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A fellow Memphis blogger makes one of the more hopeful regional observations I’ve seen in a while:

I can’t shake the feeling that Memphis is just about to bust wide open, we’ve held [ourselves] back for so long that something’s got to give. There is a [tangible] sense here of a city about to give birth to itself. Like I said, I’ve lived here all my life, and the city has never seemed like this before. I don’t know what it is, but it’s coming soon.

Check out other writings at The Pesky Fly, “a group blog in Memphis, Tennessee.”

For some reason I keep blogging in my Reading section instead of here in my, uh, Weblog.

I finally cross the finish line after weeks of puttering and running down tangential learning rabbit paths: I relaunch my website with a new look and better infrastructure.

Markos’ first post at Daily Kos is dated May 26, 2002. What was I blogging about on that date?

Whew — here’s all my content presented using Textpattern.

Intense cleaning, organizing, and navigational interlinking going on over next several days. Looking in, I don’t know if you’ll see a busy technician in an open-to-the-public laboratory — my preferred self-imagery — or a bonobo in a primate house flinging smelly bits.

Probably both.

Poke around as I work, or else visit the content as originally published 2002-2004:

[2005-03-29 update: Taking Movable Type archives completely offline in response to insane level of incoming comment spamming attempts. All archived content is available in current Textpattern presentation via search field.]

• Tread lightly on the things of earth (MT weblog, 2003–2004)
• Tread lightly (Radio Userland weblog, 2002)
• Tread lightly: Interesting links (MT sideblog, 2003–2004)
• Mike’s Photolog (MT photolog, 2002–2004)
  
  

TextDrive. Last week from a lonely hotel room in beautiful Pleasanton, California — I was in the Bay Area for Documentum training — I (without much planning) jumped on a stellar webhosting offer from Dean Allen, maker of Textpattern, and thus became one of the lucky VC200, first “venture capitalists” of many customers to come in Dean’s (and business partner Jason’s) new webhost service TextDrive.

As the Textpattern CMS is TextDrive’s emphasis (but not requirement of course) perhaps I should devote more time to mastering it.

Textpattern. I’ve been admiring Textpattern for quite some time as an alternative web publishing system to Movable Type, which I’ve been using happily for the last year and a half.

Why an alternative? Not because I’m all a-dither about the Movable Type 3.0 pricing brouhaha — I like MT, understand it reasonably well, and appreciate its Perlishness relative to PHP. And I trust Ben, Mena, Anil, et al. to get the pricing/licensing kinks worked out.

Freedom. I’m interested in an alternative because I’ve been a Free Software enthusiast and advocate since my immersion into Linux in early 1998, and I want to use truly free weblogging software. (Shelley and Mark provide informative takes on freedom, blogging, and software licensing.)

WordPress. WordPress is another truly free contender (GPL license) and perhaps has the most post-MT mo’ right now. Shelley’s extensive writing about it at Burningbird (just search her blog for “wordpress”) persuaded me to look closely at WordPress, and it is indeed wonderful.

But Dean’s style just radiates from Textpattern (BSD license GPL license as of g1.19) in a way that intrigues me and captures my imagination. And my <ahem> skim-only, read-only “participation” in the Textpattern community over the past several months tells me these are people I’ll enjoy knowing better.

Objects. Textpattern employs software engineering concepts that rang familiar as I studied Documentum last week. For example, instead of uploaded graphics files being scattered in the filesystem of a served directory where they’re hard to track, each graphic file uploaded to Textpattern becomes an object with category, alt text, and caption metadata accompanying it. The uploaded graphic filename itself is of no consequence — it’s actually saved with a numeric filename — because Textpattern keeps the physical file associated with its image metadata. This easy-to-grasp object approach (where behind the scenes the object == filesystem file + database metadata) is generally how Documentum does things.

Object-oriented thinking in this context is still somewhat new to me, so I may be making too much of this. But I was struck by — and impressed by — the conceptual resemblance between Textpattern and Documentum on this.

Sizzle. Even though I advocate Free Software, I nevertheless use Mac OS X on my PowerBook most of the time instead of the completely free Gentoo- or Debian Linux distributions, each of which is as extraordinary on PowerPC hardware as it is on ix86 PC hardware. My use of Mac OS X is a conscious decision to forego a bit of freedom in exchange for enjoying The Most Empowering OS I’ve Ever Experienced. But even within the half-free, half-not-free world of Mac OS X, I use much Free Software, thanks primarily to the Fink project.

