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The Thinker

My million-word blog

This is blog post number 892. In itself, this number is hardly significant. But it just so happens that with this post, Occam’s Razor will have reached a milestone that few individual blogs ever make. I will have written over a million blog words. That’s 1,000,000 words. That, dear readers, is a lot of words. The English translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace is 560,000 words. If you were to put all my blog entries into a book, it would be nearly twice the size of that famous novel. If this blog were a book, it would amount to something like 3,500 pages. Thankfully, no trees were abused in the publication of this blog, although I have heard from one reader than he prints each blog post I make.

When I started blogging on December 13, 2002, my motivation was simply to jump in on the latest Internet fad. I soon realized that I felt I had worthwhile thoughts to share with the world. While there are many writers far better than me, I also knew I am a better writer than many. One constant that followed me during my professional life was a sincere appreciation expressed by my bosses and colleagues for my writing. Gosh, you really write well, was a common refrain that I heard. I took it as a complement and verification that I had a gift.

I began writing for pleasure and to stroke my ego when my age could be measured in single digits. As you can imagine most of what I wrote back then was dreadful. A child of the baby boom generation, my writing was inspired by the space program, the science fiction of the era and the wonderfully deep fantasy world of J.R.R. Tolkien. With a battered Smith Corona electric typewriter that I purchased with the proceeds from my modest part time wages at the Winn Dixie, I tried hard to write something that might actually sell. Yet soon, like an airplane, I realized the end of the runway was dead ahead and I had to take flight. My flight was a journey into adulthood. In addition, I was discouraged by how inefficient writing was. A typewriter was better than nothing, but to write with quality, I had to revise it multiple times, which was enormously time consuming. After all that work, my magnum opus was still likely to be rejected by an editor.

Unfortunately, just as the tools to write efficiently arrived, my free time became nearly nonexistent. I worked full time and endured hellish commutes into Washington, D.C., arriving home exhausted and my energy sapped. Then there were the considerable duties of living to attend: being a good husband, maintaining a household and caring for our daughter. Blogging conveniently arrived at a time when I could finally eke out enough free time to write regularly. In addition, the web had evolved sufficiently so that web publishing was easy. All I needed was a computer with Microsoft Word (with spell check and the grammar features turned on), the ability to copy and paste into a text box, some MoveableType software (now Wordpress) and web space. After a few months of blogging, I was hooked.

I am unlikely to earn anything beyond spare change from Google Adsense for my writing, but neither have I had to suffer through editors’ cruel rejections. I could publish myself and reach a much larger audience than I could as some obscure author. Had I managed to publish at all, I would likely have suffered the same fate that most authors suffer, and find my books quickly consigned to the discount rack. Multiply two hundred to three hundred page views a day over many years and that’s a lot of readers. It is in fact far more than I am ever likely to get if I wrote a book.

This blog soon evolved into a potpourri of essays. While each essay tries hard to be coherent about a particular topic, Occam’s Razor has no common theme. Categories and tags help with content organization, but each entry is simply about something that happens to be on my mind that day. As I have mentioned, aside from blogging allowing me to regularly scratch my itch to write, it has also proven to be excellent cognitive therapy. Like most human beings, I have my share of personal issues to sort through. Buddhists practice mindfulness. While blogging is not exactly mindfulness, writing in the form of an essay at least allows for introspection. It is useful for me because it helps me make sense of our complex world. Perhaps it helps you too. If it does, this makes me especially happy since that is my primary motivation for blogging.

Each post gets four reviews before I publish. I would double the number of edits that I make if I had more time. Four reviews seems to be my happy medium between wanting to publish something that will not embarrass me and squeezing in this time-consuming hobby during my nights and weekends. Since each post typically exceeds a thousand words, every post takes a considerable amount of my time. At best, a post consumes ninety minutes of effort. More typically, each post takes two to two and a half hours to write and edit.

This blog is unlikely to ever be popular. I draw 200-300 page views a day, which is something but keeps me a backwater blog. It is also true that certain posts are read repeatedly and others rarely are read. Not surprisingly, the few that I have written on the topics of pornography and sexuality tend to draw the most hits. According to Google Analytics, my top ten individual blog posts from January 1st through the end of October were:

I expect that a year from now this list will likely not have changed that much. I am not surprised that subjects on pornography or sexuality would elicit so much disproportionate interest. However, I feel flattered that The Root of Human Conflict: Emotion vs. Reason is regularly read, since I consider it one of my best (and longest) essays. (It was actually written in 1997.) By the way, this blog’s main page received 6,330 page views over this period, making it my third most visited web page, which is also encouraging.

I will keep blogging away. I am unlikely to ever hit 10,000,000 words, as the actuarial statistics are likely to have me planted six feet underground long before that happens. It took nearly six years to write a million words. At that rate, I would need 54 more years to reach 10,000,000 words. Since I am now 51, I would have to be alive at age 105 while still able to type and in reasonable health. Nor am I sure that this blog will survive another six years. Blogging may lose its luster or I may finally feel tapped out. As long as there are enough readers and I can find the time, I will endeavor to continue.

If I retire from blogging, I will find other things to write about. Most of us writers aspire to write a novel or two, and I would like to do it at some point. I do not think I could both blog and write a novel at the same time.

I will be back with an update when I hit blog post 1,000, also a significant number. At the rate I am going, it should appear sometime in the summer of 2009.

