Blogging Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Neil Turner's Blog

21st-ish blogiversary

November 12, 2023January 14, 2023 by Neil Turner

Today marks 21 years since I started my blog, on the 14th January 2002. Back then, I was 17 years old, in the sixth form, a few months away from taking my A-levels and living at home with my parents.

Surprisingly, I managed to keep up with blogging regularly for 16 years, but gave it up due to a lack of time and a monumentally screwed up server upgrade that also wiped out my only backups.

So there weren’t any 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th blogiversaries, as I only restarted blogging last summer. Which means that this isn’t a ‘proper’ blogiversary. But I’m counting it anyway.

Nowadays, I still don’t have much time to blog – a combination of full-time work and being a parent – but I’m aiming to rustle up at least a few blog posts every month.

So, happy birthday blog. I would say ‘here’s to another 21 years’, but who knows what the Web will be like in 2044. And I’ll be nearly 60 years old by then.

More Melodic

January 3, 2024March 13, 2011 by Neil Turner

For the first time in over 8 years, this blog is not running on Movable Type. Because I’ve migrated to Melody.

Announced in June 2009, Melody is a fork of Movable Type 4 maintained by volunteers, many of whom formerly worked for Six Apart (MT’s original developer). It carries on in the same direction as MT version 4, rather than the very enterprise-focussed MT version 5 which is now being developed by a Japanese company called Infocom.

Because of its common heritage with MT, you can switch to Melody by installing it over Movable Type, and then simply tidying up the bits that are no longer needed – there’s a handy migration guide, too. It’ll keep all of your blogs, comments and settings.

Because Melody is new, and not quite ready for a 1.0 release, there are a few minor issues still and the admin interface still looks like it needs a little polish. In particular, a number of plugins no longer work; for now, you won’t have to type the word ‘ball’ when commenting and you won’t be able to log in using your Facebook account, but hopefully new versions of those plugins will surface soon.

If you see any other funkiness, let me know.

Melody

January 3, 2024June 25, 2009 by Neil Turner

Just recently announced is Melody, a new open source content management system based around the blog concept that is derived from Movable Type, the software that has powered this site for nearly 7 years. It has been developed with Six Apart’s blessing, and by several former 6A employees; its development is guided by the Open Melody Software Group which counts Anil Dash from 6A as one of its directors.

The system will stay API-compatible with MT, so that plugins will still work, but may drop support for lesser used features like Trackback and PostgreSQL databases (Update: These may be spun off into plugins, not dropped altogether – see comments). Focus will be on improving development and support of weblog themes (which has always been a little clunky in MT), but ultimately the aim is to generate a community around Melody which guides the development process. MT will stay on as a product of 6A, and while there will be some code-swapping between the two Melody is essentially a fork.

It all sounds like good news and I wish the team every success with the development of Melody – once a more stable release is available I may well switch to it. WordPress has, rightly or wrongly, stolen the limelight from MT in recent years so a proper, community-driven open source alternative could pull users back to the MT/Melody platform.

(Incidentally the default user name for a new MT installation is ‘Melody’ – not sure whether that was used as an inspiration or not)

Going into print

January 2, 2024August 17, 2004 by Neil Turner

The cover of the book 'Hacking Movable Type'

If you read Ben Hammersley and Jay Allen, you may have seen references to “the book” recently. This is Hacking Movable Type (sponsored link), a 500+ page guide to getting deep down and dirty with MT and customising it to the extreme. And now I think it’s time to let you know that I’m writing a couple of chapters for it.

It’s very much a group effort – as well as myself, Jay and Ben, there are contributions from Matt Haughey, Brad Choate and David Raynes amongst others, and the foreword to the book is being written by Ben and Mena Trott themselves. As arguably the least known of any of those, I’m naturally flattered to be involved in such a project.

The book is still very much a work in progress but will be out later this year. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you want to pre-order it, the ISBN is 076457499X and the publisher is John Wiley & Sons.

Welcome to my world

January 2, 2024January 14, 2002 by Neil Turner

Hello, and welcome to my world – a world filled with music, computers and other generally weird things. Please fasten your seatbelts and return your seat to an uptight position, as this may be a jerky ride…

I intend to use this page as an outlet for my thoughts and opinions, and will try to update as much as possible (after all, what’s a blog that lies unused?). I’m not going to give much away about my personality yet, since you’ll hopefully find out all you need to know (and more) about my life as you read on.