September 2010 Archives

I am maintaining my record as a steadfast adopter of disappearing technologies.  It seems that Windows Live Spaces is being migrated to WordPress.com. 

That means I don’t have much longer to migrate Orcmid’s Live Hideout.  Uh, If I can still find it.  Ah yes, there it is.  It is off my Windows Live pages, but the URL still works.

The notice says I have until March 2011 to migrate.  There are also ways to download the Blog to my PC and save it.  I will probably do that regardless.  Oh, and the blog will be locked starting January 2011. 

It is tempting to do the migration.  However, I was going to migrate content I cared about and abandon that blog anyhow.  I might do all three, plus have a full backup.

What fun!

This is more incentive to lower the intensity of my battle to achieve interoperability via genuine open standards for documents.  I want to have more satisfaction building something, and maintaining and writing blogs is part of that.  But I’m not quite ready yet.  But soon.

[update 2010-09-27T20:13Z: Ah, now I see how it is that I learned about this in a Twitter update from the Windows Live Writer folks.  According to this account, WordPress.com will be the default blogging service.]

When I had to become much more web-server savvy as part of having a private installation of Movable Type on my web-hosting account, I realized that my web site deployment and maintenance model had exceeded my mental grasp.  I spent several days making diagrams using borders around groups of annotated spreadsheet cells.  Although I could have used Visio, I found that Excel was much simpler for this kind of diagramming.

A full image of the diagram is not great for viewing on the web.  But you can get a general sense of the way the pillars are connected, starting with my development web folders on the left and my Internet domains on the right.  This image is better for keeping inside my notebooks where I can remind myself how to stage something I am working on.

This diagram is going to see heavy duty in defining and documenting the more-detailed procedures that make this work.  A view of the worksheet itself is a little better for taking a closer look:

This is draft 0.12.  I will be refining the diagram as I work through further details.  Here is the Excel worksheet that I used for this version:

As part of the acquisition of Six Apart by VideoEgg to become SAY Media, Ben Parr foresees Movable Type being abandoned.

So, I maintain my record of keeping all of my blogging eggs in obsolete but stable authoring products.  Hey, I am still using FrontPage 2003.

I suspect that the change in direction into advertising is going to be more significant with regard to Movable Type 5.  Movable Type 4 appears to be stable and in essentially maintenance mode.  It was also the best product for my transition from Blogger, since I wanted to continue having static pages and archive folders and not ones generated dynamically on access.  This also lets me find ways to blend in my pre-Movable Type archives in a coherent manner.

I will stick to that for now. 

Golly, I haven’t even brought my dormant blogs back to life on Movable Type yet.

I may at some point need to move to an Open Source fork of Movable Type, but I will not do that just yet.  I’ll be paying attention though.  I’ll continue keeping an eye on the MovableType.org Open Source development and only go to a forked distribution if this disappears.

For a short time, I held the lease on orcmid.tv.  I rented the domain on 2007-06-01.  I cancelled on 2008-06-02 after deciding that $49.95 per year was not worth the ego-foo of possessing my own TV domain for hosting videos, especially since I never created a site for the domain.  I gave the money to the International Red Cross instead and went back to holding onto domains having $12.95 annual rents.

Now orcmid.tv/ is simply a shared folder of webcam-produced videos on Scampo.  The videos themselves have appeared on the Microsoft-abandoned Soapbox and also on Orcmid’s Flying Kyte.  I simply stopped making videos after conducting initial experiments.

My goal was to learn how to do tutorials and screencasts.  I also acquired a light-weight video camera in that period, but it is currently in a box somewhere with the first cassette not filled.

Based on that slow rate of progress, and my turning away from creating regular webcasts, it seemed inappropriate to hold onto orcmid.tv.

My initial enthusiasm for video was triggered by Scobleizer’s adventures with Kyte and his rapidly moving from webcams to videos captured from smart phones.  I had already obtained a (no-longer offered) Microsoft VX-6000 LifeCam to use with Skype and be able to assist Vicki in making video calls with friends.  I was satisfied enough with the device and Windows Movie Maker to attempt my own webcasts.  The technology has advanced dramatically and Scobleizer has also moved his attention to other video approaches.

Although it would be like starting over, I wonder if it is worth looking into video again.  First, the technology has improved considerably in two years, especially in terms of video quality and the low lighting levels at which webcams now work.  Also, while I slowly learn how to re-animate my dormant blogs using Movable Type, I could direct some of my pent-up desire to write posts toward making more webcasts.

