1FPS|by David Chartier

Yea, it’s that time again. I’m trying to simplify my life, and WordPress is just not a fit for my blogging anymore. I want to post more and more interesting things, and I’ve found Tumblr to be a much better tool for doing this. The company has some great ideas about how blogging should work, and I’ve found that I’m a lot more interested in actually writing and posting things I find with Tumblr.

This should be my last post here at the 1FPS blog, though I’ll leave it running indefinitely so traffic can still get to where it’s going. To ease the move, I’ve tried to keep the new URL and feed redirection as simple as possible. I’m switching all the tech, culture, software, and tips blogging that I have previously been doing here to my Tumblr blog at blog.davidchartier.com, with a new feed at feeds.feedburner.com/davetumbled. I can redirect the old WordPress feed to the new one for a while, but eventually you’ll need to manually update yourself. If you know a better of doing this to make it easier for RSS subscribers, please let me know.

As always, thanks for reading, and sorry about all the commotion as of late. Life’s getting more complicated, but Tumblr should help me keep my blogging simple and (somewhat) steady.

Chyrp is a blogging engine that surfaced earlier this year with a focus on being lightweight, flexible, and very plug-in-able. Already it has a respectable list of add-ons (though not too many available themes), and a new 2.0 release has just emerged from a beta period with a RC1. See the 2.0 announcement post I linked for the most thorough list I could find of what’s new.

Matthew Buchanan has improved upon an iPhone UI for Tumblr blogs that Tumblr Hacks developed. Now, you can redirect your visitors to http://tumblephone.com/<username>/ and they’ll see your tumblelog rendered like mine looks below:

Tumblr offers its own built-in, generic mobile view for blogs by default, but this of course plays much better on iPhones.

Not doing anything to help my blognundrum, I just stumbled across an appetizing new iPhone app this evening called Tumble. Yes, that light tingling feeling somewhere in the back of your head is right: this is an (unofficial) app for posting to a Tumblr blog, sans audio and video posts for obvious reasons. It’s free, and I’ll be trying it out soon.

I’ve posted thoughts about a blognundrum I consider myself to be stuck in over at my Tumblr blog, sometimes also referred to as my linkblog. Mind sharing your thoughts on my predicament over there?

147xxxx

Interesting blog written anonymously by a Starbucks barista in “a big city.” Dig the tagline:

Making your latte, working with the motto “just say yes,” dealing with the hobos, the clueless, the regulars, and amazing(ly dumb) customers. I’m your starbucks barista.

Good wit, and interesting insight into what goes on in front and behind the register. I got trained at Starbucks for a month around 2003, before I had to quit for a multimedia job that I couldn’t pass up. That certainly doesn’t qualify me to know much about the Starbucks culture, but even I recognize some of the strangeness written about here.

147xxxx has been added to Google Reader and my Tumblr follow list.

I use iWeb to run DavidChartier.com, a site I present as sort of a hub to all my other work on the web. Something I’ve never understood about iWeb’s blogging features since it first debuted, however, is the seeming requirement of two titles for each new post.

In the screenshot above I’m using iWeb ‘08 and the default theme Darkroom (though this blog design seems typical across most, if not all, of iWeb’s themes). Click the image if you want a larger version. I haven’t started editing this post at all, but above the image here is what clearly looks like a placeholder for a title, since “Evan’s World” appears at the top of every new post regardless of the actual name of my website or if I edit the entry’s title directly in iWeb’s entry list.

Just below the first title, the picture, and the post’s date, is what looks like another area for a title to go. Do I copy and paste the same title in both areas? Come up with yet another excerpt-ish area, in addition to the default one already next to the image?

This layout is really confusing, and while I’m kicking around a redesign using RapidWeaver, I’d like some help to understand how these layouts work for now.

For about two years now I’ve run 1FPS at my own hosting, handling all the WordPress setup, maintenance and upgrades on my own with each new release. It isn’t necessarily hard work by any means, but the tedious aspects of this it have grown more heavy on me lately. I’m getting tired of having to stay on top of updates and worrying about security while simultaneously having to kindly ask (read: bug) my theme’s author to update for the changes in the new WordPress build before I can upgrade my site. I’ve always wanted to learn PHP and possible make my own theme some day, but that isn’t going to happen anytime soon, if ever.

I’ve been a DIYer with a lot of technology stuff ever since I got into computers in 1995. But for the same “it just works” reasons that I bought a Mac and haven’t looked back, I’m considering giving up the WordPress DIY lifestyle and moving to TypePad. I looked at WordPress.com as an option, but TypePad seems to be a clear leader in the managed blog market in terms of features, power, speed and customizability (good grief, both their backend and live sites are fast). Of course TypePad is a commercial service and WordPress.com is free, but that aspect doesn’t concern me much anymore.

Now I have questions for you: are you a TypePad user? Did you by chance move away from WordPress or another DIY option? What was your experience? Do you have any advice considering my goals? One major caveat to the move is that 1FPS has always lived at dcharti.com/blog, and I’m not entirely sure if it’s possible to get TypePad’s domain mapping feature to map to a subdirectory like that (technical advise on this aspect is much appreciated). If I have to completely uproot and keep my blog at the domain level that’s fine; it’s probably what I should do anyway, considering that’s all I really want this domain for. In that case, I could also use advice on any tricks I can use to redirect current links to 1FPS posts to their new home at TypePad, considering /blog/ would be dropped from the URL and .html would be added.

So please, sound off. My trial TypePad account expires in a week and I would love to know whether I’m going to commit or not before then. I’m down for hearing your thoughts or reading posts from others who have shared their experiences, but I’m not that interested in the feature-for-feature rundowns that sites like Mashable have done. I already have a good grasp on feature differences ‚Äî I want to know how they pan out with real world use, especially among those who have already made the switch I’m considering.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Since I did a decent chunk of my TUAW and DLS blogging for the last half a year in Philip Dow’s Journler, and now all my Ars Technica writing as well, I’ve amassed a respectable library of writing that is expanding on a daily basis. One of the things I love most about Journler is a great feature Philip added just recently: an instant related entries view based on your tags.

As you can see, I’ve added a couple tags to the entry I’m working on in this screenshot, and clicking the pulldown menu on any of these tags generates a popup that lists any other entries with that same tag. Now I write across a variety of topics so I’m not sure if this popup has a specific limit to the number of entries it will display, but I think I’ve seen as many as a dozen entries while playing with this so far. It rocks.

To get this tagging feature, however, I think you need to grab one of the recent beta versions from the Journler beta forum.

If you find Journler useful, I encourage you to adhere to Philip’s mandatory donation policy and give him at least a few respectable bucks for his excellent work with this app.
[tags]Journler, productivity, blogging[/tags]

For those looking to find where else I write on the web, I’ve added a link to my Vox blog in the navigation up top. I post more personal stuff there: what’s going on in my life and with my wife, Jessi, pictures and other bits of web culture. Basically anything that doesn’t fit into the tech and tech culture focus of this 1FPS site goes over on my Vox blog. I also dive into Vox’s Amazon, YouTube and Flickr integration there, so my Vox blog is a great place to see what else I’m reading and looking at. I invite you to swing by and see what I’m up to, but I offer no warranty and take no responsibility if it scares you away or sets fire to your computer display.

If you’re wondering how I created a page in my WordPress navigation above that directly links to an outside site, I’m using Mark Jaquith’s Page links To plug-in. It’s very easy to install and use, and I’m running the latest 2.2 version of WordPress so I know it’s up to date.