***Simon Cozens|http://simon-cozens.org/***, the extraordinary Perl guru, poet, photographer, and preacher, is starting work on his own next-generation blogging system: ***Feuilleton|http://wiki.simon-cozens.org/index.cgi?Feuilleton***. I’m very excited about this. Simon isn’t as immersed in the blogosphere as some of us are, but he has incredible design and programming talents, and all he needs is some input from the user community to come up with something really cool.

As a side note, Simon is just one of many technologists who I’ve discovered are also Christians. This list also includes:

* ***Larry Wall|http://www.wall.org/~larry/***, creator of Perl
* ***Rich Bowen|http://www.rcbowen.com/***, member of the Apache Software Foundation and active participant in the Apache Documentation Project.
* ***Brad Rhine|http://truetech.org/***, developer of the Frequency and Tangelo blogging tools.
* ***Chris Nandor|http://pudge.net/***, Mac+Perl developer, Slashdot moderator

Netcraft: Changes at MT, Blogger Highlight Blog Hosting Strategies

In the article linked above, internet research and analysis firm ***Netcraft|http://www.netcraft.com/*** offers their take on the Blogger and Movable Type news of the past few weeks. They offer an explanation for Six Apart’s licensing scheme as follows:

qqq|Six Apart’s pricing for MT 3.0 appears to have been influenced by two hosting-related concerns: steering MT users to the more profitable TypePad, and licensing MT for use by other hosting providers. The $69.95 price on the cheapest MT license costs more than a full year of TypePad hosting, which offers far more features.|qqq

In other words, they’re hoping that people who are using MT for more personal reasons will just use the cheaper TypePad instead, and that people who are running MT in commercial installations will start paying for it, since they are now allowed to charge for it.

Netcraft also correctly identifies the blogging community as “price-sensitive”. Like me, many users simply can’t or won’t pay for a blogging service, particularly if they are already paying for their web hosting space.

Which brings up an interesting point. I’m already paying $25.95 per month for my web hosting service. ***Site5|http://www.site5.com/*** could conceivably purchase some sort of Movable Type site license from Six Apart, and then enable all of their users to have access to it for a small monthly fee increase. If this were to happen, I certainly might consider paying the few extra bucks per month.

Apart from the Movable Type changes, of course, Netcraft discussed ***Blogger|http://www.blogger.com/***’s recent overhaul. For no particular reason, we have been managing our ***Scrabble This!|http://scrabble.prwdot.org/*** blog with Blogger. I have had a chance to check out the new Blogger site and features, and I have to say that I’m very impressed. Thanks to the power and financial wherewithal of ***Google|http://www.google.com/***, Blogger is able to offer a lot of advanced features for free. They have great XHTML compliant code, well-designed CSS and XHTML templates, built-in commenting and RSS feeds, and blogging-via-email to name a few features.

Blogger has really come a long way. I used Blogger to manage ***my old blog|http://peter.prwdot.org/?p=archives-individual*** from December 5, 2000 until April 15, 2002, and moved to Movable Type after that because it had more features and allowed me to have complete control over the blogging system from my own web host. I still like the control offered by running my own blogging system, but I have to admit that Blogger is now really a great service. I highly recommend it if you’re looking to start up your own blog.

Of course, I’d also be happy to host your blog on this server if you’re interested. I’m already hosting ***Pulcher Sentio|http://pulchersentio.prwdot.org/*** and ***waltondammerung|http://waltondammerunprwdot.org/g/***, so just drop me a line if you’d like to be set up as well!

SixApart has responded to the user community’s criticisms by slightly restructuring their licensing terms and pricing. Based upon the new scheme, if I were to upgrade our current installation to 3.0, I would need to purchase the Movable Type 3.0 Personal Edition for $69.95. This is less than the $119.95 I would have had to pay for the previous “Volume License I”, but still too much in my opinion.

