The Blogstyles design just wasn’t working for me. So I’m using Neil Turner’s design for now. Usable, looks good and lets me concertrate on the blogging until I figure out MT’s design workings.
Movable Type Goodness
Mark Pilgrim has some cool MT stuff. So does Neil Turner. And I found MTPlugins which is pretty cool. And this Movable Type template tutorial is quite good.
Maybe I’ll get MT figured out enough to make it look nice.
New Style
I got a style from Blogstyles just to jumpstart the new design. I don’t like it that much but at least it gives me something other than the default MT styles. I just don’t have a lot of time to design right now.
So far I’m liking Movable Type better than PMachine, althought it is unfortunate that my posts wouldn’t import without serious work. I may get around to typing them in someday.
LISHost.com
Well I got set up with Blake at LISHost.com. I’m not moving the blog immediately as I want to spend I little time learning Blake’s setup and moving the blog over to Movable Type. PMachine is nice but it’s definitely very Mac oriented and isn’t nearly as widely adopted and not quite as feature rich as MT. So for the next little bit the blog will still be on the Mac in an effort to make the transition as painless as possible.
Maybe now I can concentrate on actual blogging.
Changes
Decided to keep the blog on the Mac and keep using PMachine. It works and a barely have time to blog, much less tinker with a server. That being said I’m pondering moving librarymonk.com to LISHost.com In fact I probably will soon. Getting the Ph. D. and other things has caused a serious reallocation of my time and I don’t have much time to tinker anymore.
And there are might be better/cheaper hosts out there but I like the fact that LIS Host is librarian oriented. Because while my ALA accredited degree says Information Sciences and the Ph. D. is Communications, I am after all a Library Monk.
Downtime and Changes
The server had a bit of downtime due to an unnoticed router issue that has since been fixed. I guess that proves how busy I’ve been that I hadn’t noticed.
LibraryMonk will be moving soon to a dedicated WinXP machine from the Mac OS X machine it is on now. I know, I know the inner geek screams in horror. Win XP isn’t really a server operating system and it’s Windows even worse. Mac OS X (non server) has some serious quirks that bug me as far as a server goes, makes a great media machine though.
Then there is Linux. I ran Mandrake for a while and I like it well enough, but software compatibilty is an issue. So I’ll try win XP and see how that goes.
I’m also pondering switching blog systems, maybe Blosxom or Movable Type.
Cyborg Liberation Front
Saw this artice about the World Transhumanist Association conference at Yale University. This conference examines the implications of a human/tech melding to become “post-human”.
To me this seems like people who have only seen ancient single sailed boats, trying to understand the International Space Station. Sure, they could speculate and they might have a metaphor in space as sea, shuttle as boat, but they really couldn’t understand.
This debate may help us understand what a human is. But to quote Bonnie Kaplan, chair of Yale’s Technology and Ethics Working Group, “My gut says we’ll never have the answer to that question we first raised thousands of years ago: Who are we?”
Digital Gutenberg
The University of Texas at Austin now has their Gutenberg Bible online. As this CNN article states it’s not the first one to go online. But the more copies that go digital, the less the originals get used. And more people can use the digital copies. So the work is more widely distributed and the original is preserved. Sounds good to me.
And now for something completely different
A friend of mine told me about this site which is a pretty harsh counterpoint to the idea that vegetarianism is better for the planet etc, than eating meat. Specifically this site deals with the fact that animals are routinely killed as collateral damage in gain harvesting.
I grew up on a farm. We raised animals for meat, and I have been to stockyards and slaughterhouses. I have seen rabbits and other wildlife killed because they were in the path of farm machinery. The point is nobody has the moral high ground here. Some farming practices may be harder on animals than they need to be. Stockyards are not nice places. On the flip side, wildlife die to harvest the soybeans for that soy burger.
I rarely eat red meat and tend to eat more soy and grains. That’s a health choice not a moral one. Why can’t people like the guy that behind this grain harvesting kills site and PETA see that there is a middle here and mellow out a bit?
Software that works
A couple of days of ago I installed the alpha of Thunderbird, the mail client from the folks now known as the Mozilla Foundation. My early impression is that it’s as good as any mail client out there, but being an alpha it of course lacks polish.
Slightly more polished (beta) is the RSS reader FeedDemon. I like it quite a bit. It’s very easy to use and nicely laid out. Maybe now I can find more interesting things to post here at Library Monk.
And then there is Sizer. It’s a freeware app that resizes windows. Very handy for web designing. I’m glad I found it because the software I’d been using since 1999 to do that kind of thing, BrowserMaster, doesn’t work very well anymore and appears to be abandonware.