Rodent Regatta

TextDrive is Dean Allen’s new hosting company. Dean is also the mind behind Textpattern, Textism and Textile. Tonight, I was catching up on some back entries at the TextDrive and Textpattern support forums.

Some announcements just reaffirm instincts you had when you made a decision. The announcement that Brad Choate has joined the TextDrive staff did exactly that. Here are Brad’s own comments about the new work with TextDrive.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve avoided launching IE6 at all. I’ve forced myself to work with Firefox, then I configured (tried to configure) Opera. Here are my findings:

• I like both browsers a lot. Either would suit my needs as replacements for IE6.
• Firefox locks my system up an average of once a day. It’s guaranteed to do it more than that if pdf files are opened. Firefox also opens any link in an email twice. It also opens new windows for email links rather than new tabs.
• Opera cannot display the IE ”links” toolbar. They call it a ”personal” toolbar, and no amount of trial-and-error with the customization of that toolbar gets me more than three Opera-related links on it. This is a big drawback. I start my day by clicking from left to right on the string of favorites I have set up on my ”links” toolbar. It works fine in Firefox and IE.
• Opera also cannot display the formatting buttons on the Movable Type text entry screen. I found a fix for Firefox that even allowed me to change the tags from B to strong and i to em. I haven’t found such a fix for Opera.
• In fairness, Opera feels like the more finished package. Firefox really reminds me of the old Netscape browsers that seemed to have a feature, but you couldn’t get it to work.
• I use technology a lot. It has to work reliably. While I get a small amount of enjoyment out of toying with it, I do not like to spend hours trying to make something work only to have an intermittent or flakey result. Both of these products have important areas where they fall into this category.
• While I believe SP2 is going to make IE a bigger target for a while, there is at least some hope that SP2 might bring some security to the browser and add some much needed features.

Just a note for passers-by. Browser choices are not religious events for me. I don’t care which browser I use so long as 1) it worx reliably 2) enough other people use it to have a support foundation 3) it can be configured using set-and-forget work habits.

Given any choice at all I prefer to prevent problems rather than fix them. That goes for just about any area of life – technology in particular. The past month’s security issues with IE and things from Microsoft found me giving alternative browsers a try. Opera and Mozilla/Firefox are the tools I’ve been looking at. I use a laptop computer (all the time), and the speed-scroll section of the touchpad doesn’t work with these other browsers. That’s a relatively small habit to change given the reduced security risks.

I’ve noticed that some shortcut buttons at the top of my MT text entry screen are missing in Firefox. I have to type out the full syntax of an a href tag.

Meryl is facing similar changes for the same reasons. She has posted three entries that may be of use to others: | 1 | 2 | 3 |

• * * UPDATE * * * No sooner had this entry been out there a few minutes, than I had a suggestion or two from Meryl regarding those missing icons on the text entry screen. One ”hack” she suggested is at kurcula.com. The other is at FCKeditor. A quick glance makes me believe that this latter option simply replaces your text entry box with a full-featured text entry box.

It raises the following questions:

• Does FCKeditor include spell checking? I was told to use IESpell, but I’ve never added it. How does this compare to enabling your text entry box with Textile?
• Are these tools going to conflict with one another?
• Will the B and <em>i</em> icons ever plug in tags that validate in XHTML? I believe we’re supposed to use strong and em, but I’m not sure whether those are the only tags that will provide valid bold and italicized text.

Overall this is great stuff. It simply seems that a couple of answered questions open up entirely new veins to be mined.

• * * UPDATE 2 * * * After a second comment from Meryl, I got my courage up and edited my edit_entry template. Sure enough, it worked. I’ve got the buttons showing in Firefox, and I’ve also been able to edit the tags so that the icons insert strong and em tags!

The dilemma with junk like this is whether to stick with a tool that has Jay Allen fighting the good fight, or are you better off moving to a different CMS tool that is considered a less ”target-rich-environment.”

Lists are useful. It’s interesting to see a list of everyone’s favorite. People are weighing in on web hosting at SuperfluousBanter.