Dead Ink Vinyl

The top four entries of my blog have remained extremely consistent over time. Arranged alphabetically, they are:

• CouchDB on MacOSX Leopard
• Flex 3 addChild() and initialize()
• iPhone OpenGL ES [UPDATED]
• Tivo Series2 First Setup Without Phone Line
• TypePad and SquareSpace

What strikes me about this list is that the subjects are very diverse, but thematically they are all help guides: I have learned something and I share it in hopes that it will be useful to other people. Look for more entries like that in the coming months.

WordPress.com has started to tick me off this weekend. I’ve lost control over the widgets that appear in the left and right menus. I’m investigating alternative commercial blog hosting solutions. The top two contenders are TypePad and SquareSpace.

Both offer paid hosting with domain mapping for less than $15 per month. I’ve signed up for the two week free trials on both sites. I’ve exported my WP blog, spent a couple of hours with StAX to clean up the output, and have successfully imported everything into both TP and SS. In both cases, I need to perform some manual tuning to get things the way I like them.

Quick summary of my thoughts so far:

• TypePad annoyed me a little by asking for my credit card number up front, whereas SquaredSpace doesn’t require it until I’ve made a commitment to join.
• For my needs, TypePad is much less expensive ($8 versus $14).
• TypePad is straightforward to use, but a bit painful. I need to mass-delete all 200+ of the custom “categories” it imported from WP and it requires a two-click process for each. Additionally, things are not quite laid out cleanly on the management side. Tabs within tabs kind of thing.
• SquareSpace takes a radically different — and better — approach to content management. It threw me for a loop at first, but it’s great once I got a handle on its metaphors. Switching to SS from Blogger, WP, or TP is a bit like switching to a Mac from a PC. It’s a new, scary, and aggrevating environment until you understand it, then it’s obvious and elegant.
• TypePad has an iPhone application already available. SquareSpace is still working on theirs.

In response Marc Farley and others pointing out that my blog doesn’t accept comments and doesn’t provide trackbacks, I have accelerated my search for an alternative blogging solution. Currently, I use TextPattern for my entire site. TextPattern is great as a full CMS solution — including allowing multiple people to contribute design and content in a controlled fashion — but for most of what I use deadinkvinyl.com, a simple blogging solution is sufficient. With trackbacks.

Consequently, I’m evaluating the migration of the blog portion of my site to blog.deadinkvinyl.com and using WordPress.com to host it. Unfortunately, WordPress.com doesn’t support Textile for editing articles — which I really like — but I’m willing to live with that trade off to have a solid, simple blogging platform. I have already migrated all of my articles from here and my old Blogger site and I am half way through the process of categorizing and tagging the old articles.

In the coming days, I will create an Apache Rewrite so that all incoming links to content on www.deadinkvinyl.com are correctly directed to the appropriate place in blog.deadinkvinyl.com. After that, I will update www.deadinkvinyl.com to be a simple information page.