Tech Talk

So, I finally upgraded my blog software this weekend.

RobWorley.com had been running b2evolution for the past five years. It’s a swell bit of software. When I settled on it back in the day it was one of two projects that grew up from the remains of the previous open source blogging favorite cafelog’s b2. The other project was WordPress.

Since then WordPress has caught fire. An amazing support community sprung up around it. It has a huge repository of plugins, widgets and themes. I had occasion to install WP on another blog I was setting up and I was hooked pretty quickly.

In addition to the great community, it has the best back office interface I’ve ever seen in a CMS, and I’ve toyed with a lot of Content Management Systems: Joomla, Drupal, Silverstripe, Typad, Typo not to mention a number of custom coded ones. The  back end is clean, easy to navigate, easy to understand without the need for instructions.

One nice feature is a automatic upgrade mechanism. Upgrading open source web software is the bane of any website’s existence. With my site running a tag team of b2evo and ZenPhoto.org I was in a constant cycle of downloading updates, tweaking config files, backing up, uploading, reinstalling, blah blah blah. With WordPress you can update the core software and any plugins you might be running by clicking through a couple of screens and it’s done.

There was no clear path to migrate from b2evo to WordPress. WordPress supports numerous imports, but b2evo isn’t one of them. I did find solutions described elsewhere online though. If you’re  interested in moving, here’s the process I used:

1. Find a skin for your version of b2evo that makes it output Moveable Type format. I found such a skin here, although I think it is for pre version 2.0 installs. I didn’t work for me because I was on version 2.3. However I was able to modify it so it worked fine with version 2.3. If you’re on 2.x it may work for you as well. If you’re on 3.x it probably won’t. Download the Movable Type Skin for b2evolution…
2. If you’re using my MT skin, you’ll then have to put it on your b2evo install under the /skins folder.
3. Run your blog with the MT skin. You can use a URL like: http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?tempskin=mt&posts=9999999999999 – which should bring up all your posts and comments in an ugly looking format. Save the results to a text file.
4. Install WordPress on your server.
5. Use Tools->Import and follow the steps for importing a Moveable Type blog. It works amazingly well.

One HUGE mistake I made was to install the Tweetly plugin before doing the import. Tweetly posts a tweet on Twitter every time you post a new blog. It ended up tweeting for every single entry I imported. It’s a wonder I still have a Twitter account.

I’ve decided to do away with ZenPhoto as well. It’s a cool, lightweight gallery but I’m moving my stuff to Flickr mainly to avoid the upgrade cycle, and also because I couldn’t get the one good ZenPhoto plugin for WordPress to work.

There are numerous nice Flickr plugins available. The move was pretty painless as Flickr has nice uploading tools.

So there you go…RobWorley.com is all pimped out with WordPress and automatically hooked into twitter, facebook and flickr.

Which is cool, because I’ll have some interesting info about an upcoming project to blog about soon.

zenphoto just released the long-awaited upgrade to their promising photo hosting software.

When I started this site I used Menalto’s Gallery software and eventually graduated to their Gallery 2 system. That package is the be-all, end-all of photo management software with every conceivable feature you could want…which was kind of why I stopped loving it. It was slow and bloated, and a resource pig that was causing my host to have headaches. And I didn’t want 90% of the features provided.

zenphoto inhabits the opposite end of design ideology: lean, fast and quiet. Seemed like the perfect remedy to the G2-blues.

Shortly after I switched, I was disappointed to learn that the zenphoto project had gone dormant. It was developed by a single individual (a hard-working guy named Tristan). When big career opportunities came up he had to stop working on zen. I wasn’t sure we’d ever see an update.

However, the software is so well-loved that a community had formed and would not let it die out. Tristan recruited a willing development team and voila…today we have a hot new version!

Check out my zenphoto gallery.

It’s cool software, with web 2.0 niceties like inline editing of image titles and descriptions, drag-and-drop album sorting and so on. The new version has sub-albums, RSS feeds, anti-spam commenting, tagging and more. The theming process is pretty easy to master if you’re a CSS-oriented designer.

To be fair, there are a few less-awesome aspects: the install process isn’t exactly the guided, friendly type install that Word Press users (for example) are used to. I’m also not a fan of the completely automated thumbnailing (would be cool if a future version lets you manually select the area of a photo that’s to appear in the thumbnail). Sub-album management seems to work best through FTP. None of these quibbles are really major detractors for me, and since the software’s actively being developed again, I’m hopeful that some of these rough edges may be smoothed in future releases.