November 6th, 2008 at 09:59pm Posted by Mark | Life 2008 | one comment

The Thinker

Slow down, you blog too fast

I am a blogger and a bloggee. I have been blogging since December 2002. I have racked up 887 posts (including this one) and have posted over 994,000 words on this blog. (See the current running total here, at the bottom of the page.) In about five more posts I will have published over a million words in this blog, which should get me some sort of blogging award, but doubtless will not.

Blogging though can be dangerous to your health. I am confident that one of the first new psychological conditions to be named in the 21st century, if it has not be labeled already, will be excessive blogging. Moreover, if you ask me, one of the first one to keel over will be this guy.

Andrew Sullivan, you are one craaaaazy blogger. Andrew, if you are trying to win some sort of contest for being the most prolific blogger then congratulations, your blog The Daily Dish wins hands down. I like blogging too so please take this advice in the charitable way it is intended: you need to slow down. You need to slow way down.

As I write this, it is about 7:40 p.m. EDT. Andrew Sullivan, a blogger for The Atlantic magazine, published his last blog post at 7:23 p.m. His first post of the day was at 7:04 a.m. Thus far, he has blogged 61 posts today. Last night his final blog post was at 11:43 p.m.

I do not know if this volume of posts as well as these numbers of hours a day he spends blogging is typical for Sullivan or not. For the few weeks that I have been reading his blog, it seems to be. My guess is he posts fifty to eighty blog entries a day and is blogging on average fourteen to sixteen hours a day.

You might think he would take the weekends off at least. Perhaps he does but during this election season, he just seems content to keep blogging seven days a week. I consider blogging a hobby. I have to assume that Andrew Sullivan finds blogging addicting. I am glad he is getting a few hours of sleep in there, but his blogging habit is just crazy. For fifteen hours a day seven days a week he sits in front of a computer seeming doing little else but reading other blogs and news sites and posting interesting tidbits he finds on his blog.

It might help if there were some variety in his posts but aside from the occasional mental health break post, such as a music video, they are relentlessly political. I imagine he is also juggling a ton of email, as well as making forays into the kitchen for food and doubtless hurried trips to the bathroom. Perhaps to keep in shape he blogs from his treadmill. (It must be hard to type and walk at the same time.) Perhaps he has a laptop with wireless which lets him blog from his back porch where he can get a little sun and hear a little nature. I sure hope he is doing all these things. Regardless, I doubt that this sort of obsessive behavior is good for him, good for his readers and good for his employer, The Atlantic magazine.

If I were his boss, I would give him strict orders: confine all blogging from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Write no more than five blog posts a day. Spend the rest of your workday keeping up on email, blogs and other news sites. At 5 p.m. though, turn it off! Turn off the computer. Get on your bike or head to the gym. Buy some organic produce at your local Whole Foods. Take a stroll around a lake and watch the ducks quack. See a movie once a week that does not have politics as a theme.

Granted, Andrew Sullivan is a very intelligent man with an impressive resume. His political leanings are libertarian. He was the editor of The New Republic for five years in the 1990s. Back in the 1980s, he was one of the first to argue for same sex marriages. He is also arguably the world’s oldest blogger. He started his blog, The Daily Dish in late 2000 before the term “blog” had even been coined. Last week, he even showed up as a guest commentator on The Friday Weekly News Roundup on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show. I am surprised he could find time to get away from his blogging. I bet he brought his laptop with him to the show and was blogging from the studio’s antechamber, if not during the program breaks also.

Blogging can probably kill you. The late lamented blogger Steve Gilliard may have died, in part, from blogging. Like Sullivan, he was generally blogging from early in the morning until late at night. Gilliard’s obesity was likely a major contribution to his death too, but sitting all day in front of a computer certainly didn’t help either. I hope Andrew Sullivan stops, or at least starts to pace himself, before it is too late.

For myself, I will never be that obsessive about blogging. Blogging is an important part of my life. I take pride in my blogging and my longevity of Occam’s Razor. My philosophy though is that blogging should be a measured part of my life, not its all consuming purpose. Since blogging is not paying the rent, it helps to be the family breadwinner with a full time job as a distraction. With commute and lunch breaks, my job slices nearly twelve hours out of my workday anyhow. I would rather blog relatively infrequently (every two to three days between posts on average) and feel like I have said something very well than blog constantly like Sullivan. Even though my share of blog readers is miniscule compared with Sullivan’s (200 to 300 page views a day, on average), I am happier with less notoriety, a small market presence and my health. After all, to blog with some authority you have to experience life. That is hard to do if you are plugged into the blogosphere virtually every waking hour.

Andrew, here’s hoping we see a lot less of you online. In return, I hope we see fewer yet better and more thoughtful posts for many years to come.

October 28th, 2008 at 08:04pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | 4 comments

The Thinker

Growing Pains

It may not seem like it, but this blog is growing.

My web host is still complaining, like it did last December, that I am using too many resources. It doesn’t appear that I can run this blog on a $16.95 a month virtual private server any longer. While my visits and page counts are relatively static (200 to 300 page views a day, as documented by SiteMeter), my blog seems to get a lot of search engine traffic. This is likely due to its breadth (five and a half years, 850+ posts, 954,000 words) and my half-hearted attempts at clever marketing (all those links running down the side of my web pages). I suspect that search engines are the culprits driving up my resource usage. As a result, I get stern warnings from my web host.

