Skin of Stars

Hello all, it’s been a while. The Skinofstars site has been languishing in disuse for some time now. Like I’m sure many others, I’ve found the transition to micoblogging is all too easy. Sometimes though, one wants to write something a little longer and long gaps are not helpful when you finally think of something. So I guess I’m just posting to get rid of some writers block really.

For the six months since my last post (my, that is a long time!) I’ve been working at Studio Lift in Reading. There are five of us; two designers, two coders and a multi-talented boss. We fill our days making like this and like this (bad linking! using Movable Type. This is the same blogging platform that is used by the BBC, The Guardian, ReadWriteWeb and various others. It comes in both Commercial and Open Source offerings and is perhaps one of the most venerable of blogging systems.

Does that mean I’m going to talk tech now?… sure (jump?). Movable Type (mt) has just released its 5th version. This places more emphasis on managing multiple blogs within a site structure. Very useful if you’ve ever tried to manage multiple blog instances (how many blogs do you think The Guardian has?). There is also a new emphasis on social communication (see Motion).

The system is written in Perl but because the publishing is static files you can drop pretty much any scripting language in without any problems. My current language of choice for server-side is PHP. You hook your language in with mt using their own markup derived syntax, and to be honest for a simple blog you never have to touch another language. Let’s look at an example which will iterate over a collection of the last five entries:

<mt:Entries lastn=”5″>
<h2><mt:EntryTitle /></h2>
<p><mt:EntryBody /></p>
</mt:Entries>

There is documentation, with my favourite page being the tag reference, but otherwise there certainly isn’t the same breadth of documentation as you would find with something like WordPress. Perhaps the strong ties with the commercial side of the software, it was increasingly license prudish at the Open Source blogging party, has been a hindrance to a warm and fuzzy community embrace. Still, some big media hitters use it so they’ve certainly got something right.

Well, as I said, I work in Reading and my crappy car’s wiper motor has broken so I’ve got to get up early and catch a bus. It’s been nice to talk to you again. Thanks for putting up with my tech chatter, I expect that you’ll get variation soon enough as we head towards the General Election

Night Night.

It’s taken me some time and a little soul searching if ones being honest, but I have finally decided to leave blogger behind me. Blogspot has served me well enough but struggled with the resrictions I always feel when someone else is hosting my webbyness, so I felt it was time we parted ways. Now I get the freedom to improve or make a mess of my own site. Though I’m sure I’ll lose a bit of traffic like this, I don’t think it really matters much these days.

Thankfully, and to make life extra easy, it is stupidly simple to transfer all your posts and comments over.

Here are my marks so far for my first year of Uni. Not too bad considering how drunk I was:

Computer Systems – A
Multimedia IT Skills – A
Human Development and Learning – B+
Human Communication – B+
Communication in Groups – B+
Playing the Game: The Culture of Digital Games. – B
Structured Programming – C

It would seem that I’m at my best and my worst when I’m with computers, go figure.