TaoSpace

Under Byen

Det er mig der holder traeerene sammen. Or: It's me who keeps the trees together.
Strange, danish and oh so amazing. Sound here. Lyrics here.

WordPress

After my last post, ranting about dynamic publishing systems, I decided to take a look at WordPress for myself. What is more I decided to do so on my Powerbook.

It turned out to be very easy indeed.
First I cleaned up my old Fink installation. I've never used any of the Fink packages I installed eons ago (incl. mysql) and I couldn't get the mysql package to run properly at all. A simple rm -rf /sw did the trick.

Next I found MySQL and PHP via Marc Liyanage's site, which turns out to be an excellent resource for running popular OSS solutions on the Mac.
Following the instructions on how to install both packages is trivial (just double click the installers and make a small ownership tweak with chown for MySQL). After this the usual <?php phpinfo() ?> test worked like a charm already. It had even started Apache for me.

Next WordPress itself. The installation really is as simple as it says on the site. Unzip the package, edit wp-config-sample.php and give it the login-name and password you use for MySQL (if you follow Marc's instructions you should have this info. For instance "root".). It also needs the database name. This triggered me because I wasn't sure it meant an existing database or one it would create. Just to be sure I created a database by running mysql -u root -p (enter password) and telling it CREATE DATABASE wordpress;. After this I could tell it exit. Having created the database and entered its name in the php-file I saved it as wp-config.php.

Next I just move the entire contents of the WordPress directory to the sites directory in my homedir and opened http://127.0.0.1/~myname/wp-admin/install.php. It gave some warning (which might have been something to do with the database already being there, so I perhaps I could have skipped the database-creation step. Anyway, the installation is a wizard. You just click through it, it gives you feedback on what it does and after a few clicks you're done and you can log in to your new WordPress installation.

Very simple. Very clean.

Once I've had more time to play with it I might report on WordPress itself; its features and problems... For now, if you are thinking about using WordPress you know installing it, at least, isn't hard.

My 2 cents

With the whole MT3.0 debate raging on, I feel compelled to voice my opinion on the matter (not that anyone will read it).

As you can see, I'm a TypePad user and a happy one at that. I do however have a server I could use to run my own publishing system. This means that one day I might want to migrate my blog to this server instead. Installing MoveableType would be the most logical choice, but as things stand I won't do that.

The reason for that is that I do not think MT is worth the money. Since I've never met or talked to the MT authors and likely never will I'm strictly neutral in the whole "they spent so much effort and should be rewarded" discussion. To me this is simply a product that is being offered at a certain price-point. A price-point that I do not agree with. This isn't about not wanting to pay for software or about demanding that every bit of software in the world should be "free". This is simply about bang for buck.

So what is my beef exactly? Well, I think that $99 (or even $299 if you consider that running AdWords might be construed as being "commercial") for what basically amounts to a static webpage "manager" written in Perl is too much.

Sure, you can argue that the actual value to a Blogger is more then $99. I might even agree with you. If however, you look at the great variety of content management systems out there (Blogging systems are just a subset of this) you'll find that there are tons of these systems which are either free or very nearly free. You'll also find that a great number of them are dynamic systems, which do not need to "rebuild" that entire site every time you make a change. The concept of "rebuilding" is so embedded in the blogging world that people hardly think about it any more. Some of the contenders, like WordPress, even use the fact that they don't need this as a benefit. It should be the other way around for Pete's sake! MT should come with a label saying: "Warning! Needs to rebuild your entire site every time you make a change!".

Database-centric dynamic content management systems have been around for years and years and are the de-facto standard. Why? Because building them isn't rocket-science! I've built them myself, in both PHP and Java. Hell me and a friend even built one using C-based CGIs back in '96. That ran a very succesful BeOS news-site called BeView on a 486 without any caching (i.e. writing out "finished" HTML pages to disk and serve them instead) at all!

And even if your system can't use a database to do dynamic publishing it still should have to "rebuild" anything if stuff changes. Simple server-side includes would take care of most of the problems. And since with CSS there is no need for any presentation information to be present in the HTML most of the rest can be (or is already) solved too.

In languages like PHP and Java using databases isn't hard, especially when you are using persistance frameworks like Hibernate it almost comes for free.

If you want to see what a (free in this case) Content Management System can do, look at Ariadne. Its PHP based, is properly dynamic, has features like visual HTML editors (yes, inside the browser), user management (so you can make certain content available only if people log in), multiple language content, a PHP-dialect you can use inside the page, plugins and more.
You could run entire professional websites like ZDNet.com or something on it if you wanted to.

And oh yeah, it is Open Source. Is the author poor and lonely because of that? No. He runs a very succesful business implementing this system for corporate customers.

But does it do RSS and commenting out of the box? No. But you could probably make it do that relatively easily if you knew some PHP. And this is just one example of the systems that are out there.

