Technology Report

Posted on March 28, 2003    Posted by John Scalzi      4 Comments

The more I fiddle with Movable Type, the more I realize how stupid easy it is to use (which is, I suspect, why so many people use it). I am having to roll my own coding whenever I want to insert a picture or other non-trivial HTML thing, but so far that’s not a real problem, since I don’t do anything particularly complicated. Anyway, it’s sort of like going back to 1994, when the Web editor was notepad, and if you wanted to upload your Web page, you had to know UNIX commands. Chmod this, pal.

One thing I’ve definitely noticed about Movable Type, however, is that it’s not exactly compact in terms of the information it serves up. A full day of people access the MT version of this page sends means my servers sends out roughly twice as much data as when I was posting in pure HTML. Part of this may be due simply to the fact that for the moment I’m writing slightly more, but even on a “per unique visit” basis it’s much more data. I’m unlikely to bump up against my bandwidth limit (it’s at 15GB a month, and even at double the data throughput, I’d get nowhere near that), but now I understand why some of the more popular sites get hit hard.

And because all the updates are handled through the Web, it’s wreaking havoc on my ease of reading referrer logs, since everytime I update there’s a huge plug of my own information in there. I used to walk lightly through my own referrer logs. Now I’m splayed everywhere. This isn’t something anyone but me needs to worry about, but since I enjoy combing through the referrer logs to see what horrible things people are saying about me on their own sites, it’s now slightly more of a slog.

I’ve also started fiddling with an RSS newsreader, which is interesting although I’m not quite sure what the utility is. I get the idea that it pulls down information for you so you don’t have to wade through someone’s Web site, but I like wading through people’s Web sites. Maybe I’m missing something.

Thanks also to the people who have posted comments or sent me e-mail about installable spellcheckers; I do appreciate it.

One final minor quibble about MT is that it’s easiest to use and update (in Windows, anyway) through IE — if for no other reason than that through IE, you have the little buttons that in the HTML code for bolding, italics and underlining as well as URL codes. Trying as I am to swear off Microsoft products whenever possible, this means I dip back into Bill’s Browser everytime I want to update. It’s no big thing, as I said, but I’ll look forward to an update that allows full functionality on Mozilla.

No, I don’t expect you to care about any of this. This is why the page is called “Whatever,” you know.