June 2006 Archives

MagritteBook Pro. The Son of Mac?

The redesigned site and its new logo is part of a 10-year anniversary celebration, which is definitely saying something. (Inkblots passed the 10-year mark sometime last year, and if it weren't currently on one of its infamous long hiatuses we'd probably have launched some serious fireworks ourselves.) Slate editors Jacob Weisberg and Julia Turner themselves describe the relaunch thus:

Why the makeover? Well, it was about time. It's been more than three years since we last updated the look of our "cover" (and longer than that since we've tinkered with the basic appearance of our article pages). A lot has changed since then. For one thing, we're no longer owned by Microsoft, which for some reason seems to make it easier for us to build a site that works as well in Firefox and Safari as it does in Internet Explorer. And now that larger computer screens and broadband have become commonplace, we felt Slate could do more to take advantage of both. The new home page, for example, is wider than the old one and has graphics so numerous that a dial-up modem would have choked on them...

There's more to the article – a lot more – but I wanted to touch on these as excellent points that I've incorporated into my own design work on various projects. The relaunched Comparative Media Studies site that I've been working on, for example, uses much of the same thinking, especially about file sizes and broadband access. The editors go on to describe other functions that I've been eyeballing myself for some of my projects, including tighter integration with Technorati and other logging tools. What I want to do next is more integration of podcasting and RSS (which Slate is already doing) and even video (which, I believe, Slate isn't). It's fascinating to watch the way that content delivery evolves online – right now I'm building a new project that incorporates the new challenge of dealing with cell phones. Trying to figure out how to integrate things like text messages and downloadable ringtones and wallpapers is really difficult, especially when trying to figure out how to do it with zero budget. Some things, of course, never change. Nevertheless, the integration of even more rich media is where the web is definitely going.

Sorry, mom and dad. Dial-up isn't going to cut it for much longer.

A quick shout-out to congratulate my (relatively) newly-engaged friend and business associate Erik Martin and his fancee Jamie Blythe. Way to go, man – looks like you got yourself a keeper!

The ending is, of course, still pretty rough, but what's amazing is that the whole thing feels pretty much like it was cut from whole cloth. That's a serious achievement when you consider that I started this thing seven years ago, while I was still at Kenyon. So, yes. Seven years and 220 pages later, I have a novel. A short novel, sure, clocking in at around 56,500 words, but a novel nevertheless. I'm sure I could flesh it out to 250-300 pages if I needed to, but right now I'm adhering to the 'write tight' idea.

This feels so weird. When I was a kid I expected that completing a novel would be accompanied by fireworks and a parade, or something along those lines. Instead, when I finished my novel I took myself out for a maple walnut ice cream cone at J.P. Licks in Davis Square and a small mocha at Someday Cafe, stuck my nose in Macintyre and Moore's (a great used bookstore here) without buying anything, and then walked home in the spitting rain.

Now I guess I'll set about with the revisions, send out some copies to friends for some constructive criticism, and then maybe out to some real writers I know for the mean stuff. The book is odd – it's not designed to be literary at all, more like one step above Clive Cussler, somewhere around the Dan Brown school of writing (*wince*). It alternates between being kind of funny and something of a thriller, with dashes of the supernatural and bits of just growing up in a small town. It's about love and loss and family, and also about explosions and sex and the dead. (And the dead, not with the dead. Pervs.) It'd be a bizarre cross between a Hollywood blockbuster and an art house film, if a movie were to be made out of it. It's got too many characters and a not clearly-enough defined villain and weird poetic switches in POV and all of that, but if nothing else it's really, wholly and completely me. I think I might have pulled off what every writer sets out to do – write the book that they so desperately want to buy when they walk into a Barnes and Noble. I reread it this weekend and really enjoyed it, but then it's mine. And it's done. Done done done.

Well. The first draft, anyway.

Still. Woo!

This morning I woke up in a fantastic mood, wrapped in a warm sense that all was right with the world and that today would be a great day. If I could wake up that way every day, I think life would be a sweet and magical thing – however, I can't afford to sleep for 10 hours every night. Ah, well. C'est la vie. Maybe if I got that much sleep on a regular basis I could make up for lost time in productivity.

Regardless, my day really was fantastic. There's been some kind of weird snafu with our Internet at home, which I suspect is directly connected to our AirPort network being held together with spit and baling wire, so I haven't been able to check my email or surf the web – which I'm sure contributed greatly to my peace of mind. After getting cleaned up I packed my laptop and some books into my leather laptop bag and headed into town.

