myShoggoth

Lutz shows me Silverlight

I just got an IM from my friend Lutz Roeder (of .NET Reflector fame) who has done a few demos for Microsoft's Silverlight (don't bother with the Silverlight video, it is pointless and brain-numbing).

Silverlight is essentially their long overdue competition for Flash, and technology-wise they may have gotten it right.  Anyone familiar with Windows Presentation Foundation (it was code named Avalon) probably knows that it has some major drawbacks, especially size and performance.  Silverlight, on the other hand, is multi-browser, multi-platform (Windows and Mac at least, maybe nothing else yet) and only a 2 meg download, which is pretty impressive under the circumstances.

So, what about the code?  It is a combination of XAML (probably a subset of the WPF XAML) and .NET backing code, in Lutz's case C#, plus some Javascript for seamless browser integration no doubt.  XAML can be a bit tricky but that's what Sparkle is for... oops I guess I mean Microsoft Expression Blend.  Let your design professional work their magic, spit out the XAML which your coders can then wire up to actual business logic.  On that team they had the UI designers checking in the XAML to the source tree and working in an integrated way with the full development team, it was really nice and hopefully an early taste of the workflow of the future.

From what I've heard from Flash artists about what it takes to make that work, I have no interest whatsoever in working on that platform.  Silverlight has potential, but getting a large community to shed what has become a natural distrust of Microsoft to install the platform such that the numbers get even competitive against Flash will be hard.  The download was fast and painless, though, so there's hope.

Will I adopt it for my current project?  Not any time soon, but if it catches on and gets a good install base it is possible.  More likely I'll try it out with my next big side project and see how it goes.  Looks like Sparkle has a demo version available so I could reasonably do that, but if I liked it I guess I'd be signing up for hundreds of dollars of software.  Hm...

ZooTunes 2007

Woodland Park Zoo is hosting ZooTunes again, and we're looking over the schedule to see who we want to go to the trouble of seeing.  They are fun but the first come first serve landgrab method of seating adds extra stress and means you need to get there earlier and wait longer.

We're thinking about Brandi Carlile, and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.  A friend of mine has mentioned that both Patty Griffin and Pink Martini are good, however last year we went to too many shows so this year we're probably going to be less adventurous and see too few.

My there are a lot of misspelled names on that small ZooTunes web page...

myshoggoth.com has moved!

I've got all my content from the old http://www.myshoggoth.com/ ported over, plus I moved all the posts from http://myshoggoth.spaces.live.com/ as well.  Now I've got all my content in one place and I'm very happy about it.

On top of that I got the DNS aliasing working with TypePad.com so they're hosting it as myshoggoth.com, and I have a design I'm quite happy with.  Maybe I'll add a few graphics or something in the future, but not much.  I like clean and minimal.

At this point I'm pretty sold on staying with typepad.com for this, it is up to them not to convince me otherwise over the next month.

Hopefully anyone with RSS subscriptions to myshoggoth.com will come to the site to see why the old URLs aren't working anymore rather than just delete and forget.

Trying out TypePad

TypePad (from SixApart) wisely has offered a 31 day free trial blog, and that was enough to get me to open an account, play around with the site look and feel, and then port laboriously all my existing content over to see whether I like it enough to pay them cash monies for it and have them take over control of my http://www.myshoggoth.com/ domain.

I like the look and feel I've gotten so far, it is pretty close to my original and retains the simple and readable style I was going for.  I can't get as fancy in some respects, although they seem to give me the ability to download/upload their styles.css directly so that might be a good way to get around any UI limitations.

I still need to try out the Photo Albums, TypeLists, and archiving ability, but things are looking fairly good right now.  A very bad sign was that last night while moving posts over all of typepad.com went off the net for 20-30 minutes.  Other people's blogs that were on TypePad, their main site, the whole thing.  Talking to some friends they aren't maybe known for reliable uptime...

Porting the content was a huge pain, why their 'Import/Export' functionality isn't able to work from an RSS/Atom feed blows my mind.  There's a standard, why not use it?

My main website host (pair.com) offers Movable Type as well, so if TypePad proves to be too flaky I might be able to move everything including looks over relatively painlessly, and for less money per month.

One thing I'm certain of is that Windows Live Spaces is not going to work for me, so now I've moved away from CityDesk self-publishing and WL Spaces, and I'm not really interested in writing my own although that has been tempting in the past, so it looks to me like the choice really is between typepad.com hosting or pair.com hosting Movable Type.

Still searching for a good blog tool

Not that I have enough free time to really do anything about it, but I would like to have a real blog tool to run on my real domain and be, you know, real.

I hoped that Windows Live Spaces would do it, but I just ain't happy.  I can't run it on my own domain, I wouldn't want to anyway, and it takes slow to a new level.

I just took a look at Movable Type (at least the version on LiveJournal) and I really hate the web editing, which is how I normally do it now that I can.  I guess it is time to take a look at the other options out there and find a favorite, then see what hoops are required to get it up and running on my domain.

Fun.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WINDOWS LIVE SPACES TEAM, MOVE THE TEXT IN A COUPLE PIXELS FROM THE DAMNED EDIT BOX BORDER.  WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?