Tag: open source

Categories
meta technology

Moving

I have been looking for a long time to migrate to a new blogging platform. I thought WordPress looked promising, but it could not handle my multi-blog wishes (I am unwilling to install multiple copies of the software just to run multiple blogs). I finally discovered b2Evolution. Why did nobody ever tell me about this before. It springs from the same roots as WordPress, but it supports multiple blogs and multiple languages besides the skins, valid code, open source licensing and everything else that WordPress offers.The installation was a 6 minute installation, not as famous as the “famous 5 minute installation” from WordPress, but still very simple. The only trouble was that I am extremely picky about changing the look of my site, so I started by creating a new skin before I moved over to the new platform. I am now moved and these MovableType blogs will now be consigned to the archives. I will leave the static pages up so that there will be no broken links, but the only change I will make over here from now on will be to make sure that those static pages link back to the live b2E blogs.

My new feed is located here. It is RSS2 but if you go to my new site you can also find feeds to my posts or comments in earlier versions of RSS or Atom.

Categories
technology

50 million

I really enjoyed seeing this on Slashdot Firefox Breaks 50,000,000 Barrier. It was also fun to go to Blazing a Trail to 50,000,000 and watch as the counter shows that another 44,000 plus downloads have taken place in the six hours since then. Let the good times roll.

Categories
technology

Acid Test Results

Just for fun I ran Firefox (1.0.3) and IE 6 (XP SP2 etc.) through The Second Acid Test after hearing the Safari passed the test. I was slightly disappointed to find that Firefox had problems with: shrink-to-fit on floating elements, paint ordering, collapsing margins and some CSS Table elements.

I was pleasantly surprised by IE6 though.

It rendered the CSS 1 properly.

Categories
technology

Trash IE 6

I just spent 5 hours working on some beautiful, valid CSS because it was not rendering correctly in IE 6. It worked perfectly in Firefox. After all that work I came up with ugly and almost valid CSS that functions in both browsers – because I have to. I’d rather just put: Get Firefox! on the site and tell IE users to trash IE 6.

Categories
life meta technology

WordPress(MU)

I have been hoping to move to WordPress as a show of my support for Open Source Software, and to keep myself free of the constraints of the free license for Movable Type. So far those constraints have not been a problem for my needs, but I would hate to move to another platform in a crunch so I am looking while it is anything but urgent.

Unfortunately my needs include having multiblog support because I am unwilling to run multiple sets of tables to manage my multiple blogs and I want some central control for all my blogging. This meant that I had to find and attempt to use WordPress MU. I finally got it installed, but for some reason it does not produce blogs, just entries in my tables. Well, actually it produced a blog at wp.php rather than index.php but for the non-admin blogs it produced table entries only.

I considered some other OSS platforms for my site blogs, but I decided that – at least for now – they are not what I want. I have finally concluded that I have spent too much time on this project and I would rather devote myself to another, more altruistic, project on another site where I will be combining the wordpress software with phpGedView for a platform which will support online genealogy collaboration

While I will be focusing on that project, I would welcome any suggestions as to how to implement an OSS platform for multiple blogs that I can easily customize to look just like my current site and be fully valid XHTML.

Categories
technology

OpenCD

I moved to the University of Missouri and within two days I met one of my fellow students who introduced me to TheOpenCD. I have always been a proponent of free and open source software but not an activist. I have also always wanted to find a good suite of programs that would make a linux desktop functional for everyday use by everyday users – something that could be used by the people I help rather than by people who are intimately comfortable with their computers. TheOpenCD provides a good base for such a computer. I was impressed by the range of software provided. Some of it I already use, such as OpenOffice, Firefox, and 7-Zip, but I think I could replace almost all the rest of the software that I regularly use with programs included on TheOpenCD. It looks like the momentum is building for Microsoft independence.