Here I am two and a half years into blogging, and I’ve cycled back ‘round to thinking I don’t have much to say. The unholy alliance between church and state in the U.S. is now unraveling on its own, thank God. The malign incompetence of our Executive Branch is becoming common knowledge. In my railing against these in this blog I’m hardly the lone voice I felt like last year; I’m now one among many. And of these many political- and faith-obsessed oriented bloggers, most write far more effectively than I do. So maybe now is a good time for me to be quiet and learn free blogging software.

I hope to return to writing about odds and ends I find interesting, useful, beautiful, lifegiving, instead of being constantly consumed by political/religious anger and despair. After all, blogs that showcase the multifaceted interests of people I’m delighted to meet are the blogs I most like to read.

I’m pleased to report the dubious achievement of now having more than two years of weblog entries here, all reachable via the Search field.

Two years doing any one thing represents follow-through for me on par with completing a marathon. Wow.

Best outcomes of blogging so far?

• I’m finding my voice and the courage to use it. The idea that one day voice, message, and skill might be called forth in unison to serve good ends motivates me.
• I’ve made new friends. Not having had to be alone during the last three years is a priceless gift. Life in an insane asylum (the world of U.S. conservative religiopolitics) is no stroll in paradise, however beautiful the inmates and surroundings. I get too serious about it and then forget to laugh. (Wouldn’t it be great to be remembered as someone who laughed a lot?) I’ve learned that friends help friends laugh.

David at Orcinus, a blogger I learn a lot from, wrote yesterday about The spurious rise of the non-anonymous blogger. All this interesting discussion for and against blogging anonymity postdates my “choice” of non-anonymity — my ass is hangin’ out there because two years ago it never occurred to me I could whip up a pseudonym.

Just as well: writing-as-myself exercises my internal editor so I’m a little fairer, more thoughtful, and more compassionate than I might be otherwise.

Hmmm. Maybe non-anonymous writing can also work for people like nutrition information does for foods: it gives clues whether you’d like the item and what it’s made of. I like knowing people through their writing — and letting them know me, which leads to more friends than I could actually meet in person — and then thinking that should we meet in person we’d soon feel right at home with each other based on this agreeable written history instead of having to waste time assessing whether one or the other of us is a jackass. :-)

My 2003 and ongoing 2004 weblog entries are all nicely tied together here in Movable Type with links every which way: entry to entry, month to month, day to day, category to category. (Try clicking an entry’s month name, for example.)

My 2002 entries were almost all published using a different system, Radio UserLand, and are accessible as published starting here.

But I’ve also imported these 2002 entries into Movable Type (using Bill Kearney’s Radio Exporter.root tool) so that all weblog content is searchable from within Movable Type. FWIW, the imported 2002 content starts here.

Last June I was seeing my main blog as a place to put my thought-out, essay-like entries (baked), and my sideblog as a place to record interesting links I’ve been reading along with some quick top-of-the-head commentary (half-baked).

My thought-out emissions here in the main blog can’t be hurried, apparently; days pass between them. Looks like I’m on hiatus when I’m really not.

In contrast, I drop stuff into my sideblog all the time. If you’re coming by here anyway, then by all means please visit there, too, to see what’s gone on lately. :-)

Evolution is good. Maybe the more active blog needs to be the main one. Hmmm.

[Brigadoon is a story set in a Scottish highlands town that comes to life for one day every hundred years. Its inhabitants don’t notice anything unusual about this because they’re in it. That is, people’s perception of time passing is relative to where they are. I daydream that the experience of eternity is something like this.]

And from my cube comes a mighty Duh. I never before realized this:

Using an appropriate browser bookmarklet, you can observe the effect of CSS style definition changes rendered in real time.

At least with this tool combo —

• Mac OS X 10.2.6
• Mozilla 1.4
• Jesse Ruderman’s “edit styles” bookmarklet as provided by Simon Willison, Using bookmarklets to experiment with CSS

— a click of the “edit styles” bookmarklet in a browser window opens another window containing a copy of the open page’s governing stylesheet. Make style definition changes to that open stylesheet text and you see the changes rendered live in the browser window. When satisfied with the result, copy-and-paste the modified stylesheet text into the real stylesheet file.

I can’t believe I’ve let this bit of designing efficiency sit under my nose all this time. If this bookmarklet works in IE, too, this should really cut down the number of CSS tweak iterations needed to accommodate IE/Win’s CSS borkage.

I’m always glad when radical coolness rears its lovely head, even when I’ve been really slow to recognize it.

Thanks, Simon and Jesse.