I know - two entries in two days. Shocking. But Julian's website, BooksWellRead was mentioned in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer yesterday, which I think warrants an entry!
For those not familiar with BooksWellRead it's an online book log where you can track all the books you read and write entries about them. And it's free!
The lessons of this story are:
#1. Never drop your computer. Never ever ever ever. In fact, don't take it anywhere. Ensure there are cushions around it all times. Do not, repeat, do not drop it. It will cost you more than your first born child. Seriously...
#2. If you cannot follow lesson #1, then ensure you have some damn fine house insurance with no deductible on a few dear-to-you items. And a credit card.
If I could go back in time and ensure my case was properly closed, believe me, I would.
I am a bad mother. I dropped Buster yesterday when I was coming in!! He seemed okay at first, but I soon realised he was mistakenly telling me it was 1969. I fixed that and held my breath. And then he crashed. And crashed again. And again and again and again. Poor Buster!! He's currently at the Mac Doctor. Please keep your fingers crossed that he'll be okay... (and that it won't be too goshdarn expensive...)
I found out here, and confirmed it by checking my own Dictionary Widget, that the definition for "blog" on my computer is "a weblog: blogs run by twenty-something Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers." Huh! Well, I do admit to being twenty-something and I won't deny my interest borders on unhealthy, but I'm not American!
Anyway, this is a fairly inaccurate description; most of the blogs I read are Canadian, and at least one is written by someone a lot older than twenty-something. He's 30.
I have to say, considering this dictionary is sourced by the OED the English is fairly poor. After all, what does "at least an unhealthy interest" mean? Is there something worse? Like an "extremely unhealthy interest" or a "positively sickening interest?"
I've been doing some editing over at the wedding website to do a little style-switching. I thought it would be fun to have different stylesheets so people could change looks. After much late-night tinkering I managed to get A List Apart's styleswitcher to work in IE and Firefox, but there's a known issue with Safari - it works but the cookie doesn't stick around so as soon as you surf to another page it's gone. I also adopted changes from Back-up Brain. Anyhow, it still doesn't work in Safari so I've kind of given up, but if anyone knows of a better, easy system for someone like me who doesn't know Javascipt from Java, or PHP from CGI, please let me know.
Seeing as the wedding site is for a fairly limited audience, I'm not concerned about making sure it works on every system, but it would be nice if my family, all of whom use Safari, could pick the sheets. It would fun to do it on this site as well. This is seriously making me question my loyalty to Safari.
Thanks to the kindness and generosity of my family, I am now the proud owner of this. Now if I don't achieve excellence in my studies next year, I have only myself to blame.
In response to Mena's post I wanted to give a summary of how I use MT.
Currently I run 6 blogs on movable type... I run two personal blogs, including this one, a design blog with free templates, a testing blog that allows me to test out templates and designs, a website tracking law school admissions data, and I've also set up a blog for my brother. Although I'm the author for five of the six blogs, I do use pseudonyms for some of the blogs. Also, I'm planning to set up a site specifically aimed at law students next year. None of the sites are for profit. None of them have ever generated revenue.
I'd like to be able to run about 10 blogs off my site. Currently I pay $150 a year in webhosting fees. Installing Movable Type 3.0 would double my costs for running the websites, and at this time that just seems too steep for something that is a hobby, especially as some of the sites, notably the design and law school site, are essentially services provided free by me to other people. Realistically, I would be unlikely to pay more than $35 to maintain my current level of service, and unless prices fell within that range I'm unlikely to upgrade. If it was a one-time only deal with guaranteed free upgrades, I might be willing to pay a little more, say $60.
Well, I've been looking forward to the release of Movable Type 3.0 for a long time. Unfortunately it looks like I won't be upgrading, at least not immediately. I run 6 blogs off this website, 5 for myself, a couple of which are related to designing Movable Type templates. I also have one which I run for my brother. I don't use my real name on all my websites, so it also means that I have 4 authors. I could pare that down to three though. And I suppose I could delete one of the weblogs too, to bring it down to 5. Even with the revised price structure it would still mean I would have to buy a 'Personal Edition' license for $69.95 (special introductory offer only, regular $99.95). That's almost $100 Canadian dollars, which is about what I pay for webhosting for a year. Overall, that doubles the cost of my current websites.
Besides, I haven't really figured out what there is in 3.0 that is really important to me. 2.6 has lots of irritating features, like the rebuild feature, and the fact that deleted entries and weblogs still muddy up the server. I'm not sure if any of that is fixed in 3.0, at least I can't find anything about it in the extensive lit on the website.
There's a lot of rhetoric about their commitment to developers, but there's little rhetoric about their commitment to their actual users, the grassroots support that has made MT the successful phenomenon it has become.
So, yeah, I'm bummed. It's not that I'm not willing to pay for the service, but I think $29.95 would be about my limit. That's already $50 Canadian. And the fact is, there are enough free options out there that I don't have to upgrade.