Michael K Pate
December 23, 2004
Comment spam attacks on Movable Type weblogs are straining servers at web hosting companies, leading some providers to disable comments on the popular blogging tool. The issues are caused by bugs in MT, forcing publisher Six Apart to recommend configuration changes while it prepares fixes. The server load issues have affected "a number of web hosts," according to Six Apart's Jay Allen, and are "especially evident in shared hosting environments." Allen said the problems are tied to two bugs that cause Movable Type to rebuild posts even when no pages are being changed, allowing comment spam attacks to tie up server resources. Six Apart is promising a fix within 48 hours. - NetCraft
I would also like to thank and recognize my employer Six Apart for not only making these last two releases a part of my job but allowing me to make it a priority over other extremely important items related to Movable Type product development. What a great company I work for. They h...
December 21, 2004
I was looking all over for someone who did Online Caricatures the other day. I couldn't find one. Fortunately, though, my brother knew of Yir-Caricatures! I plan to order something from them very soon.
December 09, 2004
I just got an e-mail from Mochi Kagami, proprieter of
Viva la Japonesa . He is the first Blogger user that I have seen who customized a version of Kubrick for his site. He also pointed out to me a problem with rendering in IE which I will be looking into.
December 02, 2004
I created my first MSN space back in the days of the Japanese Beta. This new space is a lot nicer. But I have to wonder what Phil will think ?
December 01, 2004
Shelley Powers is upset with Marc Cantor over his betrayal of a Confidence . Up until now, I have been largely indifferent over this whole Product Placement argument. But I am firmly on Shelley's side.
The single biggest reason that the Internet has changed everything over the last ten years is not that it is world wide. Printing Presses have been around for centuries. It is not that it is immediate. Television has had global satellite capabilities since the late 1960's. It is the fact that it is low-cost.
Never before have so many people been able to say so much to so many others so cheaply.
The powers that be don't like that. The fact that a bunch of people saying what they think could say what they thought without answering to anyone (or even getting dressed ) troubles them. They are trying to strike back . But even as they replace old faces with new ones, the new ones are still utterly out of touch .
I have a real job. Where I do real things. And get paid r...
November 10, 2004
The Sebring Historical Society is the place to visit when you are looking for the history of Sebring, Florida. Be sure and give check out there site.
November 02, 2004
My Polling Place
Originally uploaded by michaelkpate . I didn't go inside (didn't need to since I had voted early) but there were certainly a lot more cars there than I had ever seen. Note: you can't see the alternate parking lot which was also full.
This is the official view from the Supervisor of Election's website.
October 18, 2004
I am trying to decide if the update makes any difference with the template I am using.
September 25, 2004
First Charley, then Frances, Now Jeanne. This has been quite a hurricane season. We are opening the shelter around 3 pm this afternoon. Should be another fun time.
September 17, 2004
Phil Ringnalda has an updated BlogThis for Firefox which came in handy when creating this post.
September 17, 2004
I decide to try a new look for a little while. It may be a bit familar to fans of Michael Heilemann's Kubrick . If you would like to do something similar, be sure and check out Kubrick for Blogger .
September 03, 2004
This is a test post from my Treo to see if I set this up correctly.
September 03, 2004
One of the duties of my job is to be a Red Cross Volunteer. Even though I have been there 5 years, I have never actually had to do it. And an oddly-timed communication outage apparently meant that I was excused during Charley.
This time, things are different. I will be one of 5 people operating a shelter at South Florida Community College from noon today until a project noon on Monday. As long as my cell phone works, I will try to remember to post periodically about the experience.
August 23, 2004
This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.
August 11, 2004
At one time, it would have seemed inconceivable but it seems to be a fairly regular occurence of late.
So, why did I change back to Blogger, a piece of software that I had written off about a year ago? Here is the story. - Steven Cohen
Here's to a new home with an old friend. - Tony Steidler-Dennison
That’s it. That’s why I love Blogger, it’s easy and fun. - Sonny P.
I wonder how many more would do it if Blogger offered an import function ?
August 07, 2004
Elise Bauer has done a very interesting study of the web tools market . It seems that my recent supposition may be coming to pass.
I wonder if this trend continues, how long support for Movable Type will continue?
August 06, 2004
Around a year ago, I happened across this quote.
