This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in June 2006.

Movable Type 3.3 Beta 3

We installed the latest beta of Movable Type 3.3 last week, and it seems to be working good. I had reported a few bugs with beta 2, but they’ve all been fixed in beta 3. Jay Allen reported yesterday that the current build of MT 3.3 is the release candidate, and that things are looking good and stable so they’re foregoing another beta release. Movable Type 3.3 thereby is due soon. We’re looking forward to the release, and we’re glad here at Manufactured Environments that most of the heavy lifting for us is over. Our highly customized templates have been all retrofitted with the latest technology from Six Apart headquarters. That’s one area especially that Movable Type totally blows WordPress out the water. I’m a hands-on person when it comes to websites, and I like to dig in and custom craft my code. ManuEnvi produces always on the level of XHTML 1.0 Strict, completely valid CSS, with valid RSS 2.0 feeds and also a hidden Atom 1.0 feed that I’ve been playing around with. That’s simply something you can’t do in WordPress. If you’ve ever compared the user interfaces between WP and MT, you’ve noticed that Movable Type is much more powerful and a lot more polished. The killer feature that they haven’t baked into WP yet though is being able to handle multiple blogs/authors/etc. You have to install WP multiple times, which would be a headache. We use three separate blogs on ManuEnvi—the front page blog, the photography area, and the podcasts. The one feature that I like in WordPress and Drupal that I wish Movable Type had was easier management of static pages like the About page or the Contact page. I currently use a Dreamweaver template to manage all of those non-blog pages. I simply change the template when I need to and the changes filter down to all the pages. This is okay, but I’d rather do the same process from within Movable Type.

As an aside, this post seems kind of funny to me. I like blogging about blogging software. I’ve used MT since Feb 2003 for ManuEnvi, but I’ve tried others out on the side just to stay current. The thing that seems funny to me about this is that I’ve seen so many beginner blogs that died with the “I updated my blog software” post. I don’t think that happens often with Movable Type blogs because they take more effort, but I see that all the time with WordPress blogs. It seems that when people get to the post where they write about updating the blog software they kind of realize that they have nothing to say. We like to keep things here at ManuEnvi eclectic, so there’s no danger of that. Sometimes we write about technology. Sometimes we write about music. And sometimes we just say thanks for reading.

Tags: drupal · manufactured environments · movable type · mt · mt3.3b3 · wordpress

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You Are My Destination and Desire, Fading

I woke up last night around 2:30 thinking of a poem. Now, mind you, not just any poem, but a poem by one of my favorite poets, James Tate. I searched my book cases for the book I had in mind and found it, Distance from Loved Ones. So here goes: a poem Dan was thinking of in the middle of the night.

You Are My Destination and Desire, Fading
by James Tate

Dawn animal, why don’t you come out now
and have a nice cuppa?
I am reading the obituaries, strenuously,
which is what one does to get ready.
I am counting the fissures in my egg.
We could go to the islands,
the netherworld full of coral,
and have our portraits painted
in feathers and mud—I know this betokens
a kinship too rickety, or even sizzling, for you.
Mammoths walked there a decade ago,
lonely, tottering along the channels.
They looked at their thumbs and shrugged.
They took out their brains and hurled them
into the reefs. I’m holding a crust of bread
in my palm, I see our initials rising
from the lithosphere, a couple of pinpoints
of utility needed elsewhere, and I remember
how to cry, and I remember you, my last kin.

Tags: desire · destination · distance from loved ones · james tate · poetry

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You are so missing out

I know you’ve been meaning to come out to Iowa. But it’s a long, expensive^* flight from the coasts. What can I say? We like to keep our secret treasures to ourselves. But if you came, we’d be happy. For now though I’ll just have to tell you about life here in Iowa. You see, it’s different here. The corn grows taller, and the pigs grow fatter. Yes, I live in a large college town—30,000 students to keep things interesting. But in Iowa you’ll never forget where you are. The quality of life is good, and the pace is slow. And sometimes you see things here you don’t see other places. Like the endless tanker train cars carrying corn syrup destined for your food. Or how about what Mark saw this afternoon over his lunch hour? Indeed. It was a tanker truck on the highway hauling “pig plasma.” Yum! And just to clear up any confusion, below that was the label: “Not for human food.”

