Overpriced? Oh, come on.

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(Disclaimer: Long, rambling post ahead. This originally started as a comment in response to some comments on this post and others I’ve seen in the past day. This probably isn’t my best written or most coherent rant ever, but here it is.)

Since the official feature and pricing list for TypePad went up yesterday evening, I’ve seen quite a few people grousing about TypePad being overpriced, especially for the Pro package. I don’t think it’s overpriced at all, and will be quite happily signing up for an TypePad Pro account.

First off, about this “free MovableType” that people keep referencing. Sure, MT can be legally downloaded and used for free — however, it’s far better to give a donation if you continue to use it. I’ll save the ranting on the current desire for everything to be free for later, but for now, suffice to say that I’m of the belief that purchasing the software you use regularly is a good thing. The Trotts have put incredible amounts of time and effort into creating what I feel is the best blogging back end application available, and I quite happily sent in a donation to pay for my MT license.

Now, about my present server situation. I’ve been running my personal website, including a MT powered blog, off of my own computer in my apartment for years now. In other words, essentially free, without even the costs of paying for a hosting provider. Theoretically unlimited disk space (as long as I can add new drives, I won’t run out of space). No monthly bandwidth cap. No ads. No limitations on what I can do with my site (I could, in theory, run a porn server without any hassle. It’s a direction I’ve never wanted to go, but I could). My only sacrifices are that my transfer speed is somewhat limited by my DSL line (which, when dealing with text and images, isn’t much of a sacrifice at all over a T1-speed DSL connection), and I don’t have a top-of-the-line server, so it’s not always the speediest on the ‘net (again, though, the majority of the time this isn’t even noticed when just serving text and graphics).

So, I’ve been living with most of the benefits of paying for a hosting service, without the costs, and with the added benefits of having total control over my webserver. I can tweak Apache’s http.conf file to my heart’s content. I can install any number of CGI scripts, SQL databases, or other toys without limit. I don’t even have to deal with uploading and downloading files to my site — all I have to do is copy from one directory on my computer to another, and everything’s good to go.

Why in the world, then, would I want to pay $15/month (not counting any discounts I get for being a TypePad beta tester) to relinquish that amount of control over my site?

Quite a few reasons, actually.

First off, when did $15 become so horridly expensive a price? That’s nothing. It’s the price of an evening at the movies (ticket plus drink and snack) for one person. It’s what, two and a half decent sized coffee’s from Starbucks? Less than the price of having a single medium Domino’s pizza delivered to your door. Less than three packs of cigarettes, if you’re a smoker (and heavy smokers can go through that in a day, let alone a month). These days, it’s less than a full tank of gas.

Next, everything you get with your account. Merely looking at the feature list doesn’t really convey how completely cool some of these features are. You get all the functionality and benefits of a MovableType installation (plus quite a few) without having to bother with the installation itself, without having to worry about which Perl modules are or aren’t installed (Do I have access to Image::Magick? If not, can I get it installed? What about the alternatives?), without having to worry about your hosting provider throttling MT when it tries to grab processor time during a rebuild. Basically, without any of the issues that running your own installation can present. Now, admittedly, for many people, these issues are trivial, and easily dealt with — I’ve faced and conquered quite a few myself — but many other people aren’t going to want to have to worry about things like this.

You also get the extras that are built into TypePad, some of which have been covered this week during the Five Days of TypePad series. Simple, built-in moblogging, allowing you to quickly and easily post from your cell phone, PDA, or by e-mail — a feature I haven’t played with, but other people have said good things about. Amazingly easy photo albums. TypeLists, which have made maintaining the sidebars on this website incredibly easy — the four blogrolls on the right, and the ‘Destinations’, ‘Bookshelf’, and ‘Noises’ lists on the left are all TypeLists.

Beyond all that, there’s the interface itself. The template builder makes the basic layout and design of a simple weblog ridiculously easy: choose a basic layout style, which features you want displayed, and drag and drop them into place. If you want to go beyond the basics, you have access to the source code, complete with all of the MovableType template tags you’re already used to using, and you can tweak and customize to your hearts content. I could easily have duplicated the design and style of my old weblog here at TypePad if I’d wanted to, however it was more fun to play with the built-in tools until I got a basic design that I liked, then go into the code to tweak it from there, with an end result that I like better than what I had before.