Movable Type , Textpattern and WordPress , have made this possible for a whole range of people; from web designers to writers, all with little or no knowledge of HTML. - zlog
Today, one day short of a year later, I happened across this one.
Well since MT is no longer aimed at just the average weblogger that wants to talk about politics or his/her life, 6A haven’t bothered including features like a Link Manager or even Typelists for that matter. In the context of MT, these things really don’t need to be built into the app as they would just increase bloat. - Arvind
When the first quote was written, MT was my only choice. Now it is a distant third. Textpattern has become my first love, but WordPress has many features that it lacks at present. Only if neither of them will do, will I look to MT.
I still find that somewhat depressing.
August 03, 2004
Some days, I think eventually there will be as many blogging tools as there are bloggers. But even that won't cause the endless debates about which tool is better to cease.
What I have always said still goes. Choose the one that does what you want or need to do the way that is most efficient or easiest or best-looking or whatever criteria you want to use. For me, that has long been Movable Type . Lately, though, I have been thoroughly exploring both WordPress and Textpattern .
Repeat after me: None of them is perfect. But each one does a lot of cool things. The trick is to choose the one that best fits the task at hand. And that most likely will not even be the same for each person.
June 24, 2004
We've had an internal project for about two weeks to redesign Weblogs.Com and to add a key new feature to the site, the ability to create a weblog on this site, from the home page of the site. - Dave Winer , March 19, 2000
We're going to start the transition to the new backend server for weblogs.com, now, at approx 2PM Pacific. Some things won't work at first. The three-hour queue will get flushed this one time. The changes file may not update for a few minutes. And it may take some time for the DNS change to percolate. But the backend will be faster when all this is done. - Dave Winer , March 17, 2003
In that management change it became clear that there were two sort of branches to userland. There was one which was the commercial products (which radio userland and manilla were the two products), and there was another branch that consisted of formats and protocols and open stuff that was non commercial. So we divided it along those lines, to keep the non-commercial ...
June 16, 2004
Remember when I wrote about the domain name I wanted so badly ? The number in the title reflects the actual date I became interested in it. It actually took a mere 73 days for the registrar to release it.
Either way, it is mine, all mine.
Curious as to what domain it is? Well, go ahead and take a look .
Now, what should I do with it? Launch an anti-war site ? Actually, I have something else in mind.
June 15, 2004
Thanks to the weblog community for embracing the Weblogs.Com site, and for working with UserLand, even though some think we're the Microsoft of this little corner of the Internet. (One weblogger calls me the equivalent of Bill Gates, without the power, money or looks!) - Dave Winer
Many people are in the process of leaving Weblogs.com (whether they like it or not). Of course, unlike most of us who were able to switch away from Movable Type in a few hours, they don't have access to their own data .
Anyway, as I did with Movable Type, I thought it would be worthwhile to investigate how to make a move.
Apparently, you can use this tool to export your site to Radio Userland. Moving is probably the easiest route. Right after finding another Website Hosting Services > Manila" href="http://www.edithere.com/directory/22/websiteHostingServices/manila">Manila Host which Rogers is advocating .
Assuming you are looking for a new tool and you have you...
June 10, 2004
I am a big believer in PageRank. I have performed more than one experiment with it. I have started more than one site with zero pagerank just to see how I could get fast I could make them a success. You can read some of my other writings on the subject.
Third Superpower and PageRank
LibraryPlanet.com and PageRank
In this case , I chose to support Anil because I thought he asked nicely enough. I also chose to do it because I wanted to show that even though I am unhappy with some of the recent business decisions that SixApart has made, there were no personal feelings involved.
I also believe that the blogosphere has the power to make postive change and PageRank helps us do that. This was a good experiment to see what we could do. And it worked out pretty well.
If anyone thinks I did the wrong thing, you have my humble apology. If I had happened across someone else's post first, I might have done things different. But the fact I didn't is significant of somethi...
June 10, 2004
Presenting for your edification:
michaelkpate at gmail.com
Thanks, Avena!
June 07, 2004
When I think of Nigritude Ultramarine , I think of Anil Dash.
Anil is just the coolest guy when it comes to Nigritude Ultramarine . You, too, should support his campaign to promote Nigritude Ultramarine .
One man can make a difference. One man with Nigritude Ultramarine can make an even bigger difference.
June 03, 2004
I have had a vague distant memory running through my brain the last few weeks. It finally occured to me where it came from.