To be honest, I don’t know what they do with pig plasma. Maybe it’s a Fight Club thing and they make soap out of it. Who knows? A quick internet search reveals that GeneTex, Inc. has 50mL jars of guinea pig plasma available for a cool $150. Oh, but’s that another thing entirely. Those poor guinea pigs.

^* Actually, I’ve flown $99 AirTran flights from here to both DC and LA.

Tags: guinea pigs · iowa · life in iowa · pig plasma · pigs · plasma

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Prairie Home Keillor

I’ve been waiting to comment on A Prairie Home Companion, the Robert Altman film, until I saw it, but there have been a few interesting articles of late on Garrison Keillor. Slate’s Sam Anderson writes in The Mysterious Appeal of Garrison Keillor that

[t]hough Keillor is associated with the Midwest, his sensibility comes largely out of New York City. He began his career in the early ’70s writing short humorous essays for The New Yorker (he later became a staff writer then left, on a very high horse, when Tina Brown took over as editor in 1992). He is probably the purest living specimen of the magazine’s Golden Age aesthetic: sophisticated plainness, light sentimentality, significant trivia. … The “News From Lake Wobegon” is basically an old-style Talk of the Town piece about the Midwest.

There was also an interesting personal portrait of Keillor in the New York Times on June 1 entitled At Home With Garrison Keillor: Where all the rooms are above average. Unfortunately, that article has disappeared already in the NYTimes archive for which they’ll charge you $3.95 to read it. But for those with access, just look it up on Lexis-Nexis. It talks about Keillor’s rather grand house in St Paul and the apartment he keeps in Manhattan.

Brief write-up of Keillor at Wikipedia, which features some quotes of his, such as:

Beauty isn’t worth thinking about; what’s important is your mind. You don’t want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head.

Tags: a prairie home companion · garrison keillor · manhattan · new yorker

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Beauty in the eye of the Photoshopper

This photo gallery of images from Brian Dilg Photography amazed me. Click on the thumbnails to view an image, and then comes the good part. If you move the mouse over the image, you see the original unretouched photo. The differences between the images processed in Photoshop and the originals is amazing. Some of the changes are obvious—reducing lines and the darkness under the eyes of the subjects. But other changes—such as moving basketball players from a gym to a basketball stadium are amazingly convicing. Want to lose some weight in your old wedding photos? It can be done. Even the celebrities pictured here don’t look as good as they seem. How deceptive! It would be interesting to do a study of the rise of digitally retouched photos in the media with the corresponding rise in plastic surgery nationally. The odd irony is that the way people want to look (i.e. like celebrities) isn’t even how the people pictured in magazines truly appear.

Tags: brian dilg · photography · retouched photos

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Excuse our Mess: Site News

You’ll note some things in flux recently here at Manufactured Environments. We’ve stopped using FeedBurner to manage the blog and fotos RSS feeds. So to the ones of you who switched with us to FeedBurner, we’d kindly ask you to switch back. The podcasts feed will remain with FeedBurner. Here are the links.

• blog: http://manufacturedenvironments.com/index.xml
• fotos: http://manufacturedenvironments.com/fotos/index.xml
• podcasts: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ManufacturedPodcasts

In other news, we upgraded to the new beta 2 version of Movable Type 3.3. So you may notice some things flying about in the next day or two as we update templates and make use of all the latest features Six Apart has included.

Tags: 3.3b2 · feedburner · movable type · mt · rss

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SearchStatus extension for Firefox

I used to use and used to like the Google Toolbar. It offered direct access to search, and my favorite feature was that it showed the PageRank of a given web page on a scale of 0 to 10. PageRank is Google’s quantification of the importance of a page. It looks at who links to the page, etc. and comes up with a number to represent it. The toolbar has added some nice features over the years, like spell-checking in forms. But I’ve been looking for something less intrusive—toolbars eat up a lot of screen real estate in my opinion.

