Gripes and Groans

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I know a few of you use Movable Type. If so, how do you build a test system? For WordPress work I use XAMPP on my PC, it’s an absolute doddle.

There are Perl add-ons for XAMPP, and I found a guide to installing Movable Type in a XAMPP system but the buggering thing won’t work. I’ve checked and double-checked paths, filenames and all that gubbins but still get errors. There MUST be an easier way.. or is that why people switch to WordPress (or something else?).

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At the risk of illiciting “told you so” style comments… I’m having hassles with iTunes. For some reason it just stops working. I was working at home yesterday and listening to music quite happily. I restarted my PC at one point after having installed some new software and iTunes refused to start!

A couple of un-installs later and some not inconsiderable time spent browsing the iTunes support forums found me uninstalling QuickTime only, repairing the install and it works. So far. I’ve not yet had to reboot and try it again so I’m reserving judgement. From what I can tell, once again, it seems like Apple haven’t tested their software properly, and the forums suggest that’s true as well as there are many people having issues with the fact they have different logins on their Windows boxes and iTunes is ‘losing’ preference files, then crashing when it can’t find them. Not elegant and pretty basic if you ask me.

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My other blog has stalled. Mainly because I want to tweak the design a little before I publish. I have a few articles written up but can’t find the enthusiasm to get it going. What happened? Less than a month ago I was raring to go, fired up and… ohh what. That’s what one of the articles is about. As a quick aside, has anyone taken the Belbin team role tests? If so, what ‘team role’ are you? And can you guess which one I am??

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Anyone know of a flat, vertical, wall-mountable, radio alarm clock? Thinner the better, must have digital clock and radio alarm and be wall-mountable. In case you didn’t get all that the first time…

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And yes, I’m still “twittering”.

Comments

  1. I build another installation of MT in my webspace when I want to test something. For example, in hydragenic.com/testmt/ or in my.webhost.com/myaccount/testmt/.

    There are pros and cons to having a local installation versus web installation, but for me the benefit of the latter is that I can ask one of my Mac-using friends to check whether the test site renders properly on that platform.

    That “Safe Way To Upgrade MT” link that I delished the other day covers similar territory (i.e. parallel installations).

  2. I do the same as HG, just use my online space.

    I used to replicate everything offline when I used blogger, but with MT, I find it easy to do stuff online.

    If you want an MT test space I can give you a blog on my sevitzdotnet site to play with.

  3. Which is fine if you already have an MT installation… but a fair amount of hassle if you don’t.

    Adrian I might take you up on that, as all I want it for is to test some template designs.

  4. Don’t know if this will interest you at all but I recently “switched” from iTunes to Mediamonkey. This was initially done out of necessity after acquiring several hundred gigabytes of music from my brother-in-law (I got fed up trying to play anything in iTunes on the same day as opening my expanded library) but I have since found that it has some very nifty features and will sync with your iPod, too.

  6. I think the MT and iTunes questions have been answered (not that I could help much on either), so I’ll answer the question no-one else has.

    In the Belbin Team Inventory, I’m a “Monitor Evaluator”. If you want an unbiased opinion, I’m your man, allegedly.

  7. “Which is fine if you already have an MT installation… but a fair amount of hassle if you don’t.”

    Not sure that’s true. When you build a parallel installation completely from scratch, the presence of an existing setup is completely irrelevant. Unless you’re talking about already having the skill set, I suppose.

  9. What on earth is XAMPP? sounds like a way to cheat at scrabble.

    From memory I think I was a leader, but I’m not sure, I do remember close friend being a plant though.

  11. XAMPP is a simple one-off installer that contains all the groovy necessary stuff for a web developer – Apache webserver, MySQL database, PHP etc., in one easy package so you can run it all on your computer without sodding about with all the individual set-ups.

    Bloody handy if you’re a techie, and mind-bogglingly useless if you’re not.

  12. I had equal scores on the Belbin test for Completer/finisher and Team worker – I think you might be a co-ordinator (or team worker) “Mature, trusting and confident and generally command respect” – that’s ma boy!

    “motivated by internal anxiety” – that’s gotta be me!!

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