July 2005

I’ve had some helpful suggestions for the next step in the evolution of my blogs (do I stay with TypePad, upgrading to the Pro service level, or switch to a hosted server solution and run my own blogs).

In combining those suggestions with ones I’ve already had, plus my own thinking, things are leaning towards the hosted server solution. And I would very likely use Movable Type for my blogs; more on that in a minute.

So I’ve been looking around to see what’s out there.

My first choice would be GoDaddy. My experience with them - I’ve bought domains there - is very good and their offerings for hosted space are also good. The only negative at the moment is that they don’t seem too clued in about using their hosting service for running blogs, judging by the responses from their support team to my emails asking about Movable Type support.

I’m also looking at Bluehost and Midphase, two hosting services that seem to have rave reviews by users. Both offer very attractive deals. I used the recommendations from the Hosting Comparison site which has some great reviews of the various offerings out there.

I did look at PowWeb, but was a bit put off by lots of negative comments from users in their own support forum.

So, decisions to be made soon.

Meanwhile, I’m trying out Movable Type version 3.17 which I have as part of my membership in the Six Apart Professional Network.

I’m trying MT out on a local computer, set up as a server so it will run. I followed Six Apart’s excellent step-by-step instructions for installing it on a Windows PC.

Still a bit of learning to do, though - while the MT install went perfectly, the MT-check script which ran on my first use this morning produced this error:

Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Access denied for user ”@’localhost’ (using password: YES)

Need to figure out what I did wrong in the configuration, which I suspect is more to do with the MySQL setup and access rights to the database than with MT.

Also getting some great knowledge from Learning Movable Type, a truly excellent resource by Elise Bauer.

Stay tuned…

Tomorrow, 24 July, marks the one-year anniversary of when I first started my primary blog on TypePad. I actually started blogging in December 2002, with a BlogSpot blog, but it wasn’t until a year ago that I really got into gear, so to speak, and became a regular blogger.

In January, I made a major design change to the main blog and started this blog, where you’re reading this post. The design on the main blog has been in its current form since then.

When Six Apart upgraded the TypePad service earlier this month and included a raft of new design templates and themes, that got me thinking again about the look-and-feel of both of my blogs and is it to time to change. So with this blog, I applied one of the new designs (the Powell Street 2-column left template) which is what you see today.

I didn’t apply any of the new designs to my primary blog. The main reason is that the blog currently uses a customized version of a standard 3-column template which I’ve changed quite a bit. So applying one of the new design templates would mean that I’d need to spend quite a bit of time in customizing that, and doing it on the live blog.

While I’m quite willing to spend time on customizing, the idea caused me to think more about getting direct access to the template HTML code and creating something a bit more unique from the design and layout points of view.

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Some months ago, I bought a Packard Bell AudioDream MP3 player/recorder, plus external powered microphone, for recording conversations to use in my podcast.

I said at the time that this little gadget was great, just what I needed. Unfortunately, the reality turned out quite different.

I have no complaints with the AudioDream from a recording quality point of view - it is terrific. But what a performance to actually make a recording! It really is very small and very light, and I kept dropping it. Mainly, though, setting it up to do a recording was just a major pain. Plugging in the microphone, cables everywhere, tiny buttons on the gadget… it just wasn’t worth the headaches.

So last week on a trip to London, I bought an iRiver IFP-790 in the duty-free shop at Schiphol airport. On half price offer so how could I resist Main reason, though, was that this was the brand I wanted to get in the first place but could not find an iRiver anywhere at the time.

Now this is the gadget for easy mobile voice recording, without question. While this particular iRiver model doesn’t have the flash memory storage capacity of the Packard Bell - 256Mb versus 1Gb - it’s ample for what I need. It doesn’t have a rechargable li-ion battery like the AudioDream - it takes a single AA battery which seems to last forever.

Using it is simplicity itself - you just turn it on and start speaking, that’s it. It’s built-in microphone is amazing for the quality of recording you can do. You can also connect an external microphone if you wish. I’m especially impressed with the options you can choose for setting up your MP3 recording - selecting bit rate, sample rate, automatic gain control, etc (see the full specifications). And unlike the AudioDream, the iRiver records directly in real-time MP3 format which is what you want for podcasts. It can also record in OGG Vorbis and WMA.

It has other superb features, too, like a built-in FM radio. I’m just using it for voice recording at the moment. One other thing - it supports ID3 tags, crucial for podcasts. It comes with software for Windows that makes it so easy to transfer recordings to your PC. And its firmware is upgradeable.

Now I can fully understand why nearly every other podcaster I know has an iRiver.

I’m currently trying out the first public beta of the forthcoming version 1.6 of FeedDemon, the RSS aggregator for Windows.

This is the first development following NewsGator’s acquisition of Bradsoft, the company who makes FeedDemon.

As a first beta, it’s not bad. It does suffer from some obvious glitches, the most noticeable of which to me is how the program doesn’t display individual news feeds in the correct sequence no matter what setting you define. That looks to me to be the same as happened with betas for version 1.5 earlier this year. Not a major issue I don’t think, just a bit irritating, and hopefully will be addressed in the next beta.

There’s also some issues with feed synchronization with NewsGator Online, although I’m still trying to figure out NewsGator Online. But that is a great feature, the ability to sync your FeedDemon feeds with a web-based service so you can get at your info from any PC with a net connection.

As I encounter odd things or have questions, I’m posting my thoughts, etc, in the new NewsGator FeedDemon beta forum.

One other thing I’m playing with is NewsGator’s feature to display headlines in your blog from one or more of the RSS feeds you subscribe to. In TypePad, you do this by creating a typelist. So I’ve done one which captures the ten most recent posts from Headlines from PR Weblogs and displays excerpts. Pretty cool. You can see it in the right column on my main blog.

More thoughts later as I continue.