December 16, 2004

TypeKey is a total failure

One of the great things about Movable Type is that you don't have to know all that much to set it up. Sure, the chances of it for some reason assume your archives will go in a given place have about a 90 percent chance of being wrong, but that's easy to fix once you get logged in. Even if you can't handle it by yourself, Six Apart's support forums have some really sharp minds that can get you up and running.

TypeKey is everything that Movable Type is not. It's a simple enough concept: A one-stop shop to get a persistent, semi-verified identity that will let you comment on anyone's weblog. In practice, it's a lot different. It's way more trouble than it's worth.

Here's an obvious example of what makes it confusing:

WTF?


Questions:

1. Why is the token (ostensibly, your identity) with the list of weblogs you wish to use it on? It seems to me that the token and the list of weblogs shouldn't be included. You can't change the identity, hence it's not a preference. Your preference doesn't really matter, because you get what they give you.

2. What's with the text? I like to think that I'm a reasonably smart guy, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Do I put in the full address to Movable Type? Should it just point to my site? It says application, but it's hardly explicit about it. Now, does it go to the actual mt.cgi or just to the directory that contains it?

Suppose you make sense out of all that, and you put in the necessary information. Then suppose something doesn't work. There's no help page available from the TypeKey site. When you try to submit a comment and something's not set up correctly, they let you know with this incredibly informative message:

The site you're trying to comment on has not signed up for this feature. Please inform the site owner.

Seeing as how I'm the site's owner, that's kind of worthless. I don't know what to do about it, and I have no simple place to go to find out.

If I do want support, there's no real FAQ on the TypeKey site. The only thing there is just information about what TypeKey does. If you want support, you have to go to the main TypeKey site and then there's a link to a support form.

Maybe I'm old school, but there's an old adage on the Internet that this brings to mind: RTFM. Unfortunately, since there is no manual (or relevant FAQ), it makes it kind of hard.

Being a spoiled Mac user, reading the manual is something I've begrudgingly learned to force myself to do. When you use a Mac, it's not something you often find yourself needing to do. I know they're Mac fans at Six Apart, and they've done great work to make Movable Type as simple as they can, but they dropped the ball on this. If you can't make intuitive, the least you can do is include a good manual.

I know I could look this up on Google or fill out the support form, but that's not the point. The point is that it's sort of ridiculous that I have to do that at all. When I have the time, I will look for support elsewhere on the Web. But I shouldn't have to.

In the meantime, comments are shut off because I'm getting spammed.

Posted by Chris Coleman at 12:45 PM | Comments (0)

November 30, 2004

More half-assed feats of technology

Well I finally got something done today that I had been meaning to do for months. I finally successfully installed Gallery. Now, in addition to reading my pointless and poorly constructed ramblings, you'll be able to see my pointless and poorly constructed photography. It's really useless, but it's fun for me, and I know that "totally lame" generally passes for "oh my God, I wish I could do that" on the Internet.

Following the necessary instructions to put together a basic Web site is pretty much comparable to baking a cake. If you're so dumb that you you would burn down the house by putting on the frosting, then you should probably keep your distance from projects like this. If you're halfway literate and can follow simple written instructions, then you can probably handle installing Gallery. That doesn't go very far in explaining why I managed to mess things up quite so royally in previous attempts, but there are sometimes circumstances beyond your control, like a faulty oven in the aforementioned cake-baking analogy.

I do take some solace in the fact that I did manage to get Gallery working on the first try, the first time I tried installing it. You can check out the results of that little experiment on Danielle's site.

I had some problems with this attempt, but I safely place half the blame on CuteFTP, which I used to upload the files during my lunch at work today. Some of the files for Gallery ended up in the wrong directory. The other half of the problems come from old configuration files from a previous attempt to install the software. They were pointing to a directory on my old domain. Everything took about ten minutes to fix, so I wasn't terribly upset. In all fairness, following the instructions will only get you so far sometimes. Even if you do follow everything, there can still be problems.

