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This entry written in, and posted from, Mac OS X über-text editor TextMate, using Brad Choate’s Blogging bundle.

I’ve been aiming for this high-five moment for a couple of weeks, but I kept getting http-proxy-related (I think) Ruby errors when I tried any network activity. I’m not sure why it’s suddenly working now. Probably a fix in the constantly updated cornucopia of text-editing goodness that is the TextMate bundles repository. Part of the problem was the little RPC bug Horst identified, and part was messed-up passwords in my keychain.

(Not quite ready for Textpattern; I had to manually set the intended section from the browser interface because I can’t find a workable syntax to specify which Textpattern section to use. Textpattern’s “sections” are analogous to other tools’ “blogs.”)

Thanks, Brad, Allan, and others, for these exciting tools.

Update: Cool, now there’s a Blogging bundle troubleshooting page.

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.

After four years of fits and starts and keeping me hugely interested the whole ~two years since I discovered it, Textpattern 4.0 is officially released today. (The “4” is for years of gestation, I think.)

Bravo, Dean. And bravo to all you other spiff contributing girlz and boyz, too. I am wholeheartedly thankful.

Textpattern is good CMS software. Check it out.

I find a simple way to implement a per-section masthead image in Textpattern.

For Textpattern blogs, I find Markdown formatting preview joy in both MarsEdit and Ecto2.

Oops, my RSS feed has been excerpt-only even though I prefer full-text. Switching site feed to full-text now, feed URL(s) unchanged.

MAMP provides Mac OS X (Panther) an utterly self-contained and easy-to-manage install of Apache2, PHP4, PHP5, and MySQL (also phpMyAdmin and MMCache) for up-to-date Web developing.

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)
  
  

I’ve finally migrated all content to Textpattern (Txp)!

I’ve been planning this since last June when I became VC125 at startup webhost TextDrive. TextDrive’s gotten nothing but better since; it’s the best hosting decision I’ve ever made. Txp has been maturing similarly.

There’s much I love about Movable Type (MT), and I have nothing against it, but I really, really prefer using Free Software, which MT isn’t and Txp is. (Txp is GPL’d.)

Please join me at Tread lightly, Textpattern edition (RSS, Atom).

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.