Five Acres with a View

Summer sky

Summer sky
We have had thunderstorms in the area since about five, but have seen quite of lot of blue sky as well. I have been watching for a rainbow in the east, but the clouds have mostly been too dense to the west.

Quote of the day

My goodness. Google Alert just informed me that my name came up on qotd, one of the quote of the day sites. The quote was Art is too much fun to be left only to those who are good at it. I used this in my email signature block for years before I decided my signature was getting too complicated.

(Zempt gets very cranky when you try to reference a deleted weblog.)

The Princess and the Peas

I rode Her Royal Highness yesteday in a class lesson with my trainer. I tempted fate when I was looking for the horse that turned out to be Lily: I said something at one point along the lines of “at least, if I find another horse, he can’t be as difficult to deal with as Hap.”
Continue reading The Princess and the Peas

TypePad Review

introverting.nu has a TypePad Review that agrees with my experience of the product. I am having a good time working with Movable Type, but if I were starting out from scratch and didn’t need a separate web host, I would definately go with TypePad.

Zempt

Now that I have decided to go with the Movable Type application, I am taking another look at Zempt :: Multi-platform posting for Movable Type. On my visit to the website, I noticed that they have a bookmarklet that will start Zempt, similar to the Post to MT bookmarklet. Zempt also includes a spell checker.

Propagation

Despite years of hearing the term domain name propagation, it still reminds me vaguely of gardening. However, I am astonished that, a little over 24 hours after I made the request to Network Solutions, our domain name has been propagated to our little corner of the Internet.

We have had this domain name for about nine years now. When we got an internet dialup account in 1994, Jack decided that he wanted us to have a domain name. (Things were so primitive then that Jack took our desktop computer down to the ISP office so they could install the software we would need.) I thought it was a complete waste to get the stardel.com domain, but have to admit that the domain name has survived four or five different service providers over the years. I have had my stardel email address for the same length of time, which may not be a record, but is a very long time. Of course the downside is that it is on every spam list in the universe, since I was sending email before anyone even thought about protecting their email address. I can still remember my shock at the first p*rn*graphic email I received.

New Weblog

I was very pleased with TypePad. However, because we had a lot of information on our existing website, as well as my old weblog, I decided to see if I could install Movable Type, which is the software predecessor of TypePad. It took me about six hours to get it working so I could log in. This included finding my way around a new web host, copying files from our old host, and and cooking dinner. I wouldn’t recommend the experience to anyone who hadn’t had some experience with Perl and/or Unix and/or SQL.

I exported my posts to the TypePad beta, and imported them into my new weblog with no difficulty. I haven’t yet started to customize the templates and cascading style sheets, because I wanted to get the basic mechanics working first.