Welcome to the new Mssv! The most obvious change is that the design is different (easier to read, I hope) and that all three weblogs have now been merged together. I’m glad I tried the four-year long experiment of three different weblogs, but ultimately it didn’t work due to the fact that I only have a finite amount of spare time and I wasn’t updating the main article as often as I wanted to. I’m optimistic that this simpler structure will see me writing much more.
There are a few other nice bits and pieces on the weblog, mainly to do with Search (it exists now) and Comments. On the old weblog, comments were a complete pain both for reader to post and me to moderate, but things should be much easier now. There’s also a Recent Comment box on the sidebar to the right. Unfortunately, I’ve still lost a fair number of comments from the old weblog.
Basically, what happened is that I ran out of space on my webhost, and as a result the comments database file became corrupted. This is no excuse for Movable Type, which continued to act oddly after everything had been fixed, and so I resolved to finally switch over to Wordpress, a weblog engine that is under much more active development and is markedly more pleasant to use (although not perfect).
6 responses so far ↓
Rich // Oct 31, 2006 at 10:25 pm
After learning a bit of SPARQL, I’ve been overcome by a desire to write my own weblog engine again. I’d like to see if I can write a weblog system with categories and comments in under a hundred lines of code!
gordsellar // Nov 11, 2006 at 3:08 am
Well, how time flies.
The old version of mssv.net was what inspired me (along with Charlie Bell’s encouragement) to make myself a website, and then to make it a blog. I consider this site the granddad of my own site.
Nice to see grandpa’s got some new threads… and threads sewn by WordPress, no less. Looks good. Congratulations!
Adrian Hon // Nov 13, 2006 at 12:21 am
Thanks! I’m glad that the site was an inspiration… I certainly updated it a lot more back then. I just checked out your site again - how do you do those progress tracker things in the sidebar?
Also, I enjoyed reading your posts about meeting with Vinge on the Culture list - interesting stuff.
gordsellar // Nov 14, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Adrian,
The progress tracker plugin is Progressfly, available here. I don’t mind the fact you update less often. One thing I totally love is that your feed is merged… I used to have three feeds for your site and I prefer having the option of subscribing just to one.
Glad you enjoyed the musings on meeting Vinge. He’s a hell of a guy, Vernor is.
gordsellar // Nov 26, 2006 at 7:37 am
Actually, I have a reciprocal question: what are you using to get the Flickr images in your sidebar? I’m running WordPress 1.5.something and can’t seem to find anything to do that specifically.
Adrian Hon // Nov 27, 2006 at 2:21 pm
It’s a combination of the Wordpress Widget plugin and Flickr’s badge generator (http://www.flickr.com/badge_new.gne). There are a few Flickr widgets for Wordpress floating around the net, but none are particularly good, and I believe Flickr’s own one is the only that will choose random photos.
I customised the HTML of the badge to remove various bits and pieces - feel free to lift the code!
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