One deterrent, at least as far as Microsoft support for video goes, is the abandonment of support for Windows XP in new Windows Live releases.  I always lean toward adopting the fully-workable accessory software that Microsoft releases, but the pull to upgrade on a schedule that is not of my making is troublesome.  Now I must either upgrade to Windows 7 or else go to third-party producers that are not so foolish to abandon what remains the most-prevalently-deployed Windows version.  I’ll think about that a little longer.

This post has led me to re-examine my interest in videos, screencasts, and webcasts.  The purpose of the post is to seed the orcmid.tv category on nfoCentrale Status.  I also want to confirm that I can embed videos using Windows Live Writer.  I also will use the category for experimental confirmation of a category-retirement technique.  There is also an interaction with Zemanta that seems to be a problem.  And I need to confirm that the video object will appear the way I want it to in the blog post even though it does not show properly in the Windows Live Writer UI.  So I am trouble-shooting all of that.

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[update 2010-09-02T20:07Z I added the orcmid.tv category and tidied up the table a little bit.  I am also noticing the many ways that Windows Live Writer fails to handle editing of more-intricate [X]HTML content.  After all of this time in the history of HTML editors, I am not clear what is so difficult about this, apart from misplaced NIH ego-foo.]

I have 20 domain names all to be hosted at nfoCentrale.  The sites category provides subcategories on their individual development and status.

There are also two retired domain names.  I’ve commented on the demise of InfoNuovo already.  Until I sat down to create this list and check on all of the current leases, I had forgotten about the never-used orcmid.tv.  It keeps infonuovo.com company in the list of retirees, below.

As I was setting up Windows Live Writer and the nfoCentrale Status blog site for uploading images, I realized that there were some useful adjustments I could make.

Previously, I had simply set up a single images/ directory per blog and allowed images posted through Windows Live Writer to accumulate there.  

A SLIGHT PROBLEM

Windows Live Writer creates a subfolder, with a name chosen by WLW, to hold the images uploaded for a particular post.  In looking for straightforward ways to back up these folders and images, I realized that it is cumbersome to have these images-per-post sets accumulate in an ever-growing, potentially gigantic single folder. 

ANTICIPATING BACKUP ARRANGEMENTS

To provide separate backups, I want to save compressed archives of the image sets.  The single archives will not reduce the space requirements by much, but they are easier to manage.  I can also include them in my source-control more easily than treating the individual folder sets as projects.  (This is a convenience for the continued use of Visual Source Safe; with other version-control systems, this part is easier.) 

The use of the source-control system is primarily a way to achieve versioned backup.  It is easy to expand a Zip archive back to the original folders.  And archiving the Zips as checked-in revisions provides a means for recovery in the event that older materials on the site are corrupted or lost in some way.

SUBDIVIDING BY YEAR

My initial solution is to annualize the images/ folder.  I will initiate that with images/2010/ and continue with images/2011/, etc. 

If even annualizing becomes ungainly, I am thinking that I will not drop down to a monthly level.  Instead, I will segment the year as needed.  For example, I might end up with the progression images/2010/, images/2010a/, images/2010b, …, images/2011/, etc.

ADJUSTING WINDOWS LIVE WRITER

For Windows Live Writer, I don’t need to change the FTP permissions I have already provided.  Those permissions already start at the images/ subfolder of the blog.  Any additional subfolders, such as images/2010/ are already accessible.

First, I prepare subfolder images/2010/ the same way I prepared images/ originally.  I will do this each time I need a new annualized folder.

Secondly, I instruct Windows Live Writer to use the new location for all future image uploads. 

When I edit the blog settings for uploading pictures, I will need to provide FTP account credentials again.  Then I can browse to the new location on the server and confirm that new location.

At the time I did this, there was already an uploaded-image folder at the images/ location the FTP account starts at (and where ftp.nfocentrale.com is pointed in this case).  That folder is allowed to remain, since there is a blog post that uses images from there.

Once I selected the folder, Windows Live Writer confirms the settings it will be using.

There is no further action to take until a new annualized folder is to be started.  Every January 1, if not sooner, I will repeat this process to start the next annualized group.  I can also adjust the backup procedures to begin preserving the new folder at that time.