Adam Kalsey thought that Atomz was making bad business decisions . He eventually found out that personal websites were no longer a part of their business .
It all came back to me while I was this . Is Six Apart becoming Atomz? I hope so for their sake .
June 01, 2004
When I created this weblog, I chose TicTac for two reasons: it was extremely nice-looking and it was created by Dan Cederholm, who is one of my personal favorite web designers.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to like. It is now available for both Blojsom and b2evolution . It has also been seen in use on a WordPress weblog.
I hope Dan (and the powers that be at Google/Blogger) don’t mind.
May 28, 2004
The Daily Dose is now on Movable Type, having joined the other bloggers from NW who are using this (blame Adam, who keeps changing his mind about which software he likes). - 9/6/02
Weblog geeks can tell at a glance that we use Movable Type for our Weblogs. Suits us fine - especially the way it supports multiple Weblogs and authors and has a simple workflow. The fact that it runs on a server is also a plus, since we often have folks posting from borrowed PCs at trade shows. - 7/3/03
After a couple of weeks futzing around with potential intranet platforms, we've settled on Movable Type. Huh, that Weblogging tool? Yeah, that's what I thought, initially, as well. But then I saw the Consumers Union site - which is done almost entirely in Movable Type. Turns out MT actually has some nice intranet-ish abilities, some of which I didn't know about. - 07/18/03
Our Movable Type-based intranet is getting closer to a launch date (smart us: We didn't set a specific date, ...
May 20, 2004
Once upon a time, Six Apart were thought to be developing three products: Movable Type , TypePad , and Movable Type Pro .
The question is, Is Movable Type the right solution for the enterprise?
Basically, my terrible meeting taught me that just as MT 2.6 was often made much more useful to individuals and small companies by the simple plug-ins available, MT 3.0 will only be able to penetrate the corporate market through extension by professional developers. - Ari Paparo
Or should there be another product like MT Pro?
My advice? If you want to charge for corporate licensing - here's a thought: make it a commercial product. It's not. What does MT do that would appeal to commercial enterprises? Does it facilitate commerce? Does it have a robust email tool to reach large numbers of people? Does it provide for automated advertising? Is it secure? The answers to all above are...no. - mkrempasky
Maybe the question to ask is whatever happened to Movable Type Pro?
May 19, 2004
One thing that has been overlooked in all the uproar over the new licensing are the new templates.
Movable Type 3's default template is different from MT2.x. Well, not hugely different, but different enough to break all the stylesheets here. Of course, it is possible to code CSS to be used in both MT2 and MT3, but it is restrictive and quite a bit of work. MT3 includes another div id="center" around the content and sidebar, so it is possible to do more fancy styles around it. - Scott Yang
One wonders how to describe the new default styles .
The new styles suck...hard. They are all the same except for color. Even Blogger has better layouts. Again, they want us to do all the work, and pay for the privilege. - Laura McMasters
I am really surprised at what a giant step backward these are.
May 19, 2004
I woke up this morning think about the whole MT Pricing Issue. I was going to write down my thoughts somewhere and then I happened to find this.
Granularity is important. The price list has figures with two to four digits (including the one that some corporate users got to see). Six Apart chose to index the price on two variables: the number of authors and the number of weblogs. I think the present model is not granular enough, too steep for individuals (I’m already using four weblogs and two authors to run this web site because of MT’s present limitations!) and lacking clarity and flexibility for the high end corporate user. It could benefit from being clearly split in three: a limited but free version for individual/personal use, a flat-fee unlimited version under $70 for the personal use of power-users (like Jason Kottke suggests) and a granular price list for business users that should do a better job at explaining the options, notably in terms of support. - Francois
It seem...
May 18, 2004
Since Blogger does not support Trackback, there are limits to what you can do. But there is a partial solution. You can at least ping other people via something like the Wizbang Standalone Trackback Form
May 15, 2004
I participated in a discussion on Phil Ringnalda's weblog the other day. My part revolved around how should a proposed change in the RSS 2.0 be implemented.
1) announce a proposed change
2) requesting comments about the change for a set time period of reasonable length to give those who might offer positive feedback time to discover the proposal and formulate a response
3) When that period ends, the Board then votes the change up or down
4) If the change is approved, a date certain implementation date is announced allowing sufficient time for aggregators and feed producers to implement the change
Even if it were never used, the fact that it existed could serve to be postitive.