Call it vanity but I want this blog to be visitor friendly and search engine welcoming. This blog has become something resembling my raison d’etre: my reason for living. The Buddha might suggest that my enlightenment recedes the more vain I get about my blog. Yet, like most humans, I want to feel that after my body turns into dust that I will have left the world a little better than I found it. This is getting increasingly hard to imagine when I consider my personal carbon footprint. This blog may sometimes amuse readers. It may occasionally instill anger. It may annoy, bore or simply make most you zoom on to the next site of interest. But perhaps all this effort is worth my time and increasing expense for the opportunity to communicate an interesting thought, articulate a well-turned phrase or spawn an insightful idea or two. A century ago, creative people like me had to hope we could write something worthy of publishing and then hope someone would read it. In the Internet age, the playing field is more level. We blog and hope for the best.

In any event, when SiteUpTime (which monitors my site hourly to make sure the server is responding) tells me it frequently cannot access the site, I have to assume you are having the same problem also. Timeouts are not acceptable to me, so I am digging a bit deeper into my pocket and rehosting again. My new web host is Media Temple. What is new this time is not my virtual private server, but that I have dedicated server memory that is all mine. No one else can have it. It is not much but I am hoping that 256MB of dedicated RAM will be enough to give readers the fast response time they deserve and search engines the ability to easily plumb my site for its content.

I spent the last couple of days, among many other tasks, buying this new hosting account and moving my content across the Internet. It went from some hosting facility in Providence, Utah to this newest one in Culver City, California. If $42 a month will not suffice (the effective rate if you pay for a year of hosting at a time, otherwise it is $50 a month for their lowest end Virtual Dedicated plan), I may have to dig into my pocket a little deeper still. Fortunately, I can pay for my hobby easily enough by selling my own Internet skills and picking up some occasional money from hosting ads here. I no longer have to pull from the family till to pay for my hobby.

So I hope you notice things run a little faster around here. I also hope that this is my last web host. Lord knows I have been through enough of them. Only time will tell.

August 4th, 2008 at 07:56pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2008 | no comments

The Thinker

The Blog Turns Six

It was exactly five years ago today, on December 13, 2002 that I penned this short blog post. Thus began my blogging adventure. Back then, I had little idea why I wanted to blog or where Occam’s Razor would go. In fact, I had no idea whether I would even keep the blog. I did know that my friend Lisa already had her blog. She seemed to be having fun with it and it looked like the cool new thing to do. In addition, since I work in the IT field, it seemed like a good way to understand and emerging technology. Therefore, rather haltingly at first, I began scribing my little posts and wondered if I would be both its writer and its sole reader.

It took a few months for the blog to get its moorings. Eventually I discovered that in many ways my blog would be the anti-blog. Those few blogs that existed in 2002 tended to consist of short posts. They contained frequent misspellings and were often rife with grammatical mistakes. Moreover, blog posts were more likely typed streams of consciousness optimized for the web than examples of structured thought. I could see their usefulness in allowing the common person to share his thoughts with those outside of his regular communities. I could also see their advantage as a way to promote the timely sharing of new information. Even then, I was not sure, given that blogs were likely to expand exponentially whether my little blog would garner any attention at all. I was just one tree in a very big forest. Fortunately, I was one of the first planted trees. I hoped that in time it might make a difference.

I got the writing bug in my youth. I let my interest lapse due to the painful necessity of being both a parent and breadwinner. Blogging allowed me to reengage my inner writer. Yet I found it hard to write blog posts that were mere streams of consciousness. Soon, I found myself editing my posts. Eventually one edit would not suffice. I wanted them polished. Soon I had discovered a pattern that worked for me. Each post would be an essay on a particular topic. I would take the time to write something thoughtful and well crafted. Moreover, I would endeavor to offer perspectives or insights that I felt was largely lacking in other blogs.

Once I finally got around to metering my blog in 2004, I was happy to get thirty page views a day, and giddy when I hit fifty a day. As the years rolled by, I kept raising my expectations. Over time, my blog’s traffic did pick up. By the standards of the more popular blogs, mine was a speck of sand on the beach. Over the years, as more of my content became searchable, my traffic picked up in a generally linear fashion. Fifty page views seemed lame. I wanted a hundred page views. It was not until this October that I caught some lucky breaks. The editor of Washington Monthly noticed my post on their blog and mentioned it on their site. In one day, I had more than one thousand page views. Moreover, for reasons I do not wholly understand, moving my blog out of Movable Type and into Wordpress doubled my traffic. A recent posting on YouPorn also has driven a lot of new traffic this way. Lately I have come to expect between 400 and 500 page views per day.

Yet it was just a year ago that my blog was deep in the doldrums after being mysteriously and unceremoniously yanked from Google’s search engine. I had no clear idea who to petition. Eventually though I solved that problem. The following SiteMeter chart gives you some idea of how bad things were. Last December I eked out a mere 1078 page views. Now I can sometimes generate this traffic in two days. Throughout 2007, I saw a steady progression in my traffic. October became something of a turning point. November was a record month with almost 14,000 page views and over 10,000 visits. Any animosity I might have felt toward Google a year ago has vanished. It continues to bring in the majority of my new traffic.