The weather was warm but overcast with a cool breeze and clouds so low that they concealed the tops of the skyscrapers downtown, which was really quite amazing. I made my way to the Prudential Center to pick up a copy of the new live Counting Crows album at Barnes and Noble. The band is taking an interesting stab at getting people to continue buying physical CDs – there are actually four different versions of the new disc, three of which offer a different exclusive track based on where you buy it, and the one from Barnes and Noble includes a copy of "Blues Run the Game," which isn't on any of their albums. Therefore, off to B&N I went. After that, I poked around downtown for a little bit, hiding from the occasional rain burst in Trader Joe's and Best Cellars, where chocolate.com was sponsoring a chocolate-and-wine tasting. Their little ruse worked – I left with a bottle of Gilberts Tawny Porto, which is a delicious port with "an orange colour and a ripe fruit flavor, all wrapped up in an elegant vanilla touch and chocolate hints, giving this wine a perfect finish." Whatever. I'm still getting started with this whole wine thing, so all I know is it tasted great. Good enough for me. (I'm a little more verbose in my corkd review, but that's pretty much the long and the short of it. The wine done tasted good.)

Oh, but I forgot the best part. After I left the house, I took the back way to the T stop and saw that the new lofts out back of our place were having an open house, and oh, mama. Swing by davissquarelofts.com and let the SlideShowPro module load – I suppose it's a sign that the developer chose one of my favorite singers, Beth Orton, for the soundtrack to the show (and inspiring the title of this post), but the apartments I saw were amazing. One of them had both exposed beams and exposed brick inside, with window treatments and trim that made me downright homesick. I'd never put two and two together before, but this drove the point home – a big chunk of why I love the industrial loft look stems from the style of the living room in my parents' house. Mom and Dad have a big brick wall wrapping the fireplace and exposed beams everywhere you look in our living room, and stepping into this apartment was like coming home. My heart sank when I heard the asking price, but wow. It gives me hope that there's places like this out there. Further, the guy showing the place (who also works there as an architect/designer) was a Denison grad whose father grew up in Cleveland, so we had a bit of a natter about Ohio and small liberal arts colleges and Boston and MIT and so on and so on. Yes, I am definitely my parents' son, striking up conversations with interesting strangers wherever I go. Call it the Long-winded curse.

Let's see, other news. One, my department head Henry Jenkins now has a blog, which I'm doing some design work for, and within three days he made Boing Boing. No surprise there, Cory Doctorow is a friend of the department, but I wish we'd made the link list after I'd gotten the new design in place. :-)

Two, my old friend Aurelia Flaming has joined the Flickring masses, posting a great whopping mass of photos from her recent safari trip to Africa. Very cool stuff there, including, um, a dik dik. (I can feel the comment spammers clustering around this post already.)

Oh, and to complete this little trifecta of news, the biggest piece of news I've currently got to share. Last week I received confirmation that a proposal some associates of mine had fielded a while back was accepted, and so next month I'm going to be speaking on a panel at the Sandbox Symposium at SIGGRAPH 2006 here in Boston. I am, of course, totally jazzed about this. I'm also somewhat nervous. This will be my first time trotting my thoughts on transmedia storytelling out in public (well, up on a stage anyway) and so I need to start whipping this stuff into something resembling coherence. Wow. I was stoked enough about going to SIGGRAPH without actually speaking there. Here's hoping I don't get any Statlers and Waldorfs in the audience.

I have officially joined the lecture circuit. Pass the wine.

I am well aware that this makes me an uber-dork, but sometimes something comes along that makes my 14-year-old self rise up and go "COOL!" The new Indiana Jones Dark Brown Baseball Hat with Brass Logo Patch over at the LucasFilm shop is one of those things.

Hey, I said I was a dork.

Update: And, okay, well, yes. The Boba Fett animated maquette is pretty badass too:

I'm not sure which one of these is cooler, the Fett maquette or the Hellboy animated maquette I mentioned back in April. I am, however, suddenly struck by the intense desire to see what an anime-style Sandman maquette would look like. Yowza.

I came across this while dong my morning webcomics tour – a sharp interview with Scott "Understanding Comics" McCloud. I can't wait to read his new book, Making Comics, which is due to hit in September. I'm still trying to figure out a way to wrangle a visit from McCloud to MIT this fall, but, as always, money is tight. Hmm. I guess we could sell tickets?

Summer's supposed to be a vacation? Hah. This evening I found myself running the numbers: a regular work week is 40 hours; if you work 12-hour days instead that goes up to 60 hours; if you work all seven days for 12 hours you get 84 hours; if you work 12 hours a day for an entire month you get 360 hours, 372 hours, or 336 hours (if it's February).

