archive.Joe Lamantia.com

After a few long evenings (and lots of chmod…), JoeLamantia.com is now pow­ered by Move­able­Type 2.6. This marks a much-needed upgrade, since the older ver­sion ran on MT 1.4: it’s akin to mov­ing from sail to steam.

I’d orig­i­nally intended to move from 1.4 to 2.6 as a first step, and then imme­di­ately put a gen­uine CMS behind it — most likely Dru­pal — once the new blog core was sta­ble. But after all the trou­ble with Una­com, I’ve decided to just post for a while.

As an exper­i­ment, I’m going to use MT to man­age all the pages on the site, mean­ing that sta­tic pages and nav­i­ga­tion will grad­u­ally dis­ap­pear as I fold those sec­tions into the blog-managed systme of entries and cat­e­gories.

In the mean­time, I’ve per­suaded friends who are much bet­ter at devel­op­ment to exper­i­ment with Dru­pal, and report back to me on the install and tem­plat­ing sys­tems.

I looked at using a wiki for this pur­pose, but again I’ve decided to wait and see how this approach works out for some oth­ers. With ref­er­ence to the over-worn tech­nol­ogy adop­tion cycle graph (which is sec­ond only to Maslow’s Hier­ar­chy of Needs as the most abused exam­ple of a trite the­o­ret­i­cal simpi­fi­ca­tion of the inor­di­nate chaos of the real world used by those with­out expe­ri­ence as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for spec­u­la­tive buseinss deci­sions), I sup­pose this strategem marks me as a “Insid­i­ous Vision­ary” more than an “Early Adopter”: I select a likely tool or solu­tion based on needs and trend analy­sis, and then con­vince oth­ers to actu­ally try it and see what hap­pens…

Unfor­tu­nately, the new lay­out looks like crap (again a tech­ni­cal term) in Opera and Mozilla for rea­sons unknown. There are no tables and posi­tion­ing as almost totally dri­ven by stylesheets. A deep and abid­ing resent­ment of the has­sles of deal­ing with browser incom­pa­biltity lead me to aban­don development-based roles in the mid­dle 90’s, so I’m going to just admit defeat on this point right now, and have done with it. Pend­ing the move to a new set of tem­plates in a new sys­tem, I’ll revisit the issue.