May 14, 2004
I still have some thought processes to work through. But in the meantime, I thought I would document some of the ways.
The Generic Guide
Movable Type to b2evolution
Movable Type to BLOG:CMS
Movable Type to Blojsom
Movable Type to Bloxsom
Movable Type to Blogware
Movable Type to Drupal
Movable Type to ExpressionEngine
Movable Type to Geeklog
Movable Type to Inknoise
Movable Type to Nucleus
Movable Type to Pivot
Movable Type to pLog
Movable Type to Serendipity
Movable Type to Textpattern
Movable Type to Typepad
Movable Type to WordPress
It certainly seems to be a popular topic.
May 12, 2004
The single I miss most when using the Blogger interface is Textile . With the other major blogging platforms making good use of it, Movable Type , WordPress , and, of course, TextPattern , one can hope that Blogger will do so as well someday.
May 12, 2004
Last year, I decided to purchase a certain domain. Unfortunately, I missed registering it by one day. Since then, I have kept track of it. The purchaser never actually deployed it and did not renew it prior to the anniversary date.
Now the fun begins: Eleven days after it expired, the registrar changed the status to REGISTRAR-HOLD. 26 days later, the status changed to REDEMPTIONPERIOD.
The wait continues. I have no idea when the next step will occur but according to this discussion , it could be another 34 days.
May 11, 2004
RSS, in its simplicity, is a breath of fresh air. You can understand it fully in a few minutes. You can quickly deploy an application with just a basic understanding of HTML and a bit of experience in a scripting language like Perl, AppleScript or Python. That is the reason it gained traction, while most other XML formats are still in the working groups or waiting for deployment. In the overworked world of Web development, there's no time to study, there's only time to do. - Dave Winer
But while the vision has become vivid once more, the seamless Web of the original push fantasy is almost as far away as ever. This is because the Web has grown far bigger, more diverse, more open, and messier. It cannot be unified by a single easy-to-learn, concretely useful specification like RSS. - Gary Wolf
May 11, 2004
I am really intrigued by the ability to post via e-mail. I always meant to set something up to do that on my other blogs, but never quite got around to getting it to work. This should be a big boon especially to those who blog via alternative devices.
This message arrived via that very method although I did have to edit it to remove the hard link breaks. That is something I will have to look at.
May 11, 2004
Evan is proud of his new permalinks . Sam thinks his have improved but plans to do more.
I love the nearly- Ultimate Weblogging System style of them. If only they did not include the .html or, in Evan's case, the .asp. Sam is in the lead on this point.
As Sam mentions, the real problem is generating the slug to use for the URI. Multiple word titles result in multiple word slugs which complicate things. Blogger is apparently removing articles like the which is a very nice move. But I think that the latest version of WordPress still has the most elegant solution I have seen although you don't see it in use in the post linked to in this sentence.
May 10, 2004
One plus side as well: I now have the same username for Blogger and TypeKey . That should help a great deal with commenting .
And of course, I have the same username at hotmail, yahoo, excite, and earthlink as well. As well as some other places.
I guess I like to keep things simple.
May 10, 2004
I started this blog a few weeks ago in order to try for a gmail account. That didn't work, but it did give me the opportunity to play in the new Blogger interface when it was launched last night.
The funny thing is, if Blogger had worked this well years ago, I would probably have never left it for GreyMatter . Oh, well...
Anyway, I had written a bunch of really silly things in here so I decided to start fresh by deleting all the posts. Adding a mass delete to the interface would be a good idea.
I intend to use this for really personal writing that I can't quite fit in anywhere else.
February 24, 2004
1992 is the year I generally regard as the worst of my life. So many things went wrong that year that it would take too long to list them here. One of the first was the death in January of Virginia. She was our cat for 16 years. The single bright spot for that year came in May. I was spending the weekend with my brother over in Sarasota. We called home to check in with my parents that, out of the blue, they had ended up with a dog. Back in those days, my mother was still working at an Elementary School. And one morning, this little bedraggled dog had come onto campus. One of the custodians took him down the street thinking he was lost in the neighborhood. The dog came back. Eventually, he ended up in the office where they were trying to figure out who would look after him while they tried to locate the owner. My mother quickly volunteered and my father came over and picked him up. He was a Lhasa Apso, although he was in such a mess they it took some time for them to figure that out. I ...