Also, for me (and this is somewhat specific to my situation), the speed is a definite improvement. As I mentioned above, my home server isn’t the speediest in the word. While this doesn’t affect me much for simple page serving, it does tend to show a little bit when people are leaving comments on my site, and it shows more for me on the administration end when I’m navigating within the MT interface. By moving to TypePad, everything’s far speedier to work with — combine that with the ease of use of the new interface, and it’s well worth it.

Now, there are a few things that I’m giving up in order to move over here. TypePad users don’t have the ability to muck around directly with the source code of the back end software. This precludes using some of the hacks that involved tweaking the MovableType source code. Adding MovableType plug-ins is also not an option. For some people, this is going to be a very strong and valid reason not to use TypePad — there are a lot of very impressive, very powerful hacks and plug-ins available for MovableType. Some of these I’ve used, and losing their functionality is a little disappointing — however, the majority of the time (for me), they fell into the “here’s a neat trick, I’m going to play with it for a while” category, and not the “this is functionality that I don’t want to live without” category, so I’m willing to lose those specific bells and whistles for the new bells and whistles I get to use here at TypePad.

In the end, for me, the benefits far outweigh any disadvantages. That may not be the case for everyone, and I realize this — however, I think that the complaint that TypePad is overpriced is silly at best, and almost offensively self-centered at worst. There are already a good few years of development sunk into MovableType, plus the extra time and effort that has been put into scaling MovableType up into a public service like TypePad. Is all that time worth nothing at all? From the number of people declaring how they’ll stay with MovableType because it’s free, it seems that that seems to be a very prominent (and sad) attitude.

For myself, though, I’ve paid for MovableType, and I’m going to pay for my continued residence here at TypePad. For me, the features are worth it, the ease of use is worth it, and I’m supporting the hard work that Ben and Mena (and Anil, Brenna, and anyone else at Six Apart) have put into MovableType over the years. They’ve done an incredible job with the services and software packages that they offer, and I’m happy to stick with them.

So I’m staying. :)

Ten blocks downhill…

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From Jeffrey Zeldman:

Gunfire marked our first night in Seattle. Street warfare broke out when rival gangs spotted each other following an annual torchlight parade. Three teenagers were shot and a fourth was stabbed before police could penetrate the thick, panicky crowds to prevent further mayhem.

We were returning from a quiet dinner at Maximillien Bistro in the Market when citizens began running into us. Three shots rang out half a block away.

“Those were gun shots,” said a white man in a black ten gallon hat.

We made it to our hotel and heard the remaining shots and sirens through our window. National news services ignored the short-lived riot. The remainder of our trip was comparatively sedate.

Yikes. The restaurant he refrences is roughly ten blocks away from my apartment. This would have happened last Saturday night, probably in connection with all the various SeaFair stuff going on. What fun. And this is the first I’ve heard of it.

Of course, I probably was up at the Vogue when everything happened, but still…

But weren't you the drummer?

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Tom Tomorrow pointed out this jaw-dropping exchange in the midst of the President’s press conference from a couple days ago:

Thank you, sir. Since taking office you signed into law three major tax cuts — two of which have had plenty of time to take effect, the third of which, as you pointed out earlier, is taking effect now. Yet, the unemployment rate has continued rising. We now have more evidence of a massive budget deficit that taxpayers are going to be paying off for years or decades to come; the economy continues to shed jobs. What evidence can you point to that tax cuts, at least of the variety that you have supported, are really working to help this economy? And do you need to be thinking about some other approach?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. No, to answer the last part of your question. First of all, let me — just a quick history, recent history. The stock market started to decline in March of 2000. Then the first quarter of 2001 was a recession. And then we got attacked in 9/11. And then corporate scandals started to bubble up to the surface, which created a — a lack of confidence in the system. And then we had the drumbeat to war. Remember on our TV screens — I’m not suggesting which network did this — but it said, “March to War,” every day from last summer until the spring — “March to War, March to War.” That’s not a very conducive environment for people to take risk, when they hear, “March to War” all the time.

Well, gee, you’re right, that attitude doesn’t contribute to a safe, healthy, stress free environment. Especially when you’re the idiot pounding those war drums every chance you get.

Unbelievable.

Unfortunately, the rest of the press conference is just as bile-inducing.

Blood on his hands

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Wow — Tony Blair’s in trouble, and the British press are taking no prisoners.

Finally, one British reporter shouted out: “Have you got blood on your hands, Prime Minister? Are you going to resign over this?”

Blair froze. He stood uncomfortable and silent at the lectern for what must have seemed like the longest 30 seconds of his political career, until Koizumi called a merciful end to the press conference.