Occam’s Razor SiteMeter Statistics Dec 2006-Nov 2007

So here I am five years and 757 posts later. I have published nearly 850,000 carefully edited words these last five years. How large is that? To use one metric, the English version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace is approximately 560,000 words. I expect by the time this blog reaches its seventh birthday that I will have passed one million words. How many bloggers can truthfully say they have published so much original content? My guess is I am one of a hundred or less.

Whether this blog means anything is hard to say. It obviously means a lot to me, given the amount of time I spend writing and editing posts. I only know when a post was well received when the reader leaves a laudatory comment. While certain posts (principally on topics like pornography) regularly bring in about a quarter of my traffic, the bulk of my readers are reading other posts. Some posts that I am particularly proud of (which can be found in my Best of Occam’s Razor category) may only average one page view a day. Still, multiply that over the life of this blog. I can conclude that many of my best blog posts are read thousands of times. The typical author sells only a few thousand copies of his book. Yet I can get as many readers from a single blog post. At this point, it is likely that some of my blog posts have been read over a hundred thousand times.

When I was young, I aspired to be a published writer. It seemed like it would be much more fun than being a hard hat or an office drone and it appealed to my sense of vanity. I still have that aspiration. Yet in many ways, my blog has validated the concept that an author can be self-published wholly online. Sadly, it does not pay the light bills. Aside from marginal Google Adsense revenue, I get no royalties. Yet at least I have the satisfaction that I am being read. While I am unlikely to ever generate the volume of a highly trafficked blog, by writing quality posts about enduring topics I have found a way to exist below the radar of the popular blogs yet feel like the blog is succeeding in its mission.

With the blog at age six, it is harder to find novel topics. However, I still take considerable satisfaction from blogging. I will endeavor to maintain my standards and your interests in the years ahead. Happy reading!

December 13th, 2007 at 01:24pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | no comments

The Thinker

Send me to the Democratic National Convention!

Am I a good enough of a blogger to go to the 2008 Democratic National Convention? I don’t know, but I intend to find out. The New York Times reports that the Democratic National Convention Committee plans to be more inclusive toward bloggers at next year’s convention. While it will likely be more fun for bloggers to be across the street at ProgressCon2008, I am still intrigued with the idea of being a blogger at the Democratic National Convention. The convention is scheduled for the Pepsi Center in Denver from August 25-28th, 2008.

Starting in just one week the DNCC will begin taking applications from bloggers, who can apply to attend as either state or general bloggers. I will most likely have to apply as a general blogger. The application process will end on April 15th. It is likely that the number of bloggers given credentials will be in the dozens, not the hundreds, which unfortunately makes my chances of getting in rather minute.

Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I do have some good credentials. I am about to start my sixth year of blogging and few bloggers out there can say that. I have written close to 250 political posts in those years, or roughly one third of all my blog entries. Nor am I your typical blogger. No three line blog entries with misspelled words and punctuation for me. If I attend the DNC, my readers will get the high level of writing and perspective likely unavailable on many other blogs.

In the event that I am selected, it will not be a cheap event. Doubtless, the hoteliers will push up their rates for the duration of the convention. Airfares will be steep too. When I add in my other costs, this event could easily cost me $2000. This makes me wonder whether my readers would help subsidize the cost of my trip. Would having Occam’s Razor at the DNC be worth paying for? Perhaps you can let me know in the comments. If it looks viable and I am selected, I may solicit donations by putting up a PayPal Donate button.

How newsworthy will the convention be? If recent history is any guide, there will be little news to cover. The Democratic presidential candidate is likely to be selected by February. The vice presidential pick will likely follow within a few months. The reason to go to the convention is simply for the unique experience it presents. After all, it is an event that only happens every four years. Moreover, virtually any Democrat of significance will be there.

What would intrigue me the most though would not be meeting these Democratic luminaries, most of whom are likely to be too busy to shake my hand. I am more interested in documenting the atmosphere of the convention. Only a few of us have the opportunity to attend a national political convention, and in general, you have to be willing to spend years working with your state and locate political committees to get on the convention floor. Yet it sounds like the DNCC might allow bloggers access to the convention floor. Television is no substitute for being present. I want to take it all it in so that through my eyes you can be there too.

Probably next April I will let you know whether I was selected.

December 3rd, 2007 at 08:22pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2007 | no comments

The Thinker

Thanks for all the hits

Thanks, Google! Thanks, Washington Monthly! Thanks, Wordpress! Thanks, all those of you interested in satisfying your prurient interests! Thanks, casual surfers! I have all of you to thank, as well as my loyal regular readers, for visiting my blog.

For most of us bloggers, our blogs are at least in part an expression of our vanity. In real life, we may be too young, or too old, or too ugly, or too fat, or have too many annoying habits for you to want to have anything to do with us. Of course, on the Internet none of this matters because you cannot tell what I look like or how I sound. (Actually, I do have a small picture of myself on the About page, and you can see the back side of me here.) Here on my humble blog I can be judged, if not for who I am, then at least for what I write. Here is where I reveal at least a little part of myself: the part that I am proud of and I feel worthy of your time and attention.

For me, how many pseudo-friends I have on Facebook is meaningless. A significant part of what is meaningful to me you will find here. For I enjoy writing. I also like to analyze events and issues and provide my perspective on them. What I was missing prior to December 2002 was an audience. Thank goodness then for the Internet. I do not need the hassle of trying to market a book in order to find readers. The Internet has removed the middleman and well as given me many more readers than I could get writing a book. You are my audience. Moreover, in some ways, I am not just the writer, but also the performer.

