Rodent Regatta

Word comes today that Six Apart is contemplating some additional changes/enhancements to licensing. Given that I’ve got quite a history (for me) with the product, this is great news. I’ve toyed with WordPress and a couple of other tools. I’m not fond of unpredictable upgrade and licensing plans, nor am I thrilled about licensing that is based upon the content I create.

However, I’m simply astounded at the effort (for me) that it takes to migrate an existing site to another weblog tool. Given my challenges with all the things that make up web design (e.g. templates, CSS, tags, XHTML, etc.), staying with Movable Type for existing work would be a very good thing. Remember, once I identify which tag is the one for ”date,” I’m still left to determine which template that must go into and how to position it in the final, rendered page.

I’ll be hedging my future by learning another tool that doesn’t put a content limitation in the license. That’s not the same as ”free,” but it certainly prevents a situation where I can’t create a new site because of a license limitation. In a perfect world, all of my helpers wouldn’t count against my author limit. Those people help me with scripts, markup and design and they have author accounts, but they don’t post anything.

Take a new document in Notepad and begin to add a DOCTYPE and some XHTML and build a stylesheet. It’s pretty clear to me how those pieces fit together.

Throw in a content management system with templates and tags and things get a bit more challenging. Learning how tags nest inside each other and markup is not immediately obvious. Understanding the role of various templates in rendering a home page is also a puzzle.

I’ve seen a list or two of the new templates for the Blogger redesign. I haven’t yet found a list of templates for WordPress. I’m sure they exist.

• * * UPDATE * * * In the comments to this entry, Alex King points to one of his own pages which lists a lot of templates for WordPress. Experimentation to begin soon.

A long time ago I studied differential equations. Recently, I’ve studied linear algebra as it applies to optimization problems. I read. I study. I’m not without a respectable IQ. Yet, I’m ignorant; challenged and ignorant.

Articles like (and in particular) Print It Your Way and Onion Skinned Drop Shadows at A List Apart make me wonder what my web standards syllabus should be yet again. How do you start? What’s the 101 set of classes? What’s the 101 book? How do you get to this graduate-level stuff?

Time is flying by as these entries will show:

• September 30, 2002
• October 30, 2002
• August 27, 2003
• September 27, 2003

Maybe there’s value in committing this illustration to memory.

Somehow, tags, CSS, templates, markup and know-how combine to give a website the look that it takes on. It’s not yet obvious where you are to put the CSS from your ”old” site in order to make the ”new” site (built with a different CMS) carry the same ”look.”

I’ve been toying with WordPress this evening. It installed just fine. I’ve experimented with basic posting. The steps for exporting entries from Movable Type to WordPress are clear, though I haven’t worked on that effort.

What stumps me now is the same thing that has blocked me with Movable Type. Figuring out how to use CSS, tags and templates to format and present the entries in the database is a challenge. I’ve got all these templates in Movable Type, but it’s really a puzzle to see how those migrate correctly to WordPress.

We’ll keep digging.