All things being equal I'd rather donate to one of these projects then to pay for a system that even after a relatively feature-poor "archicture-upgrade" still isn't dynamic.

Of course being "dynamic" isn't the be-all and end-all, and in the form of Typepad (i.e. with extra services and hosting added on top) it is workable as it is. But when it is being sold separately, as the flag-ship product of what is arguably the most well-known blogging-company in the world, it just feels old-fashioned and clunky.

Politics

With Bush's popularity dropping and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan producing new scandals every day I am wondering who Bush will blame in the end. You see, when the polls start showing him losing serious ground to Kerry, this might be the only way to regain favour.

Blame someone, particularly in his own cabinet, for all the mess. "It wasn't me! I was framed!"

Take your pick:

• Colin Powell - "He never really supported my policies!"


• Condoleezza Rice - "She conspired with the CIA to give me wrong information!"


• Donald Rumsfeld - "His spin on the issue put me up to it!"

My money is on Powell.

MMS uptake poor

The Reigster is running an article
about the poor uptake of MMS due to lack of interest. Not surprising :-)

Mobile hype

Russell Beattie posted on the new "mobile boom" he sees coming (Thanks Oliver!). Unfortunately I do not believe him. Sure the numbers look nice (although you cannot read growth rates from them!) and the author points out that most if not all of this will be Java-enabled, buzz-compliant phones too! And 3G is being rolled out! Russel takes this to mean that we will soon all have high speed wireless connectivity all the time and that this spell some kind of new (economic) boom.

I disagree and strongly so.

Firstly, although 3G might soon be available in most places this doesn't mean people will use it.
The killer app for these high-speed links has yet to be found. Plus success will only come if people want this kind of connectivity all the time. Fact is, they don't. I can talk while I'm walking or driving (provided I have a car-kit) but I can't surf the internet while doing these things. And even if I'm sitting down somewhere I still don't need this kind of connectivity 99.99% of the time. Clay Shirky is saying something similar by the way. Sure, the geek in me would love to sit out in the sunshine browsing the web wirelessly. The realist in me however knows that, besides the fact that the LCD screen of my mobilephone or laptop would be unreable, this will hardly ever happen. What would you want to accomplish by doing something like that? If I was out in the sunshine I'd order a beer, not fire up a web-browser or some other connected application. And before you say it: I don't need a high-speed datalink to find a decent place to order that beer either.

Although I have a Nokia 6600 which has all the options I would need I still rarely ever need them. Sure I sometimes check my email on it but browsing is still a sad affair, due to the form-factor of the device. No high-speed link will change this. In fact I can only remember one instance where being connected would have been useful, namely when one of my friends found out in the car he had forgotten his bag at a diner somewhere. By the time someone had gotten the browser open on his phone, someone else was already on the phone to the number-service of his carrier and even by asking for "this diner somewhere in this and this area" he got a direct response of "Did you mean blablabla-diner?" and was connected straight away. The "old-fashioned way" was simply faster.

And how about specialised applications besides browsing? Sure there will be some, but will they spell a new revolution? Probably not. The mobile industry is full of clever people, has been since the beginning. If a real killer-app existed it would have been here by now, 3G or not. Real-time video editing for instance has only recently become possible. Did that stop people from editing video digitally years and years ago (VideoToaster anyone?), both professionally and for fun? No. So the non-availability of 3G isn't likely to have stopped a killer-app either.

And this is a geek talking! My sister in law happens to have the same phone. She didn't even know she could check her email with it. Or change the theme, or download Java-enabled, network-connected games or do instant messaging, or connect it to her PC to do "stuff". Now that she does know this is possible (I told her) will she? Not likely. Oliver wrote about this yonks ago. Things have gotten worse since then, not better.

Lastly, there is the cost issue. This is not just about 3G being insanely expensive at the moment. The cost will drop. But will it do so before the hype is over? Probably not, as the investments the carriers made were too high. The cost-model itself (metered vs. flat-fee) is problematic too.
And although the carriers are shouting that 3G will vastly improve their ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) this isn't likely either, since the amount of money people have is still finite. Many young people today are already getting into financial troubles over their phonebills. It is however these same young people that are widely expected to drive this "revolution".

Do I believe there is no value in 3G at all? Of course I don't. But like any new feature on any product or solution it won't save the world or cause a boom. There will be lots of hype, loads of money lost and many companies filing for bankruptcy before this hype is over (Same for WiFi). After that it will just be another tool in the toolbox, like bluetooth, IR, GPRS, MMS, camera, etc. It will be there when you need it, but it won't carry the market by itself. Its primary use is likely to be a means to send larger photos taken by the phone's camera across faster, but only if the cost is the same or less then the MMS/GPRS combo we have today.

And lets not forget that same as the killer app of the internet is email, the killer app of mobile communications in whatever form is still communication. People talking. Voice. Whether this talking happens via a specialised protocol like GSM or as generalised IP packets on a mobile network won't make any difference to user and therefore to the market.