A year ago, I mysteriously dropped out of Google’s search index. For about two months, I struggled without much success to rectify the situation. During November 2006, I eked out a mere 2000 or so page views. For October 2007, I had 9170 page views and 6430 visits. That averages to 295 page views a day.

Obviously, this is a mere pittance compared to many more popular blogs. I will likely never be a major blog. Yet I still am vain enough to aspire to someday be elevated into to the middle tier. For most of this year, I was averaging 100-150 page views per day. Currently I am averaging a bit over 400 page views per day and 300 or so visits per day. Moreover, these are just my SiteMeter statistics. I also have an unknown number of readers who are reading my blog with newsreaders. There are likely a few others reading via email or who are smart enough to configure their browsers so SiteMeter cannot track them.

I would like to assert that my content has gotten so much better and that is why my web traffic is picking up. I do not think this is the reason. Rather, my new traffic is a result of marketing decisions that I made, the volume of material accumulated here after nearly five years and finally a wee bit of luck.

Thanks to Wordpress. You would not think that switching to new blogging software would make much of a difference in finding new readers, but it did for me. I should have gotten off Movable Type years ago. Perhaps Google has an easier time indexing content in Wordpress. My traffic picked up by about a third as soon as I made the switch. Looking at my SiteMeter log, part of it also is that my tags are easier to find. Anyhow, to me it is clear that the Wordpress effect is real. If you want to increase your blog’s traffic, try moving to Wordpress.

Thanks to Google, which traditionally accounts for 75% of my new visitors. Since moving to Wordpress, it has re-searched my site. Perhaps by having more links inside my pages it now judges that I am more worthy of additional traffic. A year ago, it took me two months to figure out why Google had dropped my blog from its search index. It upset me so much that I almost gave up blogging. A year later, all is forgiven.

Thanks to Washington Monthly. Its editor, Paul Glastris, noticed my little post praising their blog, which is authored by Kevin Drum. I said that in my opinion it was currently the best blog on American politics. As a result of his short post, I received nearly 1200 page views on October 25th . I received over 800 more page views the following day, most from Washington Monthly. Since his post, I have average more than 400 page views per day. I am hoping that a substantial number of those visitors found the site sufficiently good to come back and visit regularly.

Thanks to all you normal human beings with active sex drives. I do not often write about topics like pornography or sexuality. However, when I find something to say on these topics it usually drives up my page views. I certainly do not want my blog to turn into a digital red light zone. However, sexuality and pornography are undeniably popular topics that interest people. Bloggers who ignore these topics just drive away potential new readers. Consequently, I feel no shame writing about these subjects from time to time. My latest post on YouPorn.com seems to have been well received by the Internet community. Since it was published, about twenty-five percent of my traffic is from people wanting to read that post. Meanwhile, my April 2004 post about ex-porn star Sharon Mitchell still routinely accounts for between 5-15% of my daily traffic.

I have been blogging for nearly five years. It has occupied much of my free time. I average a dozen or so blog posts a month. Each post is usually 1500 or more laboriously edited words. I sweat over this blog because I think a blog should be worthy of your time. If it is worthy of your time, it should be both interesting and well written. A good blog post should be written so well that it is like a hot knife going through butter. The best ones should carry you from first word through the last like a roller coaster ride. I am not sure how many of my posts meet this goal, but I always keep this goal in mind. (The posts I am most proud of are in my Best of Occam’s Razor category.)

I started to blog before the word had even become generally known. For most of this time, I have dwelled in some back corner of the Internet. It has been a long slog. I may still be in the Internet wilderness, but the sky is looking brighter. I think there is a clearing ahead.

Thank you all for reading and visiting Occam’s Razor. Occasionally, particularly when the search engines do not seem interested, I wonder why I bother to blog at all. My motivation may be pure vanity, but readers provide the fuel that keeps me going. I will do my best not to disappoint you and to make this blog worthy of returning here regularly.

November 1st, 2007 at 10:15pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | no comments

The Thinker

Making the new look

Before I resume general blogging, here are some notes and observations from moving my blog from Movable Type 3.3 to WordPress. If you are considering WordPress for your blog, you may find this interesting.

Printer-friendly versions. For those of you wondering what happened to printer-friendly versions of my blog posts, they have not gone away, just changed. Simply print whatever page you want. Ads, comments and text in the right two columns will not be printed. To see what I mean do a Print Preview. As part of upgrading, I decided that using @print Cascading Style Sheet commands was a more intuitive and better way to implement this feature.

Redirection. I felt it was crucial that links that used to work on MovableType still work in WordPress. I documented some of how I solved this in this post. In some cases, changing WordPress’s permalink structure did not solve my problem. I had to dig into the details of an Apache mod called mod_rewrite. Like many things about Apache, the syntax was a bit cryptic but I struggled through it. I discovered an undocumented “feature” that WordPress will periodically rewrite part of your .htaccess file between the “# BEGIN WordPress” and the “# END WordPress” lines. Once I put my mod_rewrite redirection commands before the “#BEGIN WordPress” line, my redirection commands were no longer overwritten. I had to redirect both my category and newsfeed links using mod_rewrite. I also had to edit a number of blog posts to correct URLs to my tag libraries.

