Series or: The Plural of Series is Series

It's been nice to finally have some free time this weekend to work on The Blog. There have been a lot of posts in the works that I've been neglecting, and some things I've wanted to fiddle with and maybe implement. Today I got to do just that.

A lot of my posts are part of a multi-post series. I've needed a way, beyond del.icio.us categories, to see all the articles in a given series. I can't find a way to cross reference anything on del.icio.us. So I've added a "-Series-" pulldown. It basically searches this blog based on keywords common to certain serial posts. It uses Google Blog Serach as it's search engine. As Google Blog Search takes some time to index stuff, the most recent posts in a given series won't be found immediately. Other than that, it works pretty well and will be quite useful to me. Hopefully to others as well.

UPDATE 1:
The good news about Google Blog Search: It apparently indexes very frequently, like at least daily. My last two posts, which were posted only yesterday, are already in the database today. Nice.

Google Blog Search and Blogger

Oh great. Blogger, apparently, has switched their search engine to the newly released Google Blog Search. And while this service does look immensely cool, and I have little doubt the Google folks will make it so, right now it doesn't work right. From what I can tell, Google Blog Serach, which is currently in beta, only goes back so far in time, and not quite far enough that all my posts are searchable. It's a cool engine, and it allows me to search by blog URL and article title, but if I search, for instance, "Tiger Beefs" in the blog title at the URL for this blog, I get nothing. Yet I'm sure I have an article called just that.

So, fine. I understand that Google Blog Serach is in beta, and may not be doing everything it should be doing at this point. Is there some reason, then, that the Blogger folks decided to make our formerly very functional search engine run on the currently beta, non-fully-functional Google Blog Serach?

I don't know. All I know is, I hope they fix this soon.

UPDATE 1:
About Google Blog Search acknowledges this problem:
"Why aren't my oldest posts listed?

Since Blog Search indexes blogs by their site feeds, it will only include items that have been posted since it started indexing a given blog. For most blogs, that will be around June 2005, or the time at which you submitted your blog for inclusion. We are working on ways to include older posts as well."

This really sucks for me, since my site goes back to May, and because one of my most popular posts is from then. So now, people relying on Google to find anything on this blog from May are screwed, and my site traffic is likely to go down. (So if your looking for my "Disable Spotlight" script, it's here.)

UPDATE 2:
Using regular old Google's advanced search yields far more accurate, if less pretty, results when searching the blog URL by term.

UPDATE 3:
Jeff Harrell, of The Shape of Days, is kind of a Nazi, but I read his site anyway, for the great writing and the occasional interesting post on technology. Recently he had a great writeup about Google Blog Search and the whole idea of tagging blog entries. He's got me thinking again about blog categories. I use categories mainly to organize my site into general chunks that are probably mainly useful mostly to me, so I'll probably keep using them in the sort of general way I do. But his thesis is correct: Tags or categories are kind of irrelevant to anything text-based, as text already contains the information you'd add as a tag, and is so easily searchable. For instance, searching my blog for the term "tag" would, in theory, yield this article, and any other article containing the term. So tagging this article with a "tag" tag would be pointless, because the information is already there.

Now all we need is a good search engine.

The Busy Time

Well, it's that time of year again. School is starting. Which leaves us quite busy in the lab, running around, making sure everything looks all purdy, making sure the network and the computers all work, and making sure new users are at least marginally oriented to our way of doing things. Unfortunately, this leaves me little time to post blog articles. In fact, in the short time I've been writing this very article, I've been interupted a grand total of some-odd umpteen times. Yes, it's true. Umpteen.

Anyway, all I really want to say is that I have posts in the pipe: More on the Tiger lab migration, more on antivirus issues, more on my Windows experience. They're coming. Soon. I promise. ('Cause I know you're all just waiting with bated breath.)

Until then, make like a McBLT: keep the hot side hot, and the cool side cool.

I can't believe I just wrote that.

Okay; got's to run.

systemsboy

Blogger or Blogsome?