And that isn't even enough. Fark.

After swinging by the somewhat disappointing Javapalooza IV downtown this evening, Nick and I headed back to his house, where we met up with his folks and had a small wine tasting. You can follow our lttle misadventure over at my Cork'd Wine Journal.

Mmmm. Wine.

All of this is food for ghosts – but then,
the care and feeding of phantoms isn't hard.
Everything loved that passes plants a seed,
so that future echoes serve to nurture,
every time the bus passes that restaurant,
every elevator that plays that particular song.

In truth, ghosts are roaches,
nigh impossible to exterminate or eradicate,
stubborn little spooks, persistant poletergeists,
that never come out in the wash or the sun.

I'm writing this from the Kenyon bookstore, where they've installed a cripped free wi-fi service – web browsing, yes, but POP/DHCP email access, no. Grump.

Every time I return to Ohio it's like a great weight is lifted from my shoulders. Yes, I have hundreds of emails piling up each day, all of which come cascading into my inbox in a digital avalanche, but it's worth it. This is recentering – lying in my old, undersized bed in my parents' house and listening to the peace and quiet of the countryside, sitting in the Kenyon bookstore and thumbing through literary magazines, returning to old haunts and old habits like a favorite old jacket. I feel like I venture out into The Outside World, learn and fight and befriend and struggle, then return to the home fort to share my findings and winnings older, stronger, broader, and hopefully better. This is still home in a way that Boston will never be. I love London and Seattle and Paris and San Francisco and all the other crazy places I've been, and they're all places I'd love to return to someday for a handful of months at a time, but if home is where the heart is, my heart is definitely here.

I wonder about the value of a PhD from a program in the first year of the PhD's existence. I wonder about the value of a PhD from the Media Lab. I wonder about what programming languages and artistic styles and business techniques I need to learn in order to come back and be a professor here. I don't know, nor do I know exactly how to find out at this point. Still, being back here is progress in and of itself, and getting a clearer idea of what I'm aiming for in the long run is absolutely invaluable.

Of couse, I knew this before – now it's just reaffirming previous theories. Anyway. Still valuable.

Woo-hoo! I just got word that my old friend and housemate Nick "Professor Bosley" Ferraro is headed to Cornell! Attaboy, Nick – welcome back to the Northeast! :-)

Since it's raining – again – here in Boston, I've elected to stay in this morning/afternoon and continue to hammer on the TOTQ integration here at geoffreylong.com. This morning I imported all my old entries from Inkblots, cleaned up the comments (removing something like 7000+ spam comments and putting some new antispam measures into effect) and tweaked the individual archives a little. Cool new feature: if you're in an individual archive entry (click the 'permalink' text below to get to the individual archive entry for this post), hold down control and hit A or D. Boom! Instant forward-and-backness. Accesskey tip courtesy of Rstevens at Diesel Sweeties.

Let's see, what else? I've also updated my Technorati Profile, so as to move some of these blog claims around. I'll probably do some more work with this as the new Movable Type 3.3 beta continues to evolve; I've whacked TrackBacks (which didn't seem to be offering me much more than 7000+ spam links) and am now looking for better ways to engage in conversations.

The hammering continues.

Update: I've also just routed my RSS feed through Feedburner. Please point your RSS readers here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TipOfTheQuill. Thanks!

Update 2: The Revenge: Visitors that came poking around late on Saturday night/Sunday morning may have noticed that I'm now one good step closer to having scheduled posts and podcasts up and running, thanks to some quality time learning how pico and cron jobs work. Thanks to my old brother Nick for the technical support!

All told, An Inconvenient Truth is both informative and inspiring, but I don't think it goes far enough on the opportunities at hand. Gore falls back on the usual treehugger tactic of stock footage of a lush, tranquil wilderness and bemoans how awful it will be if our grandkids never enjoy it. True, absolutely true, but it doesn't really kick the motivation into high gear. We've grown jaded enough so that tactic doesn't really work. What he (and the other environmentalists) need to do is tie profit to preservation. He touches on this briefly when demonstrating how Ford and GM are still in the crapper while foreign auto companies like Honda and Toyota are making real financial gains through the development of more fuel-efficient vehicles, but he doesn't go for the grand slam, which would be demonstrating how much ridiculous wealth will be generated by whoever comes up with the best replacement for the oil barons. Energy will always be profitable in some way, shape or form – and since oil is on its way out, there's a whole generation of new energy barons waiting to be born. That's where I thought Gore was going with