Widgets vs. Plug-Ins. Widgets are objects that show some form of content which you can drag and drop into your sidebars. Plugins are programming extensions that add to or change the behavior of WordPress. Widgets require no programming, but plugins generally require a certain amount of programming skill to integrate them into existing templates. While I am a competent programmer, I found that if I looked long enough I could do it faster and easier with a widget. Go with widgets if you possibly can.

Things I like about WordPress

  • Administrator Interface. It is much easier to navigate its administrator interface. The tab and sub-tab metaphor is so much more natural than Movable Type’s combinations of menus and tabs.
  • Themes. The number of ready themes for WordPress is staggering and they look good. There are clearly many first class artists out there anxious to show off their talent. Even better, they are all free! I had a hard time choosing between them, but eventually settled on the Andreas-04 theme by Tara Aukerman. I chose it primarily because it would look familiar, but was classier than what I had (which in itself is quite a complement).
  • Plugins and Widgets. Like with WordPress themes, there seem to be an almost unlimited number of these gizmos that will extend and customize WordPress. The hard part is finding the one you need. Some only work on earlier versions. Some are a bit flaky. With a couple of exceptions, I was able to find a plugin or widget for each of my complex needs.
  • Pages that are not posts. I like the fact that I can use the editor to create pages that are not posts. The “About” page in the top right corner is an example. This gives me a way to put up relevant information like “I am going on vacation for a week” without it being treated as a blog post. If Movable Type had such a feature, I missed it.
  • Blog post editor. Finally, a WYSIWYG blog editor. I may have to stop using MS Word to compose my blog posts. In addition, adding objects like images is done by simply pressing a button. Sweet.
  • Blog post protection. You can password protect a post so only those who know the password can read it. I also understand you can create communities of users who are privileged to read certain categories of posts. I do not need this feature but it is nice to know it is available.
  • Emails to all subscribers. MT 3.3 could not do this.
  • Search. Text search is built-in and very fast, unlike MT 3.3, which was unnaturally slow. Moreover, there is nothing to program. Just drop the search widget in on one of your sidebars and you are done.
  • User accounts. I like that users can create accounts and see versions of the blog. Users can also be granted special privileges.
  • Dynamic text generation. Finally, the end of static pages. Blog content (except for specially designated permanent pages) are rendered on the fly. Static pages simply add overhead and reduce flexibility.
  • Blog hiding. With one button, you can hide your blog from search engines.
  • PHP based. PHP is much easier for the layman to program. So if you need to tweak or extend WordPress you do not necessarily have to be a rocket scientist to do it.

Things I liked better in Movable Type

  • Archive and category management. In MT, archives and categories by default will show all entries. In WordPress, the number you get in an archive or category is the number that you allow displayed on your index page, which are typically 10 or 15 posts. I hope WordPress eventually fixes this limitation. Meanwhile, you can use the Different Posts per Page plug in that will give you equivalent functionality. However, WordPress does allow archives and categories to be placed on sidebars by dragging the widget to the spot you want.
  • Tags. WordPress seems to have a bug in that it cannot distinguish between a tag and a category when they are named the same. MT does not have this problem. In general, tags are better thought out in MT, perhaps because they are brand new to WordPress. MT will suggest tags to use if you type part of it on the command line. This is more intuitive.

Useful Widgets

  • Daiko’s Text Widget. This is very useful because you can embed PHP code inside it yet drop the widget into a sidebar. It became my solution for showing “The Best of Occam’s Razor” posts in my sidebar.
  • AdSense Manager. This widget made adding Google Adsense code very straightforward. Its only limitation is that there appears to be no way to tell it to display ads only on certain pages. I would prefer to hide ads on my index page.
  • Creative Commons License Widget. This widget made it easy for me to add my licensing information without hard-coding HTML.
  • Get Recent Comments. In MT, I found I had to code some template tags to show my recent comments on my blog pages. With Wordpress, I just used this widget and I could place recent comments on all my pages.
  • Subscribe2. Handles advanced email notifications. With the Subscribe2 widget, you drop the control on your page. With it, your readers have much more flexibility. You can unsubscribe (a feature not available in MT 3.3) as well as select to get emails only for certain categories.

Useful Plugins

  • Akismet. The Akismet plug in is a godsend. It redirects comments and trackbacks through the Akismet spam engine, which seems to be a foolproof way to ensure spam does not affect your blog. Akismet is so essential that it is built into WordPress. However, it must be enabled. To enable it, you first need to get an Akismet key by creating an account on the WordPress site and then enable Akismet spam filtering on your blog. If you do not bother you will soon wish you had.

October 25th, 2007 at 10:11pm Posted by Mark | Technology | no comments

The Thinker

A new look

As you may have noticed, the blog has undergone something of a facelift. After a couple weeks of struggling, I moved my blog from proprietary Movable Type software to open source GPL Wordpress software. While not all the features of the old blog are in place it is 95% there. It is good enough to switch while I tackle the remaining features that still need work.What is still missing? I have not yet succeeded in moving over the post tags. I tried to write a program to do it for me, but it is complex. It may be easier to copy and paste the tags for all 700+ posts piecemeal over the next several weeks than to finish debugging the program I wrote.

