Today marks the end of an era. Pour one out for the old Movable Type install I still had laying around. I kept it up purely for Action Streams support. Which, at the time, was a kinda cool aggregator of "the things you do elsewhere on the internets". Not something I've had on the site for a while now so decided it was time for MT to retire up state.

I had a pang of nostalgia for the good old days of blogging as I typed cd cgi-bin && rm -rf mt 🥲

As a RSS refugee from the olden times, I've used more aggregators than I can possibly remember. Most recently Reeder on top of feedbin and have been pretty happy with that setup for a few years.

But I got a bit bored with all that and wanted to give something else a try. Enter Tiny Tiny RSS.

Open source, self hosted web app with community themes. As long as you have a host and a DB, you point the installer at it, import your OPML file, add the cron job to crawl for updates and then it "just works".

Hey @kapgar, look what I'm reading.

The other day I was worried about a thing. I didn't need to be worried about a thing. It all "just worked".

And breathe out.

It's the plugins you see. Some of the ones I currently use I really like. And they don't all officially support the new shiny yet. So just wait, or pull the trigger and deal with breakage? Gutenberg aside, any other compelling reason to switch to 5.x yet?

Andre Torrez wrote a blog post about creating a feeds.txt.

My friend Adam Mathes posted an idea called 'feeds.txt' back in August where he decided to publish his current subscriptions to a human readable text file.

Intrigued by the idea I was inspired to write my own generator. It runs nightly in cron and generates both a feeds.txt and a feeds.html file.

Turns out I still have a lot of cruft in my subscription list that I should clear out. Lots of blogs have disappeared into the ether. Shame that.

The Archive Team are doing the lord's work downloading all Tumblr content before it goes away. I wish them every success.

I've long used the wayback machine to look at old sites of yore so wondered how far down the rabbit hole of my own storied past I could go? All the way it seems. For many moons and domain names ago I started what was known as "updating your website frequently".

The very first ever "blog post" I did was on a long defunct site on October 31st 2001. The wayback machine has it. I'm not linking to it. Interesting from a personal growth angle, my head was in a different place 17 years ago. The cringe factor is high.

I wonder how all this will sound 17 years from now?

After a month of using it, I've deleted the WordPress Gutenberg plugin.

Editing tools shouldn't get in your way. Editing tools shouldn't make you fight them. Editing tools shouldn't make the process frustrating. Editing tools shouldn't make the process take longer. Editing tools shouldn't make you have to roll the dice on whether that paragraph has the right amount of whitespace under a photo.

But Gutenberg did all those things. And now I'm back to the old familiar intuitive interface. Posting is a breeze and easy and quick. Which makes me happy, albeit temporarily. For I know it's only a matter of time before this is forced in WordPress core. Perhaps by then a lot of the bugs will have been worked out?

I switched to the new Gutenberg editor in WordPress this week.  I kinda like it.  The first real change to the default editor in just about forever.  Right off the bat it's obvious they're focusing on a lot more than just blogging.  Now we have more of a first class full on content editor.

Instead of one free form text area you now insert blocks.  Blocks can be made up of text, images, media, quotes.  Wanna write a straight blog post, just add blocks of text.  Wanna embed media, blocks make it super easy to do that.  And in my testing it all 'just worked'.  Not bad for something that isn't 'production' per-se.  It won't ship officially until WP 5.0 and early birds can use it by installing the plugin.

There is a bit of a "kinda solves a problem I didn't have" feel to it.  Adding images and media wasn't something I was having all that much bother with?  But I can see this being super appealing to a wider audience.  About the only thing I didn't immediately like is that it decided to hijack the Flickr link I used for the previous post.  Adding additional CSS and alignment wasn't really the help I was after. I hope I can figure out how to turn that off as having 3 extra manual steps per photo post doesn't seem appealing.

Oh and with forced tooltips on for my first 'onboarding' of Gutenberg my Mac became lava and the fans were all a spinning like little supersonic jet fighters. You go javascript in 2018!

Yesterday I lamented the end of an era.

When I was younger this is exactly the sort of thing an evening of Perl hackery and some beer could fix. I'm at the time of my life where tinkering is unappealing and I want things to "just work". So looks like this really is the end of the MT road for me. For real this time though, four years after I already declared it so.

So that didn't age well. For I did indeed have an evening of tinkering. The key was just finding the last version of Perl that old MT code would run on and force MT to use it instead of the system Perl. And thanks to Perlbrew this was a lot easier and quicker than it otherwise could have been.

And would you look at that, it all works again.

So a wee spot of site administrivia this morning then.

A hundred thousand years ago when I started "updating my website frequently" I looked into getting what the kids at the time called 'blogging' software. Movable Type was the best thing around back then. Well, times change, things change, feelings change. And four years ago I decided to retire that old MT install and move to WordPress.

Except, I didn't really retire it at all. One of the things it was bloody great at was powering my Action Stream list. So I was quite happy to let it chug along for as long as possible. Well the long as possible appears to have been last week. My hosting provider upgraded Perl and now that old MT code is borked and none of it works any more.

When I was younger this is exactly the sort of thing an evening of Perl hackery and some beer could fix. I'm at the time of my life where tinkering is unappealing and I want things to "just work". So looks like this really is the end of the MT road for me. For real this time though, four years after I already declared it so.

Update: so I guess tinkering was more appealing than I thought? It all works again and back from the dead.