As I mentioned earlier, Blogger's great. With one pretty annoying exception: the glaring omission of categories. Now I have managed to fake categories using del.icio.us and the kindness and ingenuity of strangers. But I've still been kind of envious of all the cataloging, viewing and customization options available to the WordPress crowd: the calendar, the attractive templates, the fact that it's an industry standard, and of course the built-in categories, all make WordPress very appealing to me, as an arsty type and as a systems geek. Let's face it: Them WordPress kids got it all.

Up 'til now, I've always thought the only way I could experience the lovliness that is WordPress was to roll my own blog. This would mean getting a host that has all the proper services -- php, MySQL, whatever else -- installing WordPress, learning it, setting it all up, getting a domain name. Well, you get the idea. I'm not a professional blogger, so I decided to forego that whole rigamarole. When lo and behold -- and I don't even remember how I found them -- I stumbled upon Blogsome.

Blogsome is a lot like Blogger. It's free, and super easy to set up. The domain structure is very similar. But what's cool about Blogsome is that it's basically WordPress. For dummies. And I like that. As far as I can tell, Blogsome sits on top of a good old-fashioned, standard WordPress database. So the templates you use and/or create and/or edit should work with any version of WordPress. And, theoretically, your entire blog could be ported to another install of WordPress should you ever decide, God forbid, to move it or host it yourself. Now I say "theoretically," because I haven't seen any way to get the actual files. So this could be an impossibility, and this is one way Blogger is better. Blogger allows you to host your blog on a different server. But I have no idea what sort of database Blogger uses. I only know that their templates use a proprietary, Blogger-specific syntax. Personally, if I'm going to learn a template syntax, I'd rather it were something a bit more open and extensible. And hosting my blog on another site doesn't really help me much if it still requires Blogger to do anything with it.

Again, all this is basically inspired by my desire for a good category system. The way I'm doing categories on Blogger works. But it's a royal pain-in-the-ass to maintain. On Blogger, each time I write a post, I have to do a whole bunch of stuff to categorize the article: First I have to add links at the bottom of the post to the various category bookmarks at del.icio.us. Then, using a special bookmark that needs to exist in any browser from which I want to do this, I have to add the post to del.icio.us and apply the appropriate tags. This may not sound so bad, but when you compare it to the Blogsome way, it sucks eggs: In Blogsome I simply click the checkboxes of the categories I've defined, while I'm writing my post, and the story is added to the categories and the links are embedded in the post. Sweet!

My initial reasoning for staying with Blogger was that moving would take away precious time from my blogging. But now, implementing categories is taking time away from blogging, and making the whole experience much more painful than it apparently needs to be.

Another nice thing about Blogsome is that it is self-searchable. Searching Blogger yields Google results, whereas searching your Blogsome account yields hits from the blog itself. This is can be implemented in some truly remarkable ways. Blogsome's also incredibly customizable. And the post editor is fantasic.

The main drawbacks are threefold: 1) I'm here now. I'm fairly comfy, and I'm not sure I feel like picking up and leaving. Plus, there are at least a few folks out there who are reading this, and I don't want to disrupt The Readership, though it's simple enough to simply redirect any traffic to the new site I suppose. 2) Blogsome seems a bit slower than Blogger. I'm not sure why, but it's just a bit slower. Probably not a big deal. 3) I'd need to move all my posts to date over to the new site. And this actually supplies a partial reason to move now, if ever. I mean, this site is young. I haven't written that much. Yet. So if I'm going to move, the sooner the better.

Anyway, if anyone out there on the BBI (Big Bad Internet -- and that's you guys, in case you hadn't figured it out) has any suggestions regarding any of this, I would absolutely love to hear them. Anyone use Blogsome? Are there any other advantages or disadvantages to using one over the other that I might not be aware of? I'll be waiting with baited breath. And then I'll go make up my own mind.

And, by the by, here's a sample of The Adventures of Systems Boy on Blogsome.

As usual, I'll keep you posted.

