I never mess with the MT blog software I use because quite frankly I don't need to, it's simple, it's stable, and it just gets the job done. I had been running MT 2.64 for well over a year and I wouldn't even have updated it if it weren't for the fact that I wanted to do some research on the latest features from MT to compare with Roller.

Here's some quick notes from the upgrade and first impressions ...

1. The MT upgrade process is very slick and nicely automated, something I think we should definitely aim for a bit more in Roller. The most notable benefit being the automation of the entire database upgrade process, schema updates and all. It would be very nice to see Roller offer a way to simply drop new .war files into a container and handle all the db upgrade (the most significant part of any upgrade) stuff via a tidy GUI.

2. The MT interface is still a bit more polished than Roller, but that's to be expected considering that Roller is an open source project and doesn't get the same level of commitment. However, despite the MT interface looking "prettier" I would say that for the most part the features and usability are fairly comparable. With a modest amount of additional work I think that Roller can be equal or better than MT as far as features and usability are concerned.

3. MT offers a wider assortment of tools for system admins for getting insight into what's happening across all the blogs controlled by the installation. This is definitely one of Roller's shortcomings in my mind, but it makes sense because we just don't have as big a need to invest in that part of the software considering that it's not nearly as visible to most users. We have bigger things to work on, for now.

4. MT still does not set the published date to the date the entry is actually published, which has always surprised me. Instead they populate that field at the time that entry editing first starts and so if you take 20 minutes to publish an entry like this one then you have the wrong pubtime, and certainly if you draft entries and finish them on different days you have an entirely wrong date. This is one of the small things that bugs me for some reason.

5. The entry posting interface is very similar to Roller (I suppose there is only so many ways to do a blog posting interface) and works well, but all in all I think that WordPress has the best posting interface I've seen. I think that WordPress' interface may be a bit cluttered but they have all the right pieces for publishing available on one page, which Roller is currently missing because you can't A) upload a file at publishing time and B) add new categories at publishing time. Those are 2 important things we really need to fix in Roller.

I'm sure I could go on with a handful more, but I'll leave it at that for now. At the end of the day I am happy to say that Roller has what I believe is a very comparable interface to MT, which is good news because MT is the most used blog publishing software on the web (i think).

it took about 3 weeks, but i finally got my flickr api key. the new gallery section will work now without me having to change the key every day.

I've been pretty preoccupied over the past week working on coding a simple gallery using the Flickr API.

The idea arose for two reasons ... one, just because i like messing with cool stuff like this. second, because it was quickly becoming apparent to me that hosting your own online photo gallery with full quality hi-res pics just takes up too much disk space.

My hosting company provides a great plan which includes 1.2gb storage for $15/month, but with a standard 2 megapixel camera you are looking at using about 1mb per photo you upload. This means you can hold roughly 1000 photos before you start to run out of space, and thats not much. I don't even take that many pictures, but I have about 700 online now.

The new plan is to pay a little extra for a pro account at Flickr and use Flickr as an image hosting service. Then using the Flickr API i can just query for the album information and display the pics on my own site.

Check it out ... all the actual images are hosted on Flickr. There are still kinks to work out, but so far i like it.

Finally sat down and whipped up some icons that I had been thinking about doing for quite some time. Now there is at least links to the archives and gallery.

I was coding on my christmas eve :) ... what were you doing?

well, it seems quite apparent that one cannot allow anonymous comments on a blog anymore without getting spammed to hell. I'll have to implement some kind of solution when i get back.

why are people so lame that they have to abuse everything they possibly can. one must wonder if there really is any hope for us.

Oops ... cannot locate module HTML::Template ... fail!

So, couldn't post for a week or so because of a missing perl module and I finally got off my ass and submitted a support ticket to get it fixed. Gotta say that CWI Support was pretty awesome and had the module installed and problem fixed in under an hour. bravo.

Funny this should happen on the very last day of the year, pretty much perfect timing for a little change. Anyways ... today I finally finished setting up the site on a new ISP. The reason for this is just that I felt it was time to spend the money and upgrade to a more reliable provider, and I am pretty suprised at what I've found for a mere $15 a month.

My new host is cwihosting.com and they are giving me mysql dbs, jsps & servlets, 500 megs of space and 25 gigs of bandwidth all for just $15 a month. Seems like a pretty sweet deal so far.

So, the site is back up and running and just in time for upcoming "2004 New Years Resolutions" post where I figure out my goals for the year and evaluate how I did in 2003. Ahhh, it's good to be back again. :)

-- Al G

Well ... after almost a full month I am finally back online. To make a long story short, i was offline so long because i was moving into a new house and didn't have dsl for a couple weeks, followed by the fact that the server admin had the ip change without telling me.

Anyways ... back online now and a whole lot has happened. I am just going to try and start up as if I never left and fill in blanks as time goes by.

I decided to name the site "Man's End" and so of course that is the natural name for the url of the site. So now "mansend.com" and "mans-end.com" are the correct url's. I think I like the hyphenated one best.

Right ... so this makes more sense to me as a way to display art on the site. I'll post it as it gets done and as you come around you'll see it posted. There's not much of a reason yet, but when there is I will flush out the archives page and provide links to the archives by category.

lovely ... i think i'll go play soccer now :)

I ditched the basically useless navbar that was left and now there is nothing but the blog. The site in its current incarnation doesn't cover everything that I want, but I will add as I can. My basic game plan is to provide everything through the blog and made the archives cover the functionality that would have existed in different places otherwise. This way I can remove say the movie section and instead just post my thoughts in the blog and let people use the archive to look at old posts.

I am also feeling more and more inspired artistically, so I'm sure it won't be too much longer before I start posting art to the blog ... that ought to make things more colorful eh? I have some vacation time coming up next week when I'll be in Cape Cod ... I hope to get some art done then =)

happy days!

I decided to simplify this whole website thing and cut back down to just doing the blog. I'll still be doing a lot of the same stuff as before, but just through the interface of the blog rather than trying to organize it as a bigger website.

Cheers.