Juniorbird.com

I switched to WordPress a bit casually, maybe: I knew I didn’t want to stick with Tumblr, I knew I didn’t want to go back to good old Movable Type, and there was an obvious answer out there. I figured I could get my content up and make an improvement or two every week until the site was where I wanted it. You know, agile-style. But I don’t think I truly realized the learning curve.

See, I’m taking on a bunch of projects:

1. Move to WordPress (and try not to break too many links!)
2. Move to a new design that makes me happy

Two simple tasks, right? Except this probably means:

• Learning how WordPress works
• Learning a bunch of PHP
• Learning a bunch of jQuery
• Freshening up my CSS
• Making vim useful
• Doing my first project on git rather than svn

I’m pretty sure that, if somebody at my office proposed doing this much, I’d tell ‘em it was a bad idea. Yet here I am. And I already, a la Cortez burning his ships, uninstalled Movable Type and got rid of all my old archives. So it’s win or die.

But a lot of work shouldn’t mean that this blog’s unreadable. Thus: a nice, simple prepackaged theme while we wait for me to do all that stuff. Think I’ll finish this year?

So you may have noticed that I’ve posted a lot less lately. It’s not that I have less to say; it’s that I’m doing worse at saying it. Almost 2 years ago I moved from my old stalwart Movable Type to Tumblr, with the idea that I’d spend a lot less time fiddling with my CMS and a lot more time writing. Well, turns out that time was well-spent, since I seemed to post a lot more when I had to do it than now.

To be honest, I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m a geek; I like these kinds of things. I can express myself creatively through writing, or I can channel that stuff into building microformats into my site. Except, not with Tumblr, which I don’t much control. (Not Tumblr’s fault — their product is very good at what it promises to be!)

So I’m back to a self-hosted system, this time on WordPress (somehow, Movable Type seems to have given up its 6-year head start and more to be obsolete as a publishing system). Hopefully, the fooling around will inspire me to write more; not least because (obviously) there’s a lot of fidgeting to be done with this here toy.

(Speaking of fidgeting: pardon the dust here while I do my fidgeting. I’m going to do this iteratively, rather than trying to jump over in one complete, final version, so we’re going to start looking like crap and slowly, step by step, start to look better.)

Anyway, fidgeting: already fun!

You may have noticed that it was impossible to comment here for a while. Then, if you follow very closely, you may have noticed that things looked a little funny here for a while. I’d like to say that was “growing pains” but really it was “middle-aged creaky pains.” The upshot is that this blog has been updated to “Movable Type 4.21″:http://movabletype.com/overview/ and everything should be better than ever now. Hopefully not in the way that a 47-year-old guy buys a Boxster to distract himself from creaky knees that give him a big old 1″ vertical leap at the gym basketball court.
*The backstory is this:* I hadn’t run a mandatory security update about a year and a quarter ago, and I suffered the consequences when security actually got compromised. So I upgraded things to the first secure version but somehow the commenting didn’t work on that. Since the first secure version was that year and a quarter old, I couldn’t find any discussion of what had gone wrong and couldn’t fix it. So I upgraded to the exciting newest version, and things worked even less.
Every page you see here is generated by having some content I enter into Movable Type automatically applied to a template I’ve designed. Well, the template design language changed slightly in the latest version of Movable Type, and some plugins I had installed had changed their behavior slightly or no longer worked with the new version. The result was that I couldn’t publish updates (or take comments!). This was all exacerbated by the fact that I’ve been using the same templates since Movable Type version 2.6, so, with the upgrades through version 3, 3.2, 3.3, and now to version 4, you can imagine the cruft that was in my templates.
A couple of days of work later, I’ve finally grokked the changes in MT and updated everything to work.
*The meaning to you as a user is:* Not too much. Mostly, I ran forward to stay in the same place. You may notice three things:
* The ads are gone. Seems like you all — my intrepid readers — hated them. So you all now owe me about a lunch each.
* You can log in to comment using your TypeKey ID — which is the way we’ve been doing things for a couple of years now — or your LiveJournal ID, or your OpenID, which may include your Yahoo! ID, your MySpace ID, your AOL Screen Name, your Verisign ID, or even your WordPress ID, or it may not, I haven’t tested. Tell me how it goes for you if you try it out. Anyway, the point is, commenting should now be more convenient.
* The front page Junior logo has been replaced by an electoral vote counter. Because it’s important. Obviously, this’ll change when the election is over; hope you like it ’til then!
Enjoy! Tell me what you think.

Somehow, the “five-year anniversary”:http://www.theanniversaryrose.com/index.php?cPath=26 of this blog crept by me — Friday the 23rd was the big day. Post #1 was a cheap, unfunny “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org reference. (At least “#2″:http://juniorbird.com/archive/000002.html was actually a plausible — and well-folowed — mission statement.) Since then, 682 more posts have brought 878 comments, most of them smarter than the entry itself.
I don’t know what it means that “Milla”:http://millatimes.com/milla/journalmain.htm and I started blogging within ten days of each other. I do know that my recent quiet patch — brought on by a couple of months in a row of 14-hour days, 7-day weeks at my startup — is the longest since juniorbird.com started. But don’t worry; there’s posts coming up this week, ’cause I’m on vacation, and you know how I like it with the vacation photos and travelogues.
So, hasta mañana, gang!

Well, ok, it’s not the same, but, well, it sounded like a catchy headline. Anyway, welcome to my new look. It’s big, and it’s dark grey, and it’s got my moblog right at the top, and I love it.
So, what’s new here? Well, like I said, there’s the moblog right at the top. The photos are now big, rather than postage stamp-sized, which will hopefully force me to work harder on my composition. Plus on making little vignettes from big-sized photos.
The blog content on the side is now large enough to read, which, hopefully, will incline people to actually read it. Also blog entries now have comments turned on, which I know will please at least one, or 25%, of my readers.
And, yes, I know that in general the text on *everything* is big. I’m into big these days. Maybe it’s because I like leaning back on my couch, putting my laptop on my legs (it’s too hot to sit over the ‘ol package) and read, and that’s much easier with big text. But, in general, big type is a trend and that’s one trend I like. After all, this here blog is all about content, and so the content should be big and readable. And if you don’t like the big text then get Firefox and resize it, because I like the big text. Can you tell that this has been the most unpopular feature with beta testers? Yeah I’m maybe a little defensive.
I also get rid of the poorly-conceived unified archives, not like anyone browses the archives anyway. But now the moblog, blog, and diary are all broken out and easily browseable. With everything broken out, there’s now a seperate blog and diary RSS feed, so make sure to update your subscriptions appropriately.
Speaking of feeds, there’s a feed of new WadeArmstrong.com and Cleverbird.com entries now on the front page, so if you’re interested in those sites you can keep up and, if you’re not, you can feel free to ignore.
And there’s a new color, blue, which is the color of the skin around Junior’s eyes. The yellow is now closer to the yellow on Junior’s feathers, and the text is now white, like his feathers. It’s nice to have a palette that walks and talks.
Anyway, sorry this redesign took so long; I lost days trying to figure out a mostly undocumented change in the way Movable Type handles comments, but at least I actually like the change; it makes my life easier. I’m also too lazy to switch to WordPress.
My badass gangsta neighbor is listening to “Holiday” by Madonna. I think that’s my cue to wrap this entry. Thanks for sticking around, readers.

I know I haven’t updated in a while; I’ll be back in a bit with a new host and a new look for this blog. Hope to see you back then! If you have any deeply-desired feature requests for the redesign (apart from “content that doesn’t suck”, which you should know by now is too much to ask), now would be the time to express them.