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Updated: 4/8/2003; 8:55:46 PM.

 

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Saturday, May 11, 2002
The perils of webhosting, or why Earthlink still runs Perl 5.004

As I noted, I've been Playing with Movable Type.  Looking around the MT support bboards, several people said they'd had some glitches installing MT on Earthlink hosted web sites.  The source of the problem is that Earthlink is running Perl  5.00404, which the MT people claim is over five years old.  That struck me as odd: what's a major ISP like Earthlink doing running a 5-year old version of Perl?  I have an acquaintance at Earthlink, so I asked him.  His answer was interesting.

He passed the question on to an engineer in the web hosting group, who acknowledged that this was an issue on one of their lists of things to do, but not a very important one: one that they might not even get to anytime soon. 

His next comment was most interesting:

" ... it seems certain to cause more issues than it cures, since we'd be upgrading software that our customer's software (which we don't control, and can't test, and can't fix), depends. You end up with customers yelling at you because you didn't upgrade, and then different customers yelling at you because you did (as we're seeing now with the recent FrontPage upgrade)."

He's right: Perl 5.6 has significant differences from Perl 5.004, so doing a blanket upgrade would certainly break stuff.

My suggestion is to make the version configurable so that customers can have it either way.  Current customers get left at the old version, but they have the option of changing it; new customers get the newer version by default. 

But of course that has issues of its own.  The only way to run a large site is to simplify and strive for uniformity.  Earthlink must be running tens or even hundreds of thousands of web sites, small and large.  Anyone who's ever been in the ISP business will tell you that the smaller the customer, the more trouble they are to serve; it's a wonder Earthlink keeps it all running at all.


1:01:28 AM      comment []
Playing with Movable Type

I've been playing around a bit with Movable Type. A few observations:

Movable Type (MT) is just pretty to look at. Mena G. Trott did the design, and it's very nice.

It's a bit of a pain to install. The first time took me a couple of hours, most of which was spent trying to get the proper Perl libraries in the right places. The second time I installed it on an Earthlink webhosting account, and surprisingly, that went smoothly.

MT's template language appears to be quite flexible: people are using MT as a content management system to generate some sophisticated looking sites.  (See Boxes and Arrows, for example). The ability to assign an item to several categories is quite nice.

I'm sure Radio can do anything that MT can, but in Radio these facilities are a little more opaque; the reply to "Can you do this in Radio" is often "That's a Simple Matter Of Programming."  (That's actually one of the reasons why Radio is so interesting.) MT can do it, but given that MT is another application built in Perl, I sure don't have any interest in hacking on it.

Another nice touch: MT breaks the formatting of templates off into CSS.  The default templates rely exclusively on CSS to generate a multi-column design. There's nothing to stop you from doing this with Radio, but MT is ahead of Radio here.

MT makes it particularly easy to generate multiple pages when you publish. MT presents a number of default templates that get published in addition to an HTML page: RDF, RSS, and you can trivially create other types of pages.  

Finally, MT supports mutiple authors and multiple blogs.  In fact, that's the feature that drew to me check it out.

I can't say anything about the stability of the system; I just haven't used it enough.  I am a little concerned at the number of posts in one MT support forum after the most recent upgrade; I saw dozens of complaints, small and large.  Maybe MT users are just more vocal than other folks.

I'm certainly not giving up on Radio, but Movable Type is worth a close look.


12:26:24 AM      comment []
Mozilla is great for reading through news feeds

I second what other people have said: Mozilla's tabbed browsing is outstanding for reading through a news feed. If you haven't tried it, tabbed browsing creates titled tabs just above the window you're in, letting you see at a glance what windows you've opened.

To get the most out of the feature, go into the Mozilla preferences and find the Tabbed Browsing preferences: it's under the Navigator preferences. Turn on Middle-click or control-click of links in a Web page; this will allow you to open links into tabs by Command-clicking (on the Mac) or control-clicking (on the PC). You'll also want to turn on Load links in the background, which is what really makes browsing a news aggragator feed fly: you scroll down the list of items, control-click the ones you're interested in, and keep scrolling down. When you're done, you have a tabbed list of items to look at.

Mozilla just announced release candidate 2; it's already my default browser on the Mac, and I'm using it heavily on the PC.

The only thing holding me back from using it full time on the PC is that the WYSIWYG HTML editing tool that Radio uses doesn't work under anything except IE on the PC. That's a pain, because I really don't like working in straight HTML when I'm creating a story. (Though I'm doing it right now because I'm sitting downstairs using the iMac.)


12:00:50 AM      comment []

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