delicately beautiful, but when you know about the location, they are completely disturbing.

He also had a magnificent rant about the sterility and banality of modern art. Unfortunately, I didn’t get an exact quote down, but he was saying that making a head out of your own blood isn’t controversial or shocking, but the fact that human bones and body parts are uncovered when the villagers clear some land to make a football pitch is shocking.

I’ve had two shocks today:

1. I had a nasty moment when I thought that Brian Eno’s prodigious talent might have completely evaporated overnight–just like that.
2. When I checked my email on Mailsmith this morning, I heard a loud buzzing alongside the normal notification sound. I thought that one of the drivers must have come adrift in the speakers, but I eventually checked my notification preferences. If you use Mailsmith, take a look at the notification preferences today (I’m not giving anything away…). Any company that takes the trouble to build an April Fool’s joke into their software (well ahead of time) is alright by me.