Movable Type is in a competitive marketplace. There are numerous weblog tools, some of which are arguably close to MT in terms of features, and many of which are nearing it in popularity. They have one thing in common, though. The most popular weblog tools are free. By adding this new pricing scheme, I believe Six Apart has effectively priced Movable Type out of the competition. Sure, perhaps they’re now appealing to a different crowd, who relies on the quality and support (or at least the perceived quality and support) that a paid commercial product ensures. But I think they’ve lost touch with their core following – knowledgeable people who have set up their own MT installations for themselves and a few of their friends.

So as it stands now, I have no plans to upgrade to Movable Type 3.0. I certainly cannot move to the Free Edition, as our site has one too many blogs and three too many authors. Since I really am satisifed with the current 2.661 version, and don’t really have any reason to upgrade at all, I also won’t be paying for the Personal Edition.

I just hope that Six Apart will provide security patches for older versions, when and if they are necessary. That would be the least they could do to maintain some respect.

qqq||qqq

Ok, so maybe I feel a little bit bad about contributing to the 335+ trackback entries on Mena’s post about MovableType’s new licensing and pricing scheme.

I can only wonder what’s going on in the minds of those people at SixApart. Will they bend to the user outcry, like reeds in the wind? Or are they resolute in their plan to make MovableType into a real living, desperate to keep their young corporation alive and support the employees they have hired? I really can’t blame them for wanting to make money. To be sure, that would be one of the first things on my mind if I started a corporation. SixApart is in a difficult position, however, having gone from a small group of developers working on a popular, free project, to a corporation trying to develop and support its several product offerings while making enough money to pay the bills and the employees.

Hopefully things will work out well for everybody on their end. I wouldn’t wish bankruptcy or layoffs on anyone, particularly those with families to support and particularly in a high-cost-of-living area such as the San Francisco Bay.

In the meantime, here at prwdot.org I already have a fully-functional WordPress installation up and running. It actually didn’t take too much work to get it up and running, and I am grateful to WP’s founding developer, Matt Mullenweg (who has a very nice site by the way) for personally responding to a couple of my emails in regards to some questions I had. From what I can see, it looks like a very nice product.

I haven’t decided whether or not I’m actually going to switch our blog over, however. For the moment, we don’t have any practical reason to switch. The current version of MovableType is working well for us, and MovableType in general has been working well on the sites that I’ve run since April 16, 2002 – over two years. I personally have put a lot of time and effort into learning the ins and outs of MT, and it seems like a shame to put that all to waste. I rarely make decisions based on idealism, and at this point, switching to WordPress simply because I don’t like the way MovableType is changing would clearly be an idealistic decision.

To quote Radiohead, “Pragmatism, not idealism.”

***Exposé is cool|http://prwdot.org/img/expose_stuff.jpg***.

Tired of entering text into your computer the old-fashioned way? Speech-recognition just not working out for you? On-screen keyboards no help?

Try ***Dasher|http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/***. After you spend a few minutes figuring out how exactly it works, it will blow your mind. It’s almost like playing a video game. But that’s not entirely accurate… you have to see if for yourself.

You might find this program of particular interest if you are unable to use a regular keyboard or pointing device, or if you work with special needs people. Folks who are interested in linguistics and natural language processing might find it fascinating as well.

Found the link through Perl guru extraordinaire ***Simon Cozens|http://blog.simon-cozens.org/6725.html***.

(Warning: It’s probably not a good idea to use this program if you are prone to motion sickness.)

I’ve found the perfect plugin for iPhoto:

***iPhotoToGallery|http://zwily.com/iphoto/index.xsl*** by Zachary Wily

It integrates seamlessly into my existing ***iPhoto 4|http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/*** application, allowing me to resize and export photos directly into the ***Gallery|http://gallery.menalto.com/*** web application.

It takes care of resizing, exporting, and uploading the images, as well as creating and naming the new album on the website.

This is the essence of the Mac OS – software that lets you forget about messing around on the computer, and spend more time doing what you love. In my case, shooting photos and showing them to people. So, so easy.