UPDATE 1
(Yes, that was quick.) I've discovered two more drawbacks to moving to Blogsome: 1) I'll either have to move or lose all my comments, not that there are that many, but still... Bummer. 2) The post editor, as far as I can tell, only allows editing raw HTML, whereas in Blogger, if you use Firefox, there's a nice, simple GUI "Compose" mode that lets you format links and text without having to type the code. This starts to cancel out the ease-of-use of categories. I mean sure, I may not have to hand-edit all my categories, but I'll have to hand code all my bold text, italics, and links. Oy!

UPDATE 2
(I'm on fire with the updates.) Turns out there is a graphical editor for the posts at Blogsome, but just like at Blogger, you need to edit in Firefox, not Safari, which is how I managed to miss it. Duh! I must say, though, it's not quite as nifty. It actually just uses something they call "Quicktags," which are just a quick way to insert the code you need, unlike in Blogger's version, which is kind of like a mini-Dreamweaver. A real GUI HTML editor.

UPDATE 3
Another Blogsome drawback: Editing the template is not as easy as at Blogger. Blogger's template is all stored in one file, and you can preview this file as you edit it. Blogsome, on the other hand, breaks the template up into multiple files -- one for the main page, one for the stly sheets, etc. -- and you can't preview your site as you edit. You must save the changes (which can be reverted only by restoring from a backup made by yourself or the system) in order to see your changes. Ugliness.

UPDATE 4
So far, I must say, Blogger continues to lead by a small margin. Sure, their categories aren't as easy, but everything else is. Still, I continue to test...

Blog Plans

So I spent much of today looking into how I would go about moving the blog. What I discovered is that moving a blog is a big fat pain in the ass.

Fortunately, that's not all I discovered. But first, some quick background: I've had some wild ideas about moving this blog to a permanent home on some good host somewhere and setting it up all myself with something like WordPress or Movable Type. My main reasons for wanting to do this were twofold: 1) I wanted more control over the design of the site and 2) I wanted categories so that I could organize and cross-reference things on the site, as I see this blog mainly as a reference for myself and, possibly, others. In my travails, however, I discovered that doing any of this -- getting a host, getting a domain, getting blog software, installing it, setting it up, and, finally, migrating all the existing posts, links, comments and all to the new site would take a lot of time and effort. Time and effort spent not working on the main reason for having the blog in the first place: blogging. So I started looking for alternatives.

My main concern is having categories on the site. This is so that if I want to see everything related to my Tiger Lab Migration, which is chronologically all over the map, I didn't have to dig through tons of posts and archives. I could just, in theory, go to the "Lab" category, and pretty much get everything there. After hunting around a bit, I found an extremely clever solution at Freshblog, that uses the del.icio.us community bookmark site to emulate categories for blog posts on Blogger. While it's not the easiest or best solution, I found I was able to implement it and categorize all my posts to date in a very short amount of time. So, the blog now has a rudimentary category system. Hooray.

Regarding design, I realized, at some point, perhaps many years ago, though I was reminded of it while thinking about all this site re-implementation crap, that I am not a designer, and by no means a web designer (a whole other ball of wax), and that were I to attempt to redesign the site from scratch I would most certainly spend a whole lot of time mucking things up for no good reason. There are a lot of fine templates available for the Blogger way of doing things. The are freely downloadable and modifiable. So, again, I decided to forego the design challenge and find a template out there that suited me. I've always liked the simple, easy-to-read WordPress default theme. It's simple, classy, and it doesn't get in the way. And lucky for me, someone has modified it to be usable on Blogger. So, for now, I'm going with that. I'm pretty much using the stock theme originally designed by Michael Heilemann and modified for Blogger at this site. All I've done is add my "Categories" and "Archives" pull-down menus, and increased the font size ever-so-slightly. At some point I may get graphically restless again, but for now, this is just fine.

With my mods in place, I'm sated for the time being. So I'll be staying at Blogger for awhile. If, for some reason, this ever becomes more than just a fun, though often quite useful, side project for me, I may roll my own blog some day. But I can't see that happening for quite some time. Until then I'm just going to make myself comfy right here.