Last night I did some work on the Blue Leaves WordPress theme to get it looking more how I'd like the site to look. I redid the main header, replacing the leaves image with an image of my own keyboard (doctored in Photoshop) and the old ITauthor logo from the Plone  version  of  the  site.

However, when I did a quick check this morning in IE7 I notice it doesn't display correctly. It looks fine in Firefox 2 (my default browser) and Opera  9, but IE7 obviously has different ideas about how CSS should be interpreted.

The other very disappointing thing is just how slowly WordPress serves up pages compared to Plone and even MovableType. I'm going to have to have a look and see if I can tune up. I'm getting 25+ seconds for the initial load (which is way too long, given that the images are all pretty small), and then 12”“15 seconds after that to load a page. This compares to about 4 seconds to load a page from Plone. I'm not sure how many people would wait 25 seconds for a page to appear.

I've been talking about revamping ITauthor.com for about two years now and, until now, done nothing about it. I finally decided that I've got to aim for simplicity. Originally, I saw ITauthor.com as a full-blown website mainly made up of articles about software and technical writing. Those articles never materialised because I just never had the time. Also, I never really got on with Plone. The whole architecture of Plone is very poor and I hated Python from the word go. I just didn't get on with Python at all. Give me Perl any day.

I looked around at alternatives and very nearly went with Joomla, but it's more than I need and the setup and redesign I know I would get mired in would prevent me generating content, just like Plone did. I need something plain and simple, where other people have done most of the work for me. That's where WordPress comes in. Originally I'd thought of it as just blog software. But I also need to replace my old MovableType setup, which has always annoyed me because it's incredibly slow, difficult to redesign and (the version I'm using, at any rate) is full of usability issues.

I've been using WordPress for over a year now for a private blog, so I know what it's like to use. I installed the latest version a couple of nights back and I've just spent my lunch break importing all my MovableType posts into this WordPress blog. It was pretty straightforward, with one caveat. Basically all you do is use MovableType's export facility (from the admin page) to export everything to one big text file, you then import this into WordPress from WordPress's admin page. The caveat is that it won't work if the file is too big. Mine consisted of posts going back to 2003 and when I tried to import it I just got a blank page. You've got to chop the file up. I chopped it up into 7 files and it worked fine.

Note: several how-to pages on this talk about editing a .php file on the server. In WordPress 2 you don't need to do this - just use the Import tab in the admin section.

The import wasn't flawless (of course). I lost most of the formatting, some of which I'll need to reinstate to make posts readable. The images appeared fine but they reference the images directory in the MovableType area of my web server so, to keep a logical structure, I'm going to have to move these and change the href values.

But it's a start. I feel like I'm a big step closer to a simpler but more useful ITauthor.com.

When investigating this question, I came across the following, which I liked so I thought I'd quote it here:

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Style question
Author: John Fleck

On Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 02:21:26PM +0100, John Levon wrote:
>
> "filesystem" or "file system" ?
>

I tread gingerly into these word choice arguments, because to a
certain extent an arbitrary decision has to be made. The GNOME
Documentation project is going with "file system". This is one of
those computer terms where you find a battle of common usage
between the traditional English language - "file system" - and the
computerized version of the word - "filesystem". This one seems to be
right at the tipping point. (A Google or Altavista search is an
interesting way to be crudely empirical about a question like this.)

Some people will no doubt passionately argue the stern grammarianâ € ™s
point of view - "But `filesystemâ € ™ is not a word, and just because the
unwashed masses are using incorrect grammar doesnâ € ™t mean we should."

Others will equally passionately argue - "But language is a living
entity, and `filesystemâ € ™ is the way computer people really write it now."

At this point in the argument, I back quietly out of the room. We had
to pick one, we picked "file system", but if we had settled on
"filesystem" Iâ € ™d shrug my shoulders and use it.

Cheers,
John

â € “
John Fleck

The Content Wrangler has an interesting article by Lisa Woods about the cost (in more than just money) of protracted reviews of a document.

The overview of a computer system she was tasked with producing was finally approved eight months after the original deadline at an estimated minimum cost of $53,000. It was a 15 page document, and no one was happy with the final result - including its author.

The article contains some advice if you find yourself in a similar situation. Personally, the advice I would give is just to be more dictatorial about what goes in the document. I've always taken the view with document reviews that I'm the author and I'll decide what goes in the document - all I'll carry the can if I get it wrong. If a reviewer suggests changes I don't agree with, those changes don't go in. Do reviewers get to review the updated version of the document: absolutely not. I go back to them for a second review if I need to clarify something and I direct them very precisely to what I want them to review and leave them in no doubt that they are almost certainly wasting their time by commenting on anything else.

I've been using my XDA (a brand of PDA running Microsoft PocketPC) more and more over the last few months. Here are the applications I use most often:

Start page

OK, so it's not an application, but it's where it all kicks off from. Note: This is the XDA Developers' edition of PocketPC.

My phone

My XDA is my phone, so I see this page a lot. One of the things I really is being able to write text messages by scribbling on the screen rather than having to remember key sequences to generate letters.

Music & podcasts

I tried out various audio players for PocketPC, Pocket Music was by far the best. Most of the time these days I use it to listen to podcasts.

Books

Being able to read a book wherever I am is a great bonus. I used to get irritated by enforced "down-time" when I was stuck somewhere with no mental stimulation (e.g. waiting for a bus). Now I always have a good book to hand. Most recently I've been reading David Copperfield, which I can thoroughly recommend.

Personal database

I've always had a dreadful memory for people, so having a little database of pertinent facts about the people I meet is extremely useful. Data on the Run is nice little application built on Pocket Access. You have to pay for it (after an initial trial period), but most of us would be prepared to pay a little to supplement our memory?

Recording

The XDA didn't come with a good audio recorder, so I added this one. It's come in handy for recording podcasts. One useful feature is that it allows you to select the output format.

ActiveSync

Microsoft ActiveSync handles the interface between my XDA and my PC. I don't think it's a great piece of software - it's not particularly flexible, and it tends to fall over if you ask it to do too much - but most of the time it does what it's intended to do. ActiveSync is the means by which the MP3s that Juice downloads for me end up on my XDA. This screenshot is from my PC (ActiveSync is pretty much invisible on the XDA).

Calendar

The other very useful thing with my XDA (nothing new here to anyone who uses a PDA) is that it synchronises my calendar between my PC at work and my PC at home. I don't use Outlook on my XDA much - which is why I didn't include a screenshot of it - but it means that if I'm working at home and I add a couple of appointments, next day when I'm in the office these show up on my calendar on my work PC.