I’ve finally found something better than the Google Toolbar. It’s called SearchStatus, and it’s available for free for either Firefox or Mozilla. This comes from a South African company called Quirk that offers e-marketing to companies. I’ve been using SearchStatus and love it!

SearchStatus has a lot of great features. To start with, it’s not a toolbar. It sits in the status bar or anywhere else such as on the menu line. So it’s configurable too. It displays Google PageRank for a given page, and also the Alexa traffic ranking. These two measurements are similar but different. Alexa seeks to represent the traffic level of a given website. For example, MySpace.com is the 5th most trafficked site on the Internet, so it rates a 5. Zeldman.com is 28,594 and so on. If you’re trying to determine the quality of a certain page these statistics can help.

In addition to the rankings data, the SearchStatus plug-in also provides easy access to information about a given website. Only a click away is Whois information, a listing of meta tags on the site, and a lot of other handy features. That said, I’ve dumped my beloved Google Toolbar in favor of SearchStatus, which gives more information while at the same time being less intrusive.

Tags: alexa · google · pagerank · quirk · searchstatus · toolbar

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54 ideas for increasing your blog traffic

Seth Godin has a good little post over on his blog entitled How to get traffic for your blog. The fact that I’m linking to his post indicates to me that his method is working. Actually he’s got some useful ideas, some obvious ideas, some self-referential ideas, and of course some contradictory ideas. The basic message I think is write stuff that people want to read—even if that means writing about a very narrow topic. Here at Manufactured Environments we’ve taken an the-world-is-our-oyster approach and comment on a lot of technology, social, cultural, and personal stuff. We’re eclectic, and we’re definitely one of the best blogs out there. I’ve been doing this online writing thing for six and a half years, and it keeps on getting better in my opinion. Back in the early days of 2000 and forth, there weren’t a lot of us doing online writing. At that time, my writing style was more about the personal, and I rarely linked. As time has gone on, I’ve linked more and more. And frankly, there’s a lot more stuff to link to these days. There are a few mega-aggregators like Metafilter and Boing Boing that link to tons of online material, but there are definitely other very good places to find quality links. I personally think that to write a good blog, it helps to read blogs. See what other people are doing, link to them, and foster community.

Also of interest, this classic Manufactured Environments post called Ten Things I’ve Learned About Blogging.

Tags: blog · blogging · mega-aggregators · theory · traffic

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Social netplaying

Like most people who’ve been online for a while, I’ve had various accounts on social networking sites. They seem to spring up from time to time—new ones, better ones, different ones. My first site was Friendster of course, but Friendster was never very much fun. Then came some others. And then came the two that I actually end up using. One is called Facebook. Facebook is a more closed community and requires that you have an email address ending in .edu to sign up. So it’s mostly for college people: students, professors, etc. My profile is here although I think you have to be in one of my social networks to see my profile. Search for “daniel stout,” and you’ll find me.

I’m a little late in coming to this other one, but it’s the one I’ve had the most fun with. It’s MySpace.com of course. MySpace has been in the news a lot lately for better or worse and the kids are already jumping ship. I’ve liked it for a variety of reasons though. I like finding the music I’ve found on MySpace. Lots of bands and artists have homepages there. And it seems like there’s a lot of people on MySpace in general. So check it out. You can find my profile here:

http://www.myspace.com/manufacturedenvironments

If you’re already on myspace, drop me a line….

Update: 2006-06-03 MySpace-flight made the NYTimes today.

Tags: facebook · friendster · myspace · myspace-flight · netplaying · social networking

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Skorton leaves Iowa City

Article this morning in the Press-Citizen about David Skorton’s last day on the job as president of the University of Iowa. Skorton was president of the UI for three years but had been an administrator and faculty member here (he’s a cardiologist by trade) for 26 years before that. He’s off to be president of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Oddly enough, Hunter Rawlings who gave this year’s commencement speech at Cornell and had been president there from ‘95 to ‘03 was also a former UI president. So there appears to be a well laid career track for UI presidents. When I was a grad student here at the tail-end of the 90s, Mary Sue Coleman was president and her career path took her to the University of Michigan instead.

Tags: cornell university · david skorton · hunter rawlings · mary sue coleman · university of iowa · university of michigan

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