For those of you who read my RSS feed and don't visit the web pages, here's why I haven't updated anything in a week: iBlog passed on! This software is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! Its a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If it hadn't been nailed to my dock it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now history! it's off the twig! Its kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-IBLOG!!

Hmm. That was funnier when John Cleese did it.

Anyway, iBlog, my otherwise excellent blogging software, ate my entire article database.

(pause for a moment to reflect on the advantage of blog software which generates static HTML)

Fortunately, older articles are not gone, but they are not going to be easily updated. You can still get at the archives (best way for the moment: Google any older article), and I am going to work on hooking the older articles into some sort of "back-issue archives" page.

I considered very long and hard switching to another blogging package, but decided to stick with iBlog. Several reasons:

1) I really want something which I can update offline and upload at my convenience, and ideally which generates static HTML. For MacOS X, that pretty much narrows it to iBlog or Radio Userland.

2) I test drove Radio Userland, and it had a number of oddities. For example, I couldn't find any way to make it post each entry as a separate stand-alone page (for permalinks). Entries had to be aggregated, no choice in the matter. I also wasn't too keen on the licensing model: I much prefer to buy software than rent it.

3) RU was also one of the ugliest pieces of software I've ever seen for MacOS, and as someone who deals with UI professionally (granted, UI for phone systems, but still....), I didn't want to encourage this behavior. For those who haven't run RU, it opens an application on the dock with no windows. Selecting the application provides a bunch of menus which, as near as I could tell, do nothing. The actual user interface is through a web browser, a fact which took several minutes to figure out.

So.

We're back online, and I'm going to try to have links to the archives up shortly. At least I can write again.

(Originally posted 5/16/04, re-posted 5/21/04)