Rodent Regatta

I’ve been making entries to this weblog with Movable Type for about one week now. Prior to that I was posting to the weblog using Radio Userland. I’d estimate that I’m 10% of the way along MT’s learning curve. When I stopped using Radio Userland, I was roughly 60% of the way down their learning curve.

It seems appropriate to provide a brief insight into what I like and dislike to this point. Short story – I miss Radio’s news aggregator. I miss it badly. One of my favorite pasttimes was to post to the Radio version of this weblog from the news aggregator. Each time I got ready to use it, the latest updates from the 120 or so people/sites I subscribed to would be there waiting on me. Today, I use Amphetadesk.

It’s important to note that only the updates would be there. Something that had been written hours before would be gone unless it had been changed. I’d read through my news stories and uncheck the ones I thought I might want to use. After making that pass through the aggregator, I’d wind up with a ”short list” of candidate stories for posting.

This short list allowed me to mentally sequence the items and with a single click of the mouse, post the entry into the text-editing box of Radio. I could then format, edit, expound or whatever before publishing the entry to my weblog. I miss that a lot.

I’ve been trying to use Amphetadesk. It’s currently not up to Rev. 1.0. It shows. A refresh of Amphetadesk continues to show entries from weeks ago for some sites. Copying an entry from Amphetadesk to MT doesn’t bring any of the formatting, links or anything else into MT’s text entry box. All of that must be edited by hand.

Many of the feeds that I previously subscribed to don’t show up at all in Amphetadesk. Examples include Meryl’s Notes, O’Reilly Safari, Kottke.org and NPO Today. Anything I copy and paste from Amphetadesk to MT requires that I add the attribution at the end. Amphetadesk passes no information about where the entry came from when it is copied.

Finally, MT requires that I learn a great deal more about HTML than was required under Radio. There is no WYSIWYG text entry box. I also have a long way to go before I fully understand where all of my information really is and what files it is in. However, I like the fact that I can log into and edit my weblog from any computer on the Internet.

These are clearly early comments. As I learn more, I’m confident I’ll discover features and functions that I like better than Radio. Suffice it to say that what I’m really commenting on here is usability. I give my current experiences a C+ compared to an A- for the routine I had grown accustomed to. Change is hard. The A- came only after 9 months of rather intensive work. Nine months from now, we’ll see how MT and Amphetadesk (or another aggregator) stack up!