I have not yet found a Wordpress plug in or widget that will show all tags on a master tag page. Instead, for now I have a “tag cloud” which you can see in the second column. The tag cloud lists popular tags, but not all of them. In addition, since I have tagged recent posts only, the tag cloud does not accurately represent all the post tags.

Email notifications are also incomplete. Notifications in Wordpress are fancier than what I had in Movable Type. To receive an email when a post is made, simply enter your email address in the box in the second column and press the Send button. You can unsubscribe the same way.

If you take the time to create an account on this site, then you can subscribe to notifications for certain categories only. By creating an account (look for the link under the Meta section in the right hand column), you can also tweak your notification settings to request either an excerpt or the full post. In addition, you can request the post be formatted as HTML or as text.

Other features not installed: a Google Search box and disabling ads on the main index page. In addition, some utilities I wrote (such as one that lists all my posts with word counts) need to be rewritten. Perhaps these will come with time.

Overall, with a fair amount of research, ingenuity and elbow grease I was able to replicate virtually all of the features I had on Movable Type.

I hope you enjoy the new look. I believe that by using Wordpress I will be able to offer more features for readers. I will also have an easier job of maintaining this place. In a future entry, I will get into my lessons learned from this rather major move.

October 22nd, 2007 at 07:24pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | no comments

The Thinker

Wordpressing

I hope to change my blogging software to WordPress within the next month. Currently I am using Movable Type to host this blog. I would like to say I am a loyal Movable Type customer, since I have used it for the nearly five years I have been hosting this blog. However, since its license allows me to use it for free for personal use, I never actually bought the software. That is not to say I have not given its owners, SixApart, some money. I needed to buy support when I re-hosted this year in order to make the dynamic publishing feature work. That cost me $50 and made me start wondering if I wanted to convert to WordPress, which serves all its content dynamically.

No, I stayed with Movable Type not necessarily out of loyalty, but mostly out of convenience. Just as after a certain point it is hard to move from Quicken to Microsoft Money because of the hassle of retraining, so it seemed easier to stay with Movable Type than work my way through the myriad issues associated with moving from one blogging solution to another.

Nonetheless, I am taking the plunge. I recently received an announcement from SixApart informing me that Movable Type 4.0 was ready. It extolled all its wonderful and latest features. Did I really want to upgrade and spend the considerable time learning how to use all these new features, particularly when I would not use most of them? Should I stay with Movable Type 3.3 until it gradually deteriorated into irrelevance? On the other hand, should I bite the bullet and move to what most of us non-commercial bloggers use today, which is WordPress?

Since yesterday was a holiday for me and being geeky looked more appealing than weeding the garden, I took the plunge. Installing WordPress, an open source blogging solution, turned out to be painless. I had to create a new MySQL database instance (easy enough to do in phpMyAdmin), copy the files over to my web server, edit a few settings in a configuration file, and then run the installation program. Installation time: about 15 minutes.

Next step: move 700 plus blog entries and 400 plus comments from Movable Type to WordPress. After digging through the WordPress documentation, I discovered I had to export my entries in Movable Type then import them into WordPress. It was relatively straightforward. Total time: another 15 minutes.

Unfortunately, by default all my WordPress posts will have URLs that are completely different from the URLs generated by Movable Type. All those search engine links would become obsolete meaning that Google might unlist my blog again. This would not do, so I went hunting through the documentation to find out how to solve the problem. Blessedly, WordPress has a way so that you can create a customized path and post names for your entries. I could make the resulting URLs look just like on Movable Type. Problem solved?

Not quite. There was a significant number of impedance issues resulting from blogging for five years with Movable Type. For one thing, until mid 2005, Movable Type limited entry name URLs to 15 characters. (Before that, entry names were numbers, like 000001.html.) Therefore, if your entry was titled “This is a long entry name” the resulting URL was “this_is_a_long.html”. If you wrote another entry with a similar name Movable Type would make sure you didn’t reuse the same name, so the next one was “this_is_a_long_1.html”. During one Movable Type upgrade, this limitation went away so I allowed entry name URLs to be up to 50 characters long, but this still left hundreds of entries where the entry name URL was truncated at 15 characters. In addition, WordPress puts dashes where blank spaces would be in your URLs. Movable Type substitutes underscores. I followed the helpful online advice but still had hundreds of mismatched URLs. Eventually, in frustration I wrote a little PHP script that identified the mismatched URLs. I also came up with a strategy for fixing discrepancies in the 15-character entry name URLs. Many of these entries had underscores in the last character that had to be fixed. Most of these could be fixed with one SQL statement.

When I make the switch to WordPress, my individual entry and monthly archives should now match correctly. Category archives though are not so simple. Had they been stored under /category/archive_name it would be straightforward but I have them under /archive_name. I am still pondering how to solve this one. The most expeditious way seems to be to create symbolic links.

In addition, currently there is no way to move over my Movable Type entry tags. This is an issue that must be solved before I can migrate the blog. The good news is that by examining how tags are stored in Movable Type and WordPress, I think I have found a way to do it using SQL and PHP. I will be testing it when I have some spare time. Moving over the tags was not possible until I first had addressed the inconsistent URLs.

I know there are all sorts of other embedded URLs that will break that will need to be addressed. These include tag archive URLs, feed URLs and differences in the search interface. Then there is the look of the blog itself. There is no utility to move over Movable Type templates, so once rehosted in WordPress, this site will have to look a bit different. Fortunately, WordPress has hundreds of themes to choose from, and they are much easier to edit than Movable Type templates. My WordPress blog is a work progress and can be viewed here. If you have any feedback on the look and feel let me know.

