Derek’s Diary

I have moved my blog from Blogsome to WordPress.com and merged to it my old blog at Bloglines.  Please update your feed reader to the new feed address.

This is the second time that I’ve moved my blog.  I originally hosted it at Bloglines, but then moved it to Blogsome in February, 2006.  Thsi time, I decided to merge both my original blog at Bloglines and my Blogsome blog to WordPress.com because WordPress.com uses a more recent version of WordPress that has better blog editing and management tools and it seems to be more responsive.  For example, I find that WordPress.com saves and updates blog posts much more quickly than does Blogsome.

I was a bit premature in declaring my Typo installation a success. Though my Apache Web server virtual host configuration was correct, I was missing one important piece of the solution. In order for http://blog.derekmahar.ca to be accessible to a Web browser on the Internet, I had to add a DNS ‘A’ record to my DNS name servers at ZoneEdit.

Now that my Typo weblog is running and visible on the Web, the next step is to configure its theme and migrate content from my blog sites here at Blogsome and Bloglines. Unfortunately, unlike Wordpress 2.0, Typo does not yet provide a means to copy content from one blog site to a Typo blog site.

Further reading:

• On Switching to Typo (From Wordpress)
• Wordpress vs Typo

I just installed the Typo blog engine on my website in about 45 minutes, which included the time it took to configure the Apache proxy, but did not included content customization or migration from my existing blogs. Even though the installation includes an example Apache proxy configuration template, the proxy configuration took about 80% to 90% of the total installation time. However, installing Typo itself was practically a no-brainer:

$ sudo gem install typo
(answer a few yes/no prompts)
$ sudo typo install /var/www/typo

These two commands install Ruby on Rails (if it’s not already installed), Mongrel, Typo, SQLite3, and some additional Rails plugins. Starting Typo was equally painless:

$ sudo typo start
$ sudo typo start /var/www/typo
Starting Typo on port 4231
$ ps -eaf --width=2000 | grep typo
root 15286 1 5 15:41 ? 00:00:01 /usr/bin/ruby /usr/bin/mongrel_rails start /var/www/typo -d false -e production -P /var/www/typo/tmp/pid.txt -p 4231

The first time that you load the Typo blog URL into your web browser, Typo asks you to enter a user name and password, and then promptly takes you to the Administration page. The Typo Administration page looks pretty slick and provides options similar to those that Wordpress offers, but it’s far more responsive than Wordpress at Blogsome. I’m not sure whether this is because Typo is more performant than Wordpress or because Blogsome has misconfigured Wordpress or their web servers. In any case, my Typo is snappy!

Interestingly, this post took me about 45 minutes to write, or same amount of time that it took me to install Typo. Wow, that’s fast!

Google Reader has improved considerably since I last used the blog reader and aggregator several months ago. Google Reader is a lot like Rojo, but much more responsive. Like Rojo, Reader does a fine job of weaving together (or aggregating) multiple feeds, interleaving their posts into a single virtual feed. I also like how Google Reader and Rojo both allow you to tag a feed with multiple labels. Contrast this with Bloglines, which still uses an antiquated and oh-so-Web-1.0 (or un-Web-2.0) folder hierarchy to organize feeds.

Google Reader, like Bloglines, has a handy set of keyboard shortcuts to help you more quickly navigate through articles and feeds and its menu items at the top of the page allow you to filter your reading list. Though Reader and Bloglines both have a ‘Keep Unread’ checkbox to allow you to preserve the unread status of an article, unlike Reader, Blogines provides no means for reading those flagged articles without also ‘reading’ newly unread articles. (This is one of my biggest Bloglines pet-peeves.) Like Rojo, Google Reader provides a ‘Star’ flag which also marks an article for later re-reading, but unlike ‘Keep Unread’, does not mark the article as permanently unread. The behaviour is subtly different, but there is an obvious overlap between the two flags, so I’m not too sure why Reader provides both. Nevertheless, Google Reader, like Rojo, makes reading previously read articles and articles of particular interest, much easier than does Bloglines.

One standard feature that is missing from Google Reader, but that most readers share, is the prominent display of feed subscriptions along with the number of unread articles in that feed. Unfortunately, since Google Reader doesn’t give you an ‘at-a-glance’ feed summary, you must randomly pick feeds to find out which ones have unread articles. This is a pain.

Google Reader can also improve in its responsiveness and useability. Though quicker than Rojo in loading and displaying articles, it still doesn’t come close to Bloglines, which is very fast. Navigating articles in Google Reader, though made easier with the keyboard shortcuts, is still awkward and imprecise. Jumping to the next article with the j key should jump immediately to the next article without delay, but instead, can sometimes leave you between articles, which is odd.

Despite Google Reader’s weaknesses, it has improved considerably and like Gmail, should continue to improve with time.

To switch between Rojo, Bloglines, or Google Reader (or use them all), all readers allow you to export and import your feed list as an Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) file.