Google Reader mobile, you’re killing me!

You now allow me to view 5, 10, or 20 items at a time through the Google Reader iPhone interface, yet when I choose the 20-item option, you take away my ability to mark items as read (except by actually clicking on them individually); the “mark items as read” link literally disappears (though I still get a “more…” link).

Anyone else seeing this? What gives?

Dust in the wind

I’m always telling myself to stop writing about the minor behind-the-scenes goings-on here, but of course I never do. I guess I’m OK with only a couple of people finding it interesting as I like this sort of thing when others do it.

So, without further ado, I present to you more banal and trivial nonsense.

After a week with the ‘new’ layout, I decided I needed the menu back at the top. Not only was I finding myself kind of annoyed by its new location in the side menu, but I also felt there was no real navigational “anchor” (even though the links were in essentially the same location on every page).

I spent a good part of the day trying to make IE 6 play nice (yeah, the story of every web developer’s life, ridiculous) with a dynamic rollover thingy I whipped up in JavaScript,¹ that produced a menu when you hovered over a “+” symbol in the top right corner of the site (have I mentioned I’m a minimalist?). After getting everything working on every major browser, I decided to scrap it. Surprise.

Long story short (oh trust me, I could write a lot more on this), the old menu is back at the top, though now, for the first time in this site’s history, it’s a client-side image map instead of plain text (I just can’t get enough of DIN Schrift MittelSchrift).

Speaking of wasting unbelievable amounts of time, I spent nearly 10 hours this weekend migrating the entire site from WordPress to Movable Type (for no overriding reason). However, and probably not surprisingly, all the work was for naught — I’m still using WP.

About a year ago, I wrote a three-part (one, two, three), 3,400-word piece regarding a possible move back to Movable Type. A lot has changed since then — Movable type just released version four and now both systems support a common import/export format.

Though I ultimately decided to stick with WordPress, I thought I’d discuss some of the issues I encountered during the migration.

Importing

Movable Type now supports the importation of WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) files, the format through which WP exports. Importing was far easier this time than last, but it wasn’t perfect. The biggest problem I had was HTML entities in some of my post titles; they completely broke the import script. Luckily, not too many of my titles had entities, so it wasn’t that difficult to manually swap them out for their character equivalents.

The bigger problem was that each time I tried to import the file, it would import every post until it choked on a post it couldn’t read, which meant that I had to delete all the imported posts multiple times before finally getting a clean import (after removing all the entities from the titles). It would have been nice if the import script validated the file before it actually attempted to import entries.

Another problem with the import was that it seemed to ignore my plea that it not format the posts’ text (there’s a “text formatting” drop-down, and one of the options is “none”), and instead chose to “convert line breaks.” The problem is that I don’t currently wrap the “bits” in paragraph tags until they are displayed, which means they were getting nested paragraph tags at the output, and there was no way for me to batch-change the format option on every bit to “none.” Yes, I could have removed the double paragraph tags at the output, but that would have required me to change the way the bits are saved, something I didn’t want to do.

The import also broke all of my post slugs. By default, Movable Type limits slugs (which it calls “basenames”) to 30 characters; if your slugs are longer than this, they get truncated. Sure, this is easily remedied by deleting the weblog, creating it again, setting the basename value to some larger number, and then re-importing, but it would be easier (and logical) for the importer to ignore the defined basename length so as to not break URIs between systems.

After getting everything imported, I decided to divide the posts into two separate weblogs — one for regular posts and one for bits. To do this, I had to delete all bits from the weblog (100 at a time — the max allowed), export the remainder, delete the weblog entirely, import everything again, delete all regular posts from the weblog, export the remainder again, delete the weblog entirely again, create two new weblogs, and import into each. I realize this is probably a niche need, but it would have been nice if I could have simply selected a category (or tag, or whatever) and created a new weblog with only those posts. I guess I could have “cloned” the weblog and then deleted from each those posts that no longer ‘belonged,’ but then my post IDs would have been all over the place.

Publishing

Once everything was imported correctly into the two weblogs, I set out to use the now baked-in multi-blog feature to enable the weaving of bits and regular posts on the main page. Without too much fuss, and with Google’s help, I was able to get interleaved posts working on the index page fairly quickly.

After most of the major issues had been worked out, it was time to decide how I was going to serve the pages. If [processing] time weren’t an issue, I’d prefer the pages be built statically, but that no longer makes real-world sense given the current number of posts here. No, I don’t have comments to deal with, but full rebuilds would still take more time than I could probably stand. In light of this, I decided to try out the dynamic options.

I was quite surprised that once I turned on dynamic publishing (for everything), it just worked. Well, sorta. It worked on all archive files (including individual entry archives), but threw a 404 on the main index page. I could not resolve this to save my life, but to be fair, it could have had something to do with my 775-line htaccess file (which is part of the reason I was so surprised it worked at all). Regardless, I gave up on trying to find a solution and instead chose to “publish only archive templates dynamically,” which seemed to fix the issue.

After jumping through all these hoops (and many more), I completely scrapped the installation, but I guess I now know it’s still a viable option should I want/need to ditch WordPress at some point.