The only way this could be easier is if the images were sent straight from my digital camera to the website immediately after they were taken. And, since I can already do precisely that with my camera-phone, it shouldn’t be too long until something is possible with a digital camera. Or a camera phone with really good optics and a 3+ megapixel sensor.

This was something I meant to do Wednesday, but I wanted to wish ***Mac OS X|http://www.apple.com/macosx/*** a happy third birthday!

On ***March 21, 2001|http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/mar/21osxstore.html***, Apple announced that Mac OS X would be available starting that weekend, March 24. And as promised, Mac OS X began showing up at local retailers such as CompUSA. (Apple had not yet opened any of their retail stores; the first two would open ***two months later|http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/may/15retail.html***.)

Developers and other afficionados had already been given a taste of the new operating system by way of the Public Beta, released September 12, 2000. But Mac OS X 10.0 was the first chance for everyone in the Mac world to step up to the next level.

I did not purchase Mac OS X right off of the bat; I was running Linux on both of my Mac computers at the time, and I didn’t see any immediate need for it. However, my curiosity eventually got the better of me, and I ended up installing Mac OS X 10.0 on my PowerBook towards the end of July, just before leaving for the ***O’Reilly Open Source Convention|http://www.oreillynet.com/oscon2001/***.

Version 10.0 (“Cheetah”) was admittedly quite flaky. Most of the critical features were there, but there weren’t a lot of extras to be had, and some things still didn’t work quite right.

Version 10.1 (“Puma”) was released September 25, 2001, fixing many of 10.0’s bugs and adding some new features. Since Apple had by then opened many retail stores, this upgrade was passed out for free that evening. I was there at the recently-opened ***Northshore|http://www.apple.com/retail/northshore/*** store to pick it up.

Version 10.2 (“Jaguar”) was released July 17, 2002. This, many people felt, was the first “real” release of Mac OS X. All of the features were there, it was no longer flaky, and it was just overall a good, solid experience. Particularly notable was the introduction of Quartz Extreme, boosting 2d graphics performance through the roof when used with compatible accelerated graphics cards. I was at the Northshore store again for their Jaguar release party, that night, and I’ve got the ***photos to prove it|http://gallery.prwdot.org/jaguar_party***.

Version 10.3 (“Panther”) was released on October 24, 2003, introducing some amazing new technologies such as Expose. Again, I was at an Apple Store for that celebration (dubbed “Night of the Panther”), only this time it was at the ***Burlingame|http://gallery.prwdot.org/sfo_day6/DSCN4220*** location, as Becky and I were vacationing in San Francisco.

Mac OS X has come a long way, and I now have the latest version, 10.3.3, running on both my PowerBook G3 and my PowerMac G4. It’s definitely the most stable, feature-filled, easy-to-use operating system I’ve ever experienced.

If you’re interested in a technical look back at the evolution of Mac OS X, Ars Technica has written up an article on ***Three Years of Mac OS X|http://www.arstechnica.com/etc/mac/index.html***.

Thanks also to The Apple Museum for their ***Macintosh operating system timeline|http://www.theapplemuseum.com/index.php?id=tam&page=timeline&subpage=os***.

To anyone who has received a strange Instant Message from either of us in the past few days, asking you to click on a link to play a cool game or something along those lines:

If you are using Windows, and you clicked on the link, and installed and ran the game, then your computer is probably now infested with a virus-like adware. It doesn’t destroy any data on your computer, but what it does do is use your Instant Messaging application to send a link to the game out to everyone on your buddy list. This happens behind the scenes and without any warning to you – in fact, you won’t know it’s happening unless someone responds to the IM asking you what it is.

For more information on the viral game, and what to do about it, check out ***this entry on Bob Golding’s blog|http://bobgolding.blogspot.com/2004_02_08_bobgolding_archive.html#107656376248324548***.

If you are running Windows and didn’t click on the link, you’re probably ok.

If you are running something other than Windows, like Mac OS X, then you are definitely ok.