I don’t like how my blog now consists of a bunch of links. I’m turning off the automatic post machine and I have replaced it with a neat widget on my home page that lists my latest bookmarks on Pinboard.
Alternately, you can always Subscribe to my Pinboard RSS feed or view all these bookmarks on Pinboard directly.
Assuming that I’ve configured it correctly, my blog should now automatically update at midnight (Eastern time) every day with links that I’ve added at my new Pinboard account. It’ll just be a collection of whatever I might happen to find interesting when surfing the Internet. Maybe you’ll like it.
If everything went right, you shouldn’t notice too much different about my site today. But underneath, everything changed: I went back to WordPress from Habari.
Why? Mostly because of the ecosystem: There are lots of plugins and programs that work with WordPress that don’t work with Habari yet. I was working with WordPress on another project and found it a great plug-in for adding time-lines to a WordPress blog. That kind of stuff is years away from coming to Habari.
Also, because Habari is still an alpha-level project. It’s not finished yet. It’s pretty, and the code base underneath it is supposed to be really excellent, but I don’t want to work with the code base. And when I do try to find bugs, I can’t report them.
And there are a lot of things that WordPress just does better. For example: “Remember Me” on the login page actually works. It automatically replaces regular vertical quote marks with the pretty quotes. I can hit Ctrl-I and it will make the text italic, instead of me having to manually code in <em> tags. Updating to the latest version of the software is as easy as pushing a button (no need to open up FileZilla at all!). And, new in the latest version of WordPress, you can embed videos just by including the URL on its own line. For example:
Lastly, and most unforgivable, Habari does not have a built-in export option of any kind. If it weren’t for this script (mirror) that somebody wrote, I would have been having to export each entry by hand (or else write my own script, which would have taken at least as long). Not cool Habari!
So, anyways, let me know if you see anything that looks broken. Thanks!
Will this change also lead to me posting more often? MAYBE!
Last night I was looking for a good blogging client for Habari on the iPhone. There is an excellent-looking free client for WordPress and for Tumblr, but nothing for the new kid on the block yet.
The posting screen actually looks and works exactly right in the mobile Safari browser, but I find it’s very small and difficult to read on the iPhone’s screen.
After much searching, I found the post via email plugin in the Habari Extras repository. It’s clearly a first draft, but it works. (I’ve posted a ticket on the bug tracker that corrects an issue where the post would have extra line breaks every 200 characters or so.)
Anyways, now I can just write new blog entries in the Notes application on the iPhone. When I’m done, I just push the little email to button and give it my secret blogging address, and within 10 minutes, the post (with any tags) is added to the blog. It’s a delightfully simple setup.
Yesterday marked the last entry of my Parade of Awesomeness blog. A year ago, I committed myself to writing about one awesome thing every weekday for an entire year, and, with the exception of the holidays and a trip overseas, I kept that commitment.
It’s been a lot of fun, and I found a lot of really neat stuff I might not have seen if I hadn’t been looking for it. Still, I do think it’s good for projects like this have definite end dates, lest they get stale.
Feel free to take a look around the archives of The Parade; there’s a lot of great art projects, software, games, and other interesting stuff that I found, not to mention songs by 47 different artists wise enough to allow their music to be distributed for free on the internet. I plan to keep the domain up for at least next couple of years.
Expect to see a bit more frequent posting here too; I imagine I’m still going to find new awesome things that I’ll want to show you, and I plan to do that here from now on.
Welcome to my new home on the internet!
As you may know, I’ve been having some… issues with my old WordPress blog lately, most notably the issue that caused WordPress to delete my sidebar. This was the latest in a series of minor annoyances with WordPress for me, and so I started looking for other blog platforms.
I came across one called Habari, developed by people who were disillusioned with the way WordPress is developed. Habari is beautiful and simple both to install and to run. I absolutely love how clean and easy this is to use.
The only downside to Habari is that’s it’s new, which means that there are some minor bugs and that the documentation for theme designs isn’t very good yet. But these concerns are minor; Habari is an excellent choice if you’re looking for a blogging platform.
In case I ever move again though, I’ve put this blog’s RSS feed onto Feedburner. Subscribe to that in your favorite RSS reader, and you shouldn’t ever have to worry about missing anything because I moved my blog. Just click the big orange button on the bottom of the screen and sign up.
