The Republic of T.

This Blog Has Moved

The new place is finally ready, and the new address of this blog is: http://www.republicoft.com. This Typepad site will not be updated any longer, but I will leave it up for a while to allow people to find me if they find they're way back here. If you're looking for me, I'm now blogging at the address above.

If you subscribe to my RSS feed on this blog, you'll want to update because the new blog has a new feed address via FeedBurner.

C'mon over!

The Big Move

No, not me, and not to Canada. (Though the thought has crossed my mind.) I'm talking about this blog. I'm just about ready to move it to its new home. In fact the new place is all set up and waiting for me to import the content from this space. I was tempted to make the move today, but decided to wait until after the weekend, since I'll be out of town and away from regular internet access this weekend. Which means this blog will be rather silent from the last half of Friday through the first half of Sunday.

I'll probably make the move late Sunday or early Monday. When I do, I'll post a notice here, linking people to my new online home.

And, after things have settled down a bit, I might write about my experience of moving from a subscription service like Typepad to a hosting server, and my experiences trying out different kinds blogging apps.

Thanks, and Tech Update

I just wanted to say thanks to those people who emailed to see how I was doing yesterday, since I was pretty silent on the blog. Yesterday was day for procession and ruminating.

On the tech side, I'm still working on moving to my own domain. I'm thinking of abandoning Drupal, since there's no easy way to import my old content into it. I'm leaning more heavilyt towards WordPress and b2evolution, both of which have built in mechanisms for importing Moveable Type content, which is what my exported Typepad content basically is. So why don't I use Moveable Type instead? Well, WordPress and b2evolution are both easier to set up and seem to work pretty well without much tinkering.

I still have a few more programs to check out, since I spent part of yesterday evening downloading blog tools I haven't tried yet. I expect to reach a decision sometime over the weekend.

Hot Damn!

I did it. It took a few days, but I finally did it. I finally got Drupal installed and running on my server. I did it with a little help, though. I had to go back and forth with my host's tech support to restore the MySQL database they supplied as part of my account. Then I registered at the Drupal website, and dove into the forums, where I quickly found instructions for installing Drupal using phpMyAdmin.

I deleted the database I'd created, and instead imported the tables into the mysql database my hosting service provided. Then I edited and uploaded my conf.php. then I entered the temporary URL. Boom. There it was.

So, one hurdle has been jumped. On to the rest... We'll see if I end up accomplishing what I want, or whether I end up staying with Typepad after all. Either way, at least I've accomplished this much.

And We're Back

You've heard the saying "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"? Well, I'm living proof of that today. Futzing around with the new domain name I bought (www.republicoft.com, which is not pointing to this site at the moment), and attempting to get it pointing to this blog's current address, while simultaneously futzing around with setting up Drupal on a new host server—with an eye towards moving over to a new location and platform—inadvertently caused this blog to be unreachable the new domain, and unreadable from its current address.

All is now rectified.

However, I'm beginning to think that change for the sake of change is not a good idea, and that maybe it's best to leave well enough alone. On the other hand, I'm too stubborn to give up that easily. So I'll continue futzing with Drupal until I get it running right, even if I don't end up using it. As for the progress on that front...well, at least my error messages are getting more specific.

Further updates as events warrant.

What's in a Name?

I'm not sure if anyone's noticed, but I've had an itch to change things around here lately. The design change was one thing. But some other ideas have been buzzing around in my head lately. The two big ones are that I've been thinking about (a) moving this blog from typepad to it's own server & giving it its own domain name, and (b) possibly changing the name of the blog.

Yeah. I know. I bounced that last idea off a few people at work and the response was decidedly against changing the name. The name itself was a spur of the moment creation. I originally had another name in mind: "Scattered Gleanings." Yeah. I know. It sounded good at the time, but a friend told me that it lacked something. So I thought of a name that was memorable and that would be identified with me. Since a number of my friends and relatives call me "T" (i.e. my nieces and nephews call me "Uncle T." mainly because when they were toddlers they couldn't quite pronounce my name). Then I thought of the popular brand of teas that goes by the moniker The Republic of Tea. Thus "The Republic of T."

Still, as one of my co-workers put it, at this point I'm "branded" and the blog name is part of how people remember it and find it. And I haven't really come up with any other names except for one: "The T-Spot."

So I thought I'd throw it open to my readers here. Should I keep the name or change it?

T Unbound

Well, it's done. The wireless rounter is up and running. But I gotta be honest, I was on the phone to tech support not once, but twice before the thing was configured and working properly.

Ow. Ow. Ow.

I'm getting a touch of "Blogger's Arm." I may have to resort to some other activity, like reading a book.

Redecorating

You may notice some changes over the next couple of days. I'm experimenting with some new templates, etc.

After all, what kind of gay man would I be if I didn't redecorate once in a while?

Blogging for Dollars

A coworker of mine sent me a link to this Corante > Strange Attractor >blog post on "corporate blogging", or blogging for a living.

Blogs are a great window onto someone’s life and thought processes and it’s inevitable that they’ll increasingly be used as a tool for both people looking for jobs and companies seeking new employees. Blogs are, after all, just logical extensions of the traditional website jobs page and the online portfolio/CV.

It hasn't quite been three months since I started my new job as a "Blogmaster." I still get a bit of a kick that I actually have the word "blog" in my title.
To be honest, it's not just a new job to me, but I think it's a new job in general, one that people — like me — are in the process of defining, and one that many people are in the process of understanding.