Jonathan Sanderson’s weblog, since 2001.
Apparently waiting until I was asleep before they pounced, Six Apart have now released a quickie ‘bug-fix’ update, 3.11. Hilariously, the upgrade instructions do not cover the case for updating from 3.1, and while the release notes hint that the database scripts have been fixed, different postings of said notes contradict the first set. Looks like imprecise wording to me, but the intended meaning is not obvious.
I’ve filed a formal bug report on the documentation.
OK, so I’ve avoided writing this rant for about… oh, three months, I think. But I’ve just wasted almost two hours thanks to nothing more involved than bad documentation, and I’m hopping mad. So here goes:
The whole MT3.x update thing has been a but of a marketing farce, thanks in part’s to Six Apart’s inevitably difficult growth from a couple of well-meaning geeks into a serious middleware empire. John Gruber covered the initial faux-pas and associated fallout with his customary insight. In short: Six Apart promised a free feature release, and delivered a paid-for cleaner-code release. Oops.
Apparently unnoticed in all this, they goofed in what, to my mind, was a more significant fashion. When MT3 was finally let loose, what we got was a ‘Developer Release.’ “OK,” I think, “I’m not a developer, so I guess I’ll stick with v2.6x, and continue to install that for my hostees.” Only, MT2.6 was removed from the file servers. Yes, folks, for the last – what, three months? – there’s been no evident user release of Movable Type. Am I missing something, or was that a bit brain-dead?
A month ago v3.1 was announced. Finally, we were promised, a release for more normal people. Stay tuned, we were told (twice), for more details prior to release. Evidently not learning from their past communication and marketing mistakes, Six Apart proceeded to post nothing more before actually releasing the software.
MT3.1 finally appeared a couple of days ago. With chums clamouring for something – anything – that will stem the flow of comment spam, I tonight took the plunge. Two hours of angst later, it turns out the upgrade install documentation is plain wrong; see my post here. In short, if you’re using Berkeley DB, you don’t need to run the mt-upgrade* scripts. Oh, and incidentally, MT installation is basically the same as it always has been. That is, harder than it might be.
OK, so what’s the lesson here? For Six Apart, it’s very simple: if you promise your customers something, however, trivial, you must deliver. At the moment, the main thing they have going for them is the vague vibe in the blog community that they’re decent people. That’s pretty thin, especially when WordPress is as good as it is.
For the rest of us, my take-home is this: who, exactly, is the target audience for Movable Type? As the features and complexity layer up, it seems aimed increasingly at hard-core digerati and blog envelope pushers. But those of us with a modicum of geek savvy and – crucially – established hosting are not necessarily the target market for TypePad, either.
I hope Six Apart’s market profiling is of better quality than their upgrade documentation. If it’s not, I think they risk splitting their products either side of their customers.
…completely unfathomable. Overnight ratings were all over the shop, but could essentially be described as ‘crap.’ On the other hand, the BBC were also all over the place, and there’s no apparent correlation between their ups and downs and ours. I’ve seen this before with summer schedules – my guess is that the BARB sample size is so small, most of what we’re seeing is the noise. It’s a crying shame, however: it’s the best series of the show yet, and more kids deserve to see it.
Compare with: presenter Sam agreed to do a personal appearance for his local gym tonight. They thought they might get thirty or forty kids; he just rang me to say that he’s nervous as hell, because three hundred have turned up. Yow!
Crazy Russians, vaguely well-known geeks, a kilo of iridium, and Oliver Sacks. Result: terrific read. It’s also worth reading the subsequent description of the aforementioned crazy Russians.
Note to self: buy some newspapers today.
So far as I can tell, we’ve had surprisingly little press in the UK about the protests around the Republican National Convention in New York. For example, we’ve not seen reports of the Critical Mass cycling meet (New York Times – free registration yadda yadda), nor stories of the subsequent arrests. And we’ve certainly not had reports of the more bizarre protests, such as John Perry Barlow’s ‘dancemob‘ initiative, which… well, have a look.
In fact, all I can find in the UK press – at least online – is a single picture from the Guardian. Which reminds me of a recent discussion with a local political hack: are mass protests a remotely efficient form of political engagement?
They are a perfectly reasonable means of bolstering group spirit and cohesion, I’ll admit. But in terms of expected impact it’s surely too easy to dismiss an entire protest outright, rendering the exercise a monumental waste of collective time? One suspects that Amnesty got it right years ago with mass letter-writing campaigns, which are both more personal and harder to deal with.
Disclosure: I’ll admit to having been jaded about mass action for a very long time. Ever since the particularly nasty experience that was the original Gulf War protest march, back in 1991. Hint to first-timers: don’t go to these things if you’re not affiliated to an existing group. You’d be surprised at how personally dangerous they can be. And no, I’m not talking about the police being heavy-handed.
Or, as Doc Searls puts it: ‘Oh shit, it’s September. When was July?’
Movable Type 3.1 is finally out. Why should anyone care? It’d be easy to be snide and mutter something about having jumped ship to WordPress long ago. It’d also be easy to note that MT3.1’s release marks the first time MT’s been available to end users in three months (3.0 was a ‘developer’ release, but they nevertheless pulled 2.661… then updated all the sample stylesheets without telling anyone. Which was all a bit braindead, frankly).
Anyway, rants aside, 3.1 is out. Shortly – perhaps as soon as this evening – I shall move quernstone.com over to it, and try out all the gee-whizz new stuff. Particularly the comment blacklisting features.
Once I’m happy it works, I’d be delighted to upgrade the blogs of my hostees on deletetheweb.com, at your request. Please note:
Please note, dear hostee, that I won’t do any of this without your express permission and request.
Incidentally, I bought some soap the other day. ‘Non-comedogenic,’ said the packaging. Does that mean it’s not been tested on… no, I guess not.
There’s an awful lot of green slime in my life today. Which is something of a bind, since as a result, last night I missed Gavin’s stand-up act again. After he was mentioned in The Times, no less (sorry – they’re subscription-only, so no link. He was quoted offering less than encouraging words to a Times journo who’s trying the stand-up thing. ‘But… don’t you know? Glasgow’s death for stand-ups!’).
Not much else to report. Windows SP2 has broken all sorts of unexpected things, but on the plus side, XP no longer attempts to mysteriously wrest DHCP duties from my LAN. Which is a good thing. Also, my absolute favourite Windows website (at least in terms of frequency of visits), Windows Update, is dramatically better than it used to be. Make no mistake, Microsoft’s stuff is getting better. It’s just getting better less quickly than Linux and the Mac OS. Which, in the medium term, is a bit of a problem for them.
I realised recently that I’d never actually cooked Yorkshire pudding – clearly, an intolerable situation that could not be permitted to continue.
On the left, my first.
That seemed to work, then.