Moving from Blogger to TypePad whilst considering WordPress

Blogger has served me well for the short time I’ve been there, but it has it’s limitations and so I’ve moved to TypePad. But WordPress looks worth considering in the future.

One of the main limitations of Blogger is its lack of support for trackbacks - which provide a key ingredient for real blog to blog conversations. The other significant missing feature is blog categories - the facility to identify blog posts under category names so that readers can pinpoint entries covering relevant topics.

TypePad is a commercial service built around the Moveable Type blog hosting software. It provides the crucial trackbacks and categories and quite a few other features whilst providing a fairly easy to use interface.

WordPress however, looks well worth a thought. It’s free and open source which are good qualities in my book. it also appears (from a brief scan) to support dynamic generation of pages so there’s no need for the whole process or ‘republishing’ a site when a changes is made to the overall look.

The reason’s I’m currently holding back on WordPress are:

1. I would probably have to set up my own hosting and install the software, and that’s a longer job which requires a bit of time.

2. WordPress doesn’t currently support multiple blogs unless you install it multiple times. The facility to host multiple blogs from a single installation is down on the agenda for the 1.6 release of WordPress.

My searches looking at this are encompassed in the following mindmap:

PRINCE2 Open Exam booking workaround

The day after posting this, APM Group fixed their site. Thank you.

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Attempting to formalise my PRINCE2 knowledge has been frustrated by the fact that the Open Examinations in the UK conducted by APM Group are booked through a web site booking form which which uses some outdated JavaScript to display available booking slots. From my testing this appears to only work on Internet Explorer on a PC, though Internet Explorer on the Mac will display the options even if you can't book them!

I'll see if I can persuade them to fix this, but in the meantime, if you are a user of Firefox or Safari you can circumvent their JavaScript museum by typing the following line (as one long line) into the location bar and hitting Return:

javascript:var str=document.f.T1.value; document.getElementById("Topic").innerHTML=str; document.getElementById("Topic").style.visibility = "visible"; alert("Done!");

Replace "T1" (for Milton Keynes) in the above with "T2" for Winsford or "T3" for York.

Once the dates are displayed you can proceed as normal.

An incomplete thought on blogging

What is the point of a blog?

It’s an interesting question to which I can personally think of too many answers to consider writing about, but a few short ideas have permeated recently which seem worth noting and provide an amusingly recursive entry, if you get what I mean…

1. Blogs are about sharing useful information with like minded people

I read blogs because they inform me, so blogs are often about informing people. How do they inform? They inform because they share knowledge, and often they share a learning process. The writer moves from point A to point B in their understanding of a subject area, and the reader, who reads the blog because they feel an affinity for the writer, is also given a stepping stone to move from A to B without having to do all the work involved in discovering the step.

So, whilst a blog can be anything, in this understanding, a blog is about sharing what you are learning rather than attempting to write some creative or editorial masterpiece.

This being the case, a blog of this kind is not something that should take a long time to compose, because it doesn’t need too much thought, it just requires the thoughts to be composed on the screen and it doesn’t need to take long for another reason…

2. Blogs are about progressing knowledge not completing it

Normally writing is constrained by the need to complete things… the need to make something into a whole with a beginning, a middle and an end. From the perspective of a bit of prose this is probably still true if you want your blog to read well, but it doesn’t matter with regard to the thoughts it communicates.

Forget etiquette, forget the norms of old, blogging is about a conversation separated from time. I blog something and someone blogs a response somewhere else in the world at some time later. Perhaps I never hear the response, but someone else does, and it takes thoughts forward and builds on them.

What’s the point of completing a thought and wrapping it up in a parcel. For one thing it hits the old 80/20 rule that applied here says that wrapping up a thought takes 80% of the time and probably contributes 20% or less of the substance. It’s perhaps hard to admit that a thought isn’t complete and that we don’t have the final answer, but I know as a reader of blogs that I would be sorely disappointed if all the blogs I read had censored by the ‘completed thought’ police.

Funnily enough a blog could be described as agile publishing. Perhaps I should register that definition. Anyway, I could go on but…