Body Worlds

The girlfriend and I recently experienced Body Worlds at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. At the risk of sounding a bit melodramatic (me? never), it was probably the coolest exhibit I’ve ever seen, and if I’m being completely honest, quite moving. While the $22 admission price may seem a little steep, I assure you it’s worth your time and money. In fact, I may go again, and will certainly go to the various other Body Worlds exhibits should I find myself proximate to another hosting city.

Speaking of our bodies, you may want to have your TiVo grab National Geographic’s Incredible Human Machine, which airs October 21:

NGC takes viewers on a two-hour journey through an ordinary, and extraordinary, day-in-the-life of the human machine. With stunning high-definition footage, radical scientific advances and powerful firsthand accounts, Incredible Human Machine plunges deep into the routine marvels of the human body.

Dear Twitterer, I have access to ESPN

Further to my earlier rant, I’ve one more small request: please don’t mention [relatively] current sports scores on Twitter. If I want a sports score, I’ll go looking for it. I’m so sick of thoughtless fans blasting things like, “gators up by 27 at half,” as I wait for the TiVo to finish recording the game (with the 30-second skip you can get through college football games in ~1.5 hours).

I’m not sure what drives your compulsion to tell the world the score, but from here on out please try to refrain. Thanks!

Dear Twitterer, I read your weblog

For whatever reason, it’s suddenly become common to draft a “tweet” linking to just-published weblog entries. This practice makes me crazy, because if you’re following someone on Twitter, you’re obviously also following their site — that’s how you found out about their Twitter account in the first place!

In case you haven’t made the logical leap, these discourteous time-thiefs hit us twice with a notice that they’ve just added new content to their site. We’ll see your latest post in our news aggregators — we don’t need to see it in Twitter too! Sure, your admiring public will be in the dark for an hour (or less), but I promise they’ll make do.

Unless you’re warning me of imminent physical danger, please refrain from telling me about it more than once.

I realize that Twitter’s “what are you doing?” inducement fell away almost immediately and that the service is now used predominantly to communicate random, immediate, and ephemeral thoughts, but that doesn’t mean it need also be an extension of your weblog feed!

Please respect my time.  ;)

Who do you read?

Why do I ask? Because you no longer list that information on your site. It used to be common practice on personal sites to list those sites frequented by the author (my list), but over the last few years this convention has waned and it’s now pretty rare to see such a list.

I always enjoy seeking out new, interesting sites to add to my daily routine, and it used to be that the best way to do that was to look at the list of sites suggested/pushed by those I already read. These days however, the only way I seem to find new sites is through “via” links, or similar. It’s all a bit more organic now, which is fine, but sometimes I just like to flick through all the sites enjoyed by a particular author.

What makes the increasing paucity of these lists infinitely more frustrating is the ease with which they can be maintained. For example, I currently use Google Reader for feed aggregation and perusal, but still perpetuate my Bloglines account so that I can use its blogroll feature to publicly share my feed list. When I add a new feed to Google Reader, I also add it to Bloglines (if it’s a site I don’t put in my “personal” or “non-public” folders), and the rest is done automagically.

Going forward, I think there should be some sort of unspoken rule that bloggers publish their feed lists at a pre-determined URI (e.g., /blogroll); that way, authors who don’t want to link to it don’t have to, but others who want the information can still find it.

Beating minimalism over the head

I’ve been “refreshing” the site a bit over the last few days and am quite pleased with the ‘final’ result; it seems every time I look to redesign the site, I inevitably want to make it simpler, even when that seems impossible.

How much more bare-bones could I get? Well, I found more wiggle room than you might expect. You’ll notice that I redid the header and stripped from it both the menu and my name. I snuck the header menu into a side-menu paragraph. Regular visitors will probably find this a little confusing at first, but will obviously figure it out; I think new users will take to it immediately as they’re compelled to read the side-menu paragraphs — there’s no other place to look!

The impetus behind the ‘new’ menu consists of more than just my personal aesthetic predilections; it’s also drawn from observations I’ve made regarding visitors to this site. My various stats packages make clear that almost no one clicked on the menu at the top, and after I really thought about it, it kind of made sense. I mean, I hardly ever click on menu items myself. I think the only time I do is when I’m linked to a site I’m not yet subscribed to; if the piece I read is interesting, I may skim the site to see if there are similar pieces to be found, and if I’m convinced the site may produce something I’d like to read in the future, I’ll likely add it to my aggregator. Save that, I get in and I get out, and apparently most others do the same.

Please don’t think I’m trying to make a case for the Internet-wide removal of horizontal/vertical menus, which are about as common as web pages themselves. In fact, I’ll likely re-add the top menu at some point — statistical evidence be damned — but I just thought I’d try something slightly more “conversational,” and a little less rigid. At the end of the day, I don’t feel I’m sacrificing any real-world usability by toying with the menu’s ostensible relevance; if you think otherwise, please let me know.

Quite a few other subtle changes were made, but they’ll likely be appreciated only by anal-retentive types. For all you typography nerds out there, the font used for the menu headers on the right is called DIN Schrift MittelSchrift (at 16pt with a tracking value of 25/1000 ems).

The only thing I’d still like to do is work out a way to more effectively funnel visitors to the photography section without detracting too much from the site’s simplicity.