Overall it’s a hot, standards-compliant bit of open source that’s worth a download.

…to Microsoft alternatives.

Todd VerBeek saw last week’s post about breaking free from Microsoft and directed me to his bueno excellente Just Say No to Microsoft resource.

One of my goals is to rid my computer of Microsoft bloatware.

Today, Rogers points his readers to this excellent resource, listing free alternatives to many of the bloated, expensive software packages (MS or otherwise) commonly used by Windows users.

The website programmer/designer in me is in awe of TOKYOPOP’s Takuhai Online Magazine.

It’s a great looking site that totally fits the image of their publication.

What’s really cool about it is it all all appears to be done with CSS/XHTML (and a little Javascript).

Not a spec of Macromedia FLASH on the site!

Which means, they’ve got a jazzy-looking, fast-loading, search-engine friendly, standards-compliant site without the overhead of a proprietary plug-in based service.

It’s a really strong argument for designing with standards.

Looks like there’s a spiffy new incremental upgrade to b2evolution as well.

Important improvements include better spam controls and optimized performance.

Other things involve wiki and wacko and I don’t really know what all that’s about.

The upgrade path isn’t as simple as we’d like it to be, but anyone who installed b2evolution on their server once and can still read and follow directions should have no problems.

“I’m going to f*cking bury that guy. I have done it before, and I will do it again,” says sweaty Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “I’m going to f*cking kill Google.”

Annoyed by PC-Cillin’s “Incoming Mail Scan” pop-up alert message? Here’s how to turn it off…

So you’ve set up a network in your home with Windows XP Home edition. You use XP at work so you have a good idea of what it can do for you.

To reduce desk clutter you’ve decided that you’re going to disconnect the monitor, keyboard and mouse from one of your workstations, because it’s basically a backup machine anyhow.

You think about a KBM switch, but decide they’re too expensive and they won’t work with your new hardware anyway because it has a wireless keyboard/mouse with a USB connector.

Then you get the brainstorm, “I’ll just use Windows Remote Desktop to control the secondary computer from the new one.”

But…you’re running Windows XP HOME edition, which isn’t exactly like what you have at the office. Guess what? You can’t set up a Windows Remote server on any computer running XP Home. Zing! It’s an XP-Pro-only feature.

Whatcha gonna do? Cough up $300+ to upgrade your network to Pro?

Nah…turn to the open source community instead. They excel at demonstrating that Microsoft solutions are overpriced and unnecessary.

TightVNC is Free, VNC-based remote control software. Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is an open standard for doing the same kind of stuff Windows Remote Server does. It’s available on virtually any operating system platform. If you’ve got a mixed network, VNC can get all your computers working together.

TightVNC is a client for Windows and Unix boxes, coded by Constantin Kaplinsky. I’ve been using it for a few months now and it works great.

The installation process was a tiny bit problematic and, truth be told, the documentation isn’t great. But anyone with some reasonable patience can get it up and running.

My main installation injury turned out to be self-inflicted. I was trying to connect to the remote computer using an IP address. This was only a problem because the XP network kept reassigning IPs every so often for reasons I didn’t understand. After struggling with IP problem for a day or so…the big DUH hit: just use the remote computer’s NAME. That’s what it’s there for.

Once I set up my shortcut to connect to the computer named “godzilla” rather than an IP address, everything worked fine (like any good network, my machines are named with a theme; my theme is G-named kaiju).

Now, I just click my shortcut, type in a password and I get a window displaying the desktop of the “godzilla”. The display update is very fast, almost real time. The mouse and keyboard reactions are very fluid. There are pauses and hiccups occasionally but that’s to be expected when network traffic and the multi-tasking on the control desktop are factors.

TightVNC drops the wallpaper of the server computer by default, to make for better performance. It’s one of many configuration options in this very complete, well-thought-out software.

Another nice thing: TightVNC is freeware. The author does not demand any compensation for use of the software. But, I’m a big believer that if you appreciate great free stuff you find on the internet, you’d better be thinking about ways to encourage the provider. A donation to TightVNC is certainly warranted, especially considering the cost savings over upgrading to XP Pro.

TightVNC is certainly worthy of a donation and it’s my software pick of the day…