Since I signed up to TextDrive I’ve been planning this move. Finally, after several weekends of intense inactivity punctuated with the occasional burst of activity, the blog should be moved. Pretty much all the links should be working, but email me if anything is mis-behaving.
TextDrive
I’ve had no real complaints with my old host, Gradwell. Sure, the web control panel needed some interface work, and they weren’t as up to date with new software, but they were solid enough and the support was prompt. The recent TextDrive lifetime hosting offer was enough to tempt me. Given that I was already a Strongspace user the $500 deal ended up paying for itself in a year. Add in great support (both via the forums or via email), up to date software packages and the fact that they donate 50% of their profits to supporting a selection of open source software development and I was sold. Needless to say I’ve not been disappointed since my move.
Wither MovableType – and TextPattern
Yes, after using MovableType for many years I’ve also switched blogging software. My original choice was TextPattern which I use to run another site. I like TextPattern a lot – it’s interface, easy install, ease of customisation. One thing I don’t like is the problematic handling of clean URLs. I needed to remap easily URLs from the old blog to the new using mod_rewrite, and it was very hard with Textpattern. In the end WordPress made the process much simpler. TextPattern does have a steep learning curve – but if the way it decides to handle URLs works for you and like the extreme customisation possible then it might be the one for you.
Enter WordPress
In desperation after many weekends of TextPattern tweaking I tried installing WordPress. As the documentation suggests it really does only take five minutes to install. I’ve bee greatly impressed. The admin interface is clean, there are a wealth of plugins available (and can be easily managed), and the theme handling is very handy for a compulsive tweaker like myself.
Hemingway
The design is a slightly modified “Hemingway” theme. The original really is a very nice piece of work. Over the coming weeks I plan to continue to tweak it, but I’ll be keeping the changes small and incremental – there have been enough changes recently!
Update I’ve fixed a problem with the montly archive links from the old site not working. Images in articles seem screwed up right now though – but I can’t fix that while behind a corporate firewall Images should now be fixed too.
All highly subjective, but it’s my blog and I don’t care what you damn hippies think.
Java and C#
They’re established, with big crowds. with lots of internationally well known teams. Java, feeling more European, is Football – C#, Basketball..
Smalltalk
A language beloved by it’s fans which turns on itself and ultimately ruins much of its promise, resulting in droves of potential fans deserting it. Smalltalk is Ice Hockey – or perhaps baseball…
Read the rest of this entry »
Carlos make a very interesting point concerning my suprise that Flickr haven’t invested in functional testing:
…[not testing can incur] less upfront [costs] and more maintenance costs over time. As a startup (well, before they were acquired by Yahoo, anyway), this makes sense: the whole point of a startup is that you can do riskier things, and they guessed at some point that automatically testing anything but the most significant bits (smoke tests?) wasnt as important as getting code out the door, fast, and obssessively listening and reacting to user feedback. This probably required keeping insane levels of attention to detail and commitment, which is quite rare I might add, but a great part of what I attribute to their success.
Read the rest of this entry »
Just for a bit of fun, I thought I’d see how many of the people over on the Rails mailing list were actually getting to use it in their day jobs. Completely unscientific, and obviously a completely self-selecting sample group, but like I said it’s just a bit of fun.
Read the rest of this entry »
-
Shows how to attach custom
CSS to any site using firefox
-
Allows you to attach custom DHTML to any site using this firefox extension
-
Think of it as Tomcat + the servlet
API, only for Python rather than Java
-
The excellent MT plugin that forces moderation of tracbakcs and comments on old (spam attracting) posts
-
A O’Reilly introduction to mod_security
-
The Apache mod_security blog
-
The website for the apache security book
-
-
A distributed transactional cache
-
-
Interview with 37Signals covering Ruby on Rails and Basecamp
-
A very smal database, suitible for bundling with applications
-
-
An opensource JMS implementation with some nice documentation
-
Using message hospitals to handle OpenAdaptor messages that can’t be processed
-
A fantastic online tool – give it a website, and it’ll extract the colours used
-
456 Berea Street on floats
-
-
-
-
Either genius, insane, a giant scam or all three…
-
An EAI framework
-
Using Javascript to create a gradual fade to show change.
-
A paper by Pramod Sadalage and Martin Fowler on managing DB change
-
You really don’t need the Yak hair
-
-
I wanted the first one, and I really want this one.
-
Damien on different types of grid solutions
-
-
Part of tthe Open Adaptor OS project, bhavaya provides a realtime view of relation DB’s
-
-
Bastards!
-
An online currency convertor
-
From the maker of SmartCVS comes a subversion client
-
An ItelliJ plugin that works with a server-side component to provide notification as to when a
CVS or Subversion repository changes
-
-
Curio is apparently “The Ultimate Idea Development Environment for Mac OS X” – but think flowcharts and it makes more sense
-
-
A basic plugin for the very good code coverage tool
-
Finds duplication in Java and .NET code
-
A few gotchas in Java, including information on why finalize is pretty much useless
