Today, I went to the annual Horticultural sale down by Colorado College. I only bought two phlox there, but admired this bleeding heart plant while I was looking around.
WordPress
It is almost looking like home again. WordPress has one nice feature, which I didn’t realize until I watched Jack pull up my site in his browser on his PC. If WordPress detects that you are a user with update capability for the particular weblog, it displays an “Edit this” link. I had a small edit link for my Movable Type weblog posts, but it desplayed to everyone.
Movable Type to WordPress
There are several resources on how to move your Movable Type weblog to WordPress. Carthik.net reviews some of them.
Technical Difficulties
I moved to Lunarpages in August 2003 and bought a year’s worth of service because they supported Movable Type, the weblog software I was interested in using. A few months ago, they decided, without warning or notice, that they would no longer allow new Movable Type installations. They cited security and performance concerns, though without the sort of details that would actually allow these concerns to be addressed.
They stated that grandfathered MT installations would still be allowed, so I figured that I had until August to find another host. Yesterday, they, without warning, took away my access to the main script that runs my weblog. Needless to say, I am not pleased.
When I went to the Movable Type site to pull down the 3.0 release so I could at least run it on my desktop, I found that they have made drastic changes to the license. They have increased the price, and limited the number of authors and weblogs that can be used by an instance of an installation. Their product Movable Type was definitely in competition with their Typepad service, and the terms of the new license seem calculated to reduce its attraction as an alternative. I am now looking at WordPress, a GPL weblog platform. I practiced installing it on my desktop, then migrated it to my web host. It seems easier to install than Movable Type, but perhaps I am just a lot more practiced at installing web software now.
Last Year’s Pansies
Pansies from last year bloom in my friend’s garden.
Crab apple
My friend’s crab apple tree is flowering.
Cloudscape
I saw these clouds on my Friday walk, but fortunately no snakes. Dudley tolerated staying on the lead for the complete walk better than I had expected.
Art Trading Cards
Some friends of mine from Denver had been trying to get me to go to the Denver Art Trading Card exchange for a while. It is held in LoDo (Lower Downtown Denver) on the second Saturday of the month. Last month I had family stuff planned and there was a snowstorm as well. This month, I was able to go, but didn’t have much time to work on cards. However, I did dig out some untraded ones from online exchanges, and made some new ones from old carvings. I was able to come up with 21 cards and traded every one. They all used handcarved images, usually with a commercial background stamp.
I saw one other person there with ATC’s using possibly handcarved images. There was a lot a variety: good prints from color printers, good color copies, cards with embellioshments, cards with commercial stamps, cards with embellishments, and collage cards. Most people had several different designs, so you could nearly always find something you liked to trade.
I plan to do this again, and will try to take double the number of cards, since I had to say “sorry, all traded out” more time than I can count.
Garden notes
My oregano is flourishing. So is the dianthus, the columbines, and the other herbs. However, it looks as though only one of two cinqfoils survived, and two of five rose bushes. Must do a better job of mulching next year.
Afternoon skies
After going out to feed a few nights ago, Jack returned to the house to say: “Voracious little monsters.” I asked, “What, the horses?” “No.” he said, “the hummingbirds.”
A skunk is bad enough, but I had a real thrill this afternoon when I took the dogs up to the plateau for an afternoon walk. I was returning by the normal way, walking on a path I had walked along a hundred times, and I saw a glint out of the corner of my eye about the same time as I heard a furious rattling sound. The glint quickly resolved itself to a rattlesnake, coiled to strike, which seemed near enough to touch, but was actually probably at least six feet from me. I quickly grabbed hold of Dudley, while my heart tried to leave my ribcage. I got the lead back on Dudley while I called Lody to me. I wasn’t too concerned about Lody messing with the snake, but I was very concerned about Dudley. We’ve nursed three dogs through suspected snake bites, and I didn’t want to add Dudley to the roster. I think I will keep him on the lead for the next few walks.