Battleangel | Personal

So here is the deal from now on. I got fed up with Nucleus and the lack of updates and consideration for new features. That is to say, the developers didn’t care a whit for my suggestions on cherry picking Wordpress features such as configurable permalinks and seemed more interested in producing a ’skinable’ admin area. I wish I could say it’s been great, but it hasn’t and I feel let down by the dev team. I urge the team to work on developing an advanced Nucleus to Wordpress migration script that will make the transition a little smoother and then call it a day. Perhaps expand and fix the bugs in Ketsugi’s
migrator script. There is no point in denying the demise of Nucleus anymore. Nucleus is dead. Long live Nucleus.

The migration process left me with a number of problems. Some couldn’t be avoided and some were due to the conversion script itself. One of the things that I botched was the item id or numbering. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, it would have been nice to have the item id carry over from Nucleus to Wordpress. That way I could just have written a simple htaccess rule to forward /item/id urls to the new permalink structure by way of Wordpress id. Furthermore, I used to have a multiblog setup with Nucleus and that obviously isn’t possible with the standard Wordpress version. So I had to install an entirely separate blog, the one you’re incidentally reading right now, at personal.battleangel.org. I didn’t want to merge the two sets of categories and posts again and I had become comfortable with this separation of official and personal musings. So now I have three Wordpress installs, counting the one over at Silent Nation. Maintaining three separate blogs is obviously cumbersome but it also enables a complete customization of features, plugins and templates. And more so than Nucleus, even with its multiblog, multi-user platform.

I have also come to decision about commenting. It will simply be disabled from now on. As I stated before, my experience with correspondence and user input has been negative overall. Perhaps it’s just me, but it has been aggravating and I just don’t get enough out of the deal. My ambition to win every argument and inability to let contending opinions be left alone has mired me in a nearly insurmountable workload at times. It has perhaps honed some debating skills, but it also seems that often enough I’ve been caught in talking points, common fallacies and disregarding many of the finer points of public discussion. Obviously, this also makes maintaining these journals a great deal easier. And there won’t be any spam to sort out, hence no need for plugins like Bad Behavior or Akismet. This also makes the site a great deal more accessible (I noted for instance that BB made Yahoo’s Site Manager throw up) and load a great deal faster and alleviate the server a bit. Plus I have been rather busy lately, and will be for the near future. Plus there is the personal situation that left me somewhat bereft and drifting. It all adds up. So it’s not really that I’m giving in to spam, right-wing nutjobs or emotions, but a combination of these factors. And rather than quit these journals altogether, I decided to limit the functionality.

Also, if you haven’t already, you should definitely try the new blogging options that come with Microsoft Word / Office 2007. It may sound silly and bloated, but truth be told it is one of the best offline blog writers I have ever come across. Word’s superior spelling and grammar handling coupled with its natural ability to create and upload pictures, charts, shapes and SmartArt simply blows the competition out of the water. Sure, there are a couple of kinks to work out, but overall the feature is very impressive and not just some export tool that Microsoft threw in. The only drawback that I can foresee is that once people find these new tools, we’re all going to choke on WordArt graphics. The simplicity is so overwhelming that you can’t help yourself. And at least when it comes to Wordpress, the integration is virtually seamless. The only problem is that you miss out on the many tweaks that you can do with source code. Such as define CSS classes for bulleted lists for instance. Not to mention adding proper CSS classes to images instead of the terribly outdated align=right.

So if you take Windows Live Writer’s source editing, combine it with the creative power of Word 2007, fix the newMediaObject xmlrpc upload of images and allow for more customization (for instance how link and image tags are written by default when inserted, using rel and class for instance) I think we have a winner here.