Just now finally got around to upgrading the version of Movable Type driving this X-POLLEN blog. Since I installed version 2.5 there was a 2.51 upgrade and possibly a 2.52, and then the recent more substantial release of 2.6, quickly followed by bugfixes 2.61 and 2.62. So I managed to avoid a lot of interim upgrades.
Now I have to poke around a little, make the comments closeable (Textpattern has a nice feature that makes comments close after x amount of time, such as two weeks), maybe choose a Create Commons license for my various MT-driven sites, see what else is new.
I also finally installed pMachine today. It looks kind of cool but probably not worth switching anything over for. The pro version has some droolworthy features but then the teaser's for the upcoming pro version of MT sounds awfully good too.
categories: movablefeats x-syndicate
9:17:38 PM 
say what []
Every six months or so I go back to this Webmonkey article from 1997 on how to set up the .htaccess and .htpassword files on an Apache server to password-protect a directory. I'm posting it here because I needed to refer to it today and it belongs in the RFB web-design (category "fireweaver") knowledge base.
categories: fireweaver
9:15:47 PM say what []
In my continuing but insane effort to download and install just about every blog or thin-CMS tool I can find, I've got Dean Allen's Textpattern up and running on my server. For the moment, I'm using it for a dummy blog currently called x-ism.
It's not all working yet, and I'm still getting the hang of the templates, spigots, and forms; especially how everything nests together and cascades, but it's already very cool. It's elegant (of course) and potentially very powerful.
In some ways it seems very close to my imaginary PEP project. One thing I've been trying to figure out lately is how to turn my old Enterzone 'zine into a database-backed site, bring over the best of the old content, and start publishing there again more actively. In the back of mind, I've been thinking lately that I'll probably use MT or possibly pMachine to do that, but now I'm wondering whether Textpattern might not be a very powerful way of assembling such a 'zine site.
All of this goes against my other impulse, which is to simplify, consolidate, and reduce the proliferation of alternate publishing tools I'm using. The tension between these two impulses is healthy, though, and as long as I document my findings and decisions, I can provide some value to other people from my own trials and errors.
categories: metablog
2:16:16 PM say what []
