David A. Meyer

Remember a few days back when I wrote I was moving from WordPress to Textpattern. Well that didn’t work out so well.

For now I’m migrating back to the WordPress platform. All the old posts should be up soon.

Perhaps I’ll delve further into this vacillating in the future, but the gist of the situation boils down to familiarity and not having the time or inclination to learn the Textpattern ecosystem. My apologies for the inconvenience.

This is why you have a testing server. Let that be a lesson to you.

I love podcasts. I think podcasting has revolutionized the media and helped tear down barriers that made broadcasting an industry limited to the rich and famous.

One of my favorite podcasts is produced by This I Believe. What exactly is This I Believe? In their own words:

This I Believe is an international project engaging people in writing and sharing essays describing the core values that guide their daily lives. Over 70,000 of these essays, written by people from all walks of life, are archived here on our website, heard on public radio, chronicled through our books and television programming, and featured in weekly podcasts. The project is based on the popular 1950s radio series of the same name hosted by Edward R. Murrow.

One of their recent podcasts really struck a chord with me. It highlighted the archived essay of author Ben Lucien Burman, entitled “Antidote for War”.

Burman lived an interesting life. He was seriously wounded in World War I, later became a war correspondent, graduated from Harvard and established himself as a successful author. Burman is perhaps most well-known for his children’s books.

What struck me was how timeless Burman’s 50-year old essay seemed:

My code of living is simple. It consists of three parts:
1. never be cruel;
2. always be artistic;
3. never lose your sense of humor.

And good advice is just that. Timeless.

You may be noticing that things are looking a bit bare around here. Well, good on you. Quite observant.

I’ve been experiencing slow load times with WordPress so I’m in the process of moving the site over to the Textpattern engine in hopes of speeding things up a bit.

This all started with the installation of the great Firebug plugin for the [Firefox] (http://www.mozilla.com/firefox) browser. Throw in the YSlow for Firebug plugin and you get a recipe for obsessive-compulsive disaster. Using these tools to analyze my site brought glaring weaknesses to light. Hence, the change and subsequent long-winded explanation.

I’ll be attempting to import the old WordPress database into Textpattern in the coming days in an attempt to salvage the meager smattering of pre-existing posts. I’ve had some troubles initially, however, so I’m not sure if that will pan out.

As for Textpattern, I have to say that I’m quite impressed so far. Everything seems spritely in comparison to WordPress. Not to slight WordPress and the great community behind the project, but the platform seems to suffer from some degree of feature creep. There are probably ways to slim down an installation, but even with the base install things seemed to be moving along at a snail’s pace. Perhaps it is my host — DreamHost. Perhaps it’s a dodgy network connection on my end. I won’t know until I’m well into this experiment.

Right. Off to bed now. I’ll obviously have to read up on the ways of Textpattern in the coming weeks to come to grips with the new environment. I’m looking forward tinkering with Textpattern’s innards, customizing the site, learning some new things and sporadically posting stories that go almost universally unread.