Blog Book? Yeah. Blog Book!

Can you imagine turning your blog into a book? Sounds crazy right? Well it is but that didn't deter Stephen Cavers from publishing Raised by Penguins, a blog in book form.

What's really cool is this book is pretty good. Yes, I have it in my bathroom and... well... reading a few pages (blog entries) helps move things along... if you know what I mean. And that's a compliment, believe me.

I really like what Cavers has done here. If you haven't bought a copy, run over to Cafe Press and get your copy today.

I was so excited to get my copy I took a couple of pictures. Sorry, I don't have any of me actually reading the book since I'm usually dropping the kids off at the pool while reading it. ;o)

Converted

I think I've converted just about all my templates to MT. The blog still works pretty much like the old Blogger blog but with MT under the hood. New features will be added soon.

More about the MT conversion

There are a couple of things about the conversion from Blogger to Movable Type that I'm not thrilled about but I'm deciding to live with.

The first issue is that I lost about half of my comments. As I stated last month, I had tried to import all of my dotComments powered comments into Movable Type but that process proved buggier than I'd hoped (though I expected it to go wrong, most of this stuff does and it's when things go RIGHT that I'm surprised). I'm not entirely sure what choked the comment imports but I think I lost every comment from 2004 and a few from 2003. I imagine with patience, time and effort I could have pinpointed exactly what was causing my import troubles and discovered a remedy but as a friend suggested, it's not THAT important. Yes, your comments are very important to me and I'm sorry to see them go but it's not like we've lost Hamlet or something.

The second thing that is annoying is that MT does this whole template thing. In Blogger you pretty much have one template. Every page looks like that template. But in MT, you have distinct templates for every page it outputs. So, there are index templates, archive templates, category templates, etc. And each one uses different proprietary tags that mean I can't just copy/paste my index template into my archive template. I must edit the tags, which really isn't all that difficult to do but it's something I didn't have to do at all in Blogger.

Also, I'm told that WordPress only uses one template and so now I'm just wishing that MT would have a capability where I can turn OFF some features. Like, shouldn't I be able to disable the archive template feature and tell it to just use my index template? I think so. Maybe they have this version 3.0? I must check that out soon.

The last thing that sort of has me bummed out (but I knew about and expected) about this conversion is that ALL of my old Blogger links have changed. I should probably go through and set up redirects or modify my .htaccess to fix this but I probably won't get around to that for a while. So, in the meantime I have two sets of archives and while your links to the old stuff still works, those old Blogger templates won't be updating anymore.

*Sigh*

Gmail Invites

Apparently I have three more Gmail invites. No idea why but I do. If you want one and don't have one then send me a message and maybe you'll get one. Friends have a better chance of getting one than complete strangers.

Now Movable Type

Well, this is the very first post on this blog in Movable Type. Things are different now and I'm less excited about this than I thought I would be when I first decided to convert this to MT last year. Two things:

1. Blogger has improved considerably (though Blogger may still crap out at random but I don't post enough on it to know for sure).

2. Movable Type has become less fun because of it's freaky licensing agreement (more on that later).

I was able to import all of my Blogger posts so that was good. I wasn't able to import all of the dotComments Comments so that was bad.

The advantages of Movable Type still exist. It's on my server. It's in a searchable DataBase. The MT software is pretty flexible (I'm still on 2.66 so no licensing crap to deal with... yet).

So, in all, I'm happy. Things I've learned, carefully pick your comment management tool. Anyway, expect lots of fiddling with this site for the next few days. Some links may not work, so don't worry. I'll get to it when I get time.

Oh yeah, I was out of town for 9 days so that's why I didn't get to this sooner.