Overall, WordPress is slick. The user interface is much more straightforward and feels more powerful than Movable Type. It is also wholly written in PHP. Movable Type started out as a Perl application, and in my current incarnation, it is a mixture of Perl and PHP. However, I understand PHP and loathe Perl, and I know that PHP is highly scalable. WordPress will be very fast and easier for me to customize with my own programs than Movable Type. WordPress, being open source, is unlikely to disappear. Both Movable Type and WordPress have plug in architectures, but WordPress has a huge user community. Consequently the selection of templates, plug ins and widgets is much greater. Moreover, it is likely that upgrading WordPress will be much more straightforward and less of a hassle than Movable Type. Therefore, I am confident this project will pay off in the end.

I thought there would be more users who had moved over their blogs from Movable Type to WordPress. While there are clearly some, the online documentation was inadequate. Therefore, I have been contributing to improving the documentation by adding my experience in the WordPress Wiki. While wikis have been around for a while, I am still taken aback that I can make changes instantly to their official online documentation and no one bothers to review these changes.

So I expect things to look a bit different around here within a month. One thing will not change: I will continue to set high standards for myself for all the entries I place here.

October 9th, 2007 at 09:26am Posted by Mark | Technology | one comment

The Thinker

Is this the best political blog?

So many blogs and so little time! So many blogs, yet most of them are just spinning variants of the top news stories that show up on Yahoo News. This means if you read many blogs then you are also dealing with a lot of noise, because you have likely read much of the content elsewhere. (I strive to make my blog different. It is my hope you get generally unique insight from my blog. I cannot say that of most of the blogs I read.) While blog sites offer a comfortable feeling of community for like-minded people, not that many of them can put it altogether. This is especially true in the complex world of American politics.

Many bloggers claim to be able to see the forest through the trees, but few have the combination of education, experience, content and depth of knowledge to see the forest clearly. Billmon used to share this amazing talent with the world. Alas, Billmon’s blog is no more. Steve Gilliard’s blog is no more either. (In Steve’s case, he actually died. Billmon just retired.) Therefore, for some time I have been hunting for a political blog site that could do both Billmon and Steve Gilliard justice.

Some have come close. Digby, for example, is full of useful political analysis of current events. In my mind is the best political blog written by a woman. Others are noteworthy. The Veracifier video blog hosted by Talking Points Memo has Joshua Micah Marshall dissecting current events by inserting actual recorded political events. Huffington Post is something like the National Inquirer of political blogs. It is sassy and spicy and throws in the latest celebrity news for our consumption. Juan Cole’s Informed Comment remains excellent because he is an academic specializing in Middle East studies. However, when he strays outside his area of expertise he is not as sharp. Atrios has a huge following but little in the way of detailed political analysis that I need. Still, Atrios may be the Strunk and White of bloggers. Each word is pungent enough to carry ten other words with it. He is a master of being expressive while being terse.

There are a number of journalists associated with The Washington Post worth reading. For general snarkiness and for meticulously documenting the context of Washington’s political events, Dana Milbank’s Washington Sketch is a must-read. He is not really a blogger though. He is a paid columnist. Dan Froomkin of the Washingtonpost.com’s White House Watch blog is full of useful insider Washington facts that generally do not appear elsewhere. He deserves book marking too.

I wait for the unlikely return of Billmon. Meanwhile, there is Kevin Drum who arguably is just as good as Billmon. If my blogging time is limited and I need someone who can both find the golden nuggets of political news and put it into realistic perspective, Kevin Drum’s Political Animal blog is the place to go. His blog on the Washington Monthly web site offers what I consider the best mixture of insight and content, much of which either cannot be found elsewhere, or which ordinary blogs do not deem worthy of comment.

So who is Kevin Drum anyhow? Thanks to Wikipedia, I learn that Kevin is a 48-year-old man who hosted the now defunct CalPundit blog. For someone who seems to understand Washington like the back of his hand, he hangs out in Long Beach, California. He is married and has two cats. Pictures of his cats tend to show up on Fridays, when he like many bloggers feels compelled to share the latest pictures of his furry friends lounging around the house.

For a career that included being a city editor, high tech marketer and an IT consultant, he seems an odd choice for being such a top-notch political blogger. In fact, his career does not look too different from my own. I studied journalism, but my bachelor’s degree was in communications. I moved into the information technology field because I found it fascinating and it paid much better than communications. I was never in the marketing side of IT, but I am currently in the management side, which pays very well indeed. Unlike Kevin, who now earns his money as the paid blogger for Washington Monthly, my blog site at best generates only a couple hundred bucks in Google Adsense revenue a year. I have a feeling that if Kevin lived down the street from me we would be great friends.

As you might expect his blog has a liberal bent. Unlike many political blogs though, he is not blinded by his liberalism. He can see merits in other points of view and is not hesitant to write cautions and concerns into his blog entries. Like the best bloggers such as Atrios and the retired Billmon, he can find the connections that elude most of the rest of us.

If you are a political animal like me, you too should be reading Kevin’s Political Animal blog regularly. In fact, if your time is very limited Kevin’s blog should be the only one you read. He is that good.

October 7th, 2007 at 01:05pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2007 | 13 comments

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