If only the American press corps had as much gall and backbone when questioning our leaders as the British press does when questioning theirs.

(via Daily Kos and Lane)

Communion on the moon?

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Of all the things I’d heard about the first moon landing, I’d never heard that Buzz Aldrin celebrated communion there.

Aldrin and fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong were watched by millions on television as they stepped from their Apollo 11 module into the Sea of Tranquillity on July 20, 1969, but the first lunar communion was kept under wraps by NASA for two decades until Aldrin wrote about it in a memoir.

It was the first time liquid — wine, representing Christ’s blood — was ever poured on the moon. The specially blessed bread Aldrin consumed — representing Christ’s body — was the first meal eaten by humans on another celestial body.

Just fascinating to know, and it looks like the Anglican church might be getting a special prayer to commemorate the occasion. Nifty.

(via Dad)

Too Americanized?

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Pentagon officials says Americanizing Iraq is difficult because Iraqis have had little to no reliable information for the past 35 years, and have lived on a diet of innuendo, rumor, conspiracy theories, fear, and propaganda. Sounds like the problem is they’re too Americanized.

— Bill Maher (No permalink, July 29^th^ entry)

It looks to me like Bill’s weblog is using MovableType. Who can we contact to at least get him (or his webmaster) to turn on permalinks?

Help wanted: Apache/PHP

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I’m planning on sticking with TypePad as my weblog host once everything opens up officially (tomorrow, from the looks of it). However, this poses a bit of a problem. While I’m slowly moving all of my old posts from my old weblog to this new site, there are still lots of links scattered throughout the ‘net that point to the old addresses.

I think I know of a solution, however, I’m not well enough versed in the intricacies of Apache and PHP to pull it off on my own. So, I’m asking for help!

Here’s what I’d like to do…

All of my old posts reside at my personal server at http://www.djwudi.com/longletter/. It’s a Mac OS X computer running Apache, with PHP enabled.

I know that Apache can handle redirects, based on rules set up in the httpd.conf file. I also know that pattern matching and text string munging can be carried out in PHP.

All of my old individual entry pages are stored in my webserver with the following directory structure:

http://www.djwudi.com/longletter/archives/year/month/day/dirified_post_title.php http://www.djwudi.com/longletter/archives/2003/07/31/help_wanted_apache_php.php

All of the pages on this new site are stored using a similar, but slightly different directory structure:

http://djwudi.typepad.com/eclecticism/year/month/truncated_title.html http://djwudi.typepad.com/eclecticism/2003/07/help_wanted_apa.html

What I’m envisioning for the final system is this:

  • Anytime my webserver receives a request for a page that resides within the ‘/longletter/archives/’ directory, Apache redirects to a customised PHP script on my server.
  • That script does three things:
    1. Presents a simple page to the user with wording to the effect of “This site has moved, one moment while we redirect you…”.
    2. Looks at the requested URI and converts it to what the new URI should be. As I’ve kept post titles consistent, and the directory structures are similar, this should be fairly easy with the right regular expressions.
      1. Parse the requested URI.
      2. Remove everything before the 4-digit year and replace it with the new base address.
      3. Remove the 2-digit day.
      4. Truncate the post title to fifteen characters.
      5. Remove the .php extention and replace it with .html.
    3. Redirects the users browser to the new, correct URI.
  • Hey presto, we’re done — no matter which page was linked to at my old site, the user has been redirected to the corresponding page at my new site.

More brainstorming:

  • The above method works well for links going to individual pages, but what about category archives or the main index page itself?
  • Could the PHP script be made smarter? For instance…
    1. If the requested URI contains the year/month/day/title.php string, then the above transformation and redirect is processed.
    2. If the requested URI contains any other string (in other words, it doesn’t point to a specific post), then a page is presented that says something along the lines of “This site has moved, one moment while we redirect you to the new site…”, and a redirect is passed to the user’s browser that points to the index page of the new weblog.

Anyway, that’s what I’d like to do. It all seems straightforward enough in my brain, and I think that the technology I have available should be able to handle it all without a problem — I just don’t have the faintest idea how to code it.

Any and all advice, hints, tips, or straight-up solutions would be greatly appreciated. I’m not rich enough to offer untold wealth or cool prizes or anything, but I can offer much gratitude, public thanks and kudos, and probably pizza and beer (or a PayPal donation to a ‘pizza and beer’ fund, or some such thing).

And you won’t even have to fight me for the beer — I can’t stand the stuff. ;)