Remember the cake? Suppose you get that caked all done and it looks good enough to bury your face in, but when you do, it tastes like bad fish. Obviously there's a problem, but fixing it won't be easy. That's sort of how I feel with some of the problems I'm having right now. It's installed, but some things, like creating a gallery from an existing folder of images, just won't work. When I try to do it, I get a bunch of php errors that don't make much sense. I can still use the form interface to upload photos, but I'd rather use FTP when I can. It's just one more thing on my list.

Gallery could definitely be better about letting you fix stuff during the setup process. Every time there was an error when I tried to submit the changes I made to the configuration, I was stuck starting from scratch, hoping no new errors would appear when I was finished. It wasn't a huge problem in the end. Like I said, halfway literate is all it takes.

If you try setting up Gallery for your own site, you'll probably agree with me that the configuration pages could use some serious work. I find that I have the same gripes about a lot of open source stuff. Some programs, like Adium, could not be more polished. I'm always sort of surprised that a bunch of programmers working together with no budget can put together something so nice. Others, like FileZilla, are an absolute mess. The interface is absolutely horrible. How bad? Bad enough for me to voluntarily continue to use CuteFTP over it at work. That's pretty bad. Gallery falls somewhere in the middle. The configuration pages are a maze, but once you get past the initial setup, things seem to run pretty smoothly. So far, I have no major complaints about the interface of the actual software, and I love to complain. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that version 2.0, which isn't too far off, will add some of that Adium-style polish to Gallery.

So far, so good with the installation. The software seems powerful; at least as powerful as Movable Type for what it does. I have yet to see how customizable it is, however. Creating a gallery using the default template is simple enough, but I'd eventually like to make one using custom styles. The default templates generate HTML 4.01, which is pretty weak in this day and age. I want to get something together that's a little nicer to look at both on the outside and under the hood.

I plan on using Gallery for this site and Funk 'n' Gumbo as well. It'll be mostly for showing pictures of drunks to the drunks in the pictures for both sites. The main difference being that the drunks on my site will be friends of mine while the drunks on Funk 'n' Gumbo's site will be people at the shows. Another difference is that my drunks are considerably better looking, and that's not saying much.

I know I'll get a disappointed look from Colin for not jumping right into Flickr, but this suits my purposes. I do intend to dig deeper into Flickr in the future, but I'd like to get things taken care of quickly here and then maybe look at learning about some other options. Gallery is open source, so I get that initial warm and fuzzy feeling for using it, but time will tell if it'll wear off. If it does, Flickr or something else may be the way to go.

Before I forget, here's my photo gallery. You can also find a link to it in the top navigation menu. Enjoy!

Posted by Chris Coleman at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

November 29, 2004

Scratch one more

So I tried to get creative and set up Kung-Tunes to list my current iTunes track. I don't know what the deal is, but it was having some issues. The program itself was running extremely slowly on my computer and it was sending the updated files to the site with errors. At one point, it said the current track was H�i�t�s�v�i�l�l�e� �U�K by AC/DC, when I was listening to Hitsville U.K. by The Clash. That was my cue to dump it for now.

I'll give Kung-Tunes another shot when everything else is squared up. If I can't figure out what was causing the problems, I'll try looking for another solution. In the meantime, suggestions are welcome.

Posted by Chris Coleman at 09:14 PM | Comments (0)

Remember me

I can add one item to the list of things to do for the site redesign and then scratch it and another.

I didn't manage to get anything done over Thanksgiving, but if you read below, you'll see that I was obviously preoccupied. Besides, the reason I bought a new computer was because I could never get any work done on my PowerBook, and that's all I had to work with for five days.

Posted by Chris Coleman at 06:26 AM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2004

New design

Happy days are here again; the redesign is up and running. Sort of.

It's almost finished, I swear. Still left to do:

I plan to get to the first few things on the list before the end of the week. Once that's set up, however, I have to redo the Funk 'n' Gumbo site before I get back to things over here. This redesign was basically a test run to see how much work that will take. That's going to be a little bit more complicated, but the XHTML is finished for the most part, and it's just a matter of creating a new style sheet and putting the Movable Type code where it belongs.

Should be fun times.

Posted by Chris Coleman at 08:54 PM | Comments (5)

November 20, 2004

This is a test.

This is a test. I want to see what happens when I ping my own site.

Posted by Chris Coleman at 11:01 PM | Comments (3)