Archive for the 'Ramblings' Category

One of the things I always like about the Amazon was that if you searched for something on the main amazon.com site, you could replace com with co.uk and tada you’re looking at the same item on the UK site. This no longer works and you get some new 404 page saying that URL doesn’t exist on the site. I don’t know if this is a transition period and they haven’t rolled out the new software to the UK site yet, but I’m not sure I want them too. I’ve noticed the US site’s pages now contain a lot more crap than before and I like the existing design on the UK site. Apparently I’m not the only one, have a look at Jacob Nielsen’s ‘Amazon: No Longer the Role Model for E-Commerce Design‘.

I’m sure I made a booking through ba.com with Konqueror in the past, but now it just hangs on the payment authorization screen. It’s one of those annoying waiting pages where you’re not sure if the booking has been made or not. After checking my email I was convinced that it hadn’t gone through and successfully made the booking with Firefox. ba.com is a pretty good site but it bugs me when sites don’t work with Konqueror, but it’s not as bad as Lufthansa’s website, which just fails completely in Konqueror and Firefox. It works with Opera, or I should say it loads, but it wouldn’t let me select the flight time combination I wanted and kept deselecting the other leg of the flight. It could be a bug or it might just be I couldn’t do the combination with the ticket class I selected, but surely if they want to go all automated (and hence not work in other browsers) they could at least have told me so.

I wish Sabre and/or Amadeus would offer some nice little web API so I could throw together a script to books my flights for me.

In a moment of boredom I decided to see what themes are out there for WordPress. I think I’ve settled on the Northern Web Coders one. It’s pretty nice but needs some tweaking, the dead links at the top of the page for example. The theme also needs to be adjusted to handle <pre> blocks. I miss the old Moveable Type themes, or at least the ones that took up the entire width of the screen.

Fiddling with themes does mean mucking around with PHP pages and I’m in no hurry to learn it. Maybe it’s time to explore some Ruby blogging software since DreamHost fully supports Rails now.

TypePad is pretty aggressive if you cancel your account. They immediately delete everything and give you no refund for the remaining period. Thankfully I was only on the monthly subscription. I also did an export, grabbed the atom feed and stylesheet before cancelling. There’s no going back now!

I fixed the old TypePad permalinks. Rather than trying to get the permalink structure in WordPress to match TypePad, I put together some htaccess Rewrite and Redirect rules. Since I only have nine posts on TypePad I just hardcoded them, e.g.:

Redirect 301 /programming/index.html http://blog.milesbarr.com/category/programming/
Redirect 301 /programming/ http://blog.milesbarr.com/category/programming/

RewriteRule ^2005/02/ruby_on_rails.html /2005/02/ruby-on-rails/ [redirect=permanent,last]

I tried just doing redirects for the posts but it kept appending the filename to the new URL, which WordPress’ RewriteRules would translate into URL parameters, which do a search and you just get a ‘No matching posts found page’. The rewrites work fine and send back a 301 so hopefully URLs will get updated automatically. The archive by date pages have the same URL so I didn’t have to do anything for them.

Next stage, try to replicate the old theme in WordPress.

DreamHost offers a one-click install of WordPress, so I figured I might as well try it out. The setup was straightforward and it imported all my old posts from TypePad. This does mean all my permalinks are broken, hopefully this doesn’t affect too many sites. The other annoyance is that most WordPress themes are ugly! I finally decided on Steam, but I think I’ll keep looking. It’s perhaps too simple for my eye.

This post kicks off my weblog. I’ve had web sites before, but at some point or another I would stop updating them, mostly because I’d have nothing new to post. I hope this web log will be different. So why am I doing this?

I need to get better at writing. In his last post, Joel reflects what I’ve found since I started working. If you can’t communicate well you lose credibility fast, no matter how clever you think you are. A weblog gives me the chance to write more often and in a more casual matter.

It gives me a place to post my thoughts on various things. But I will try to avoid posting the same news as all the other blogs I read, unless of course, I have something interesting to add.

Thirdly…I don’t have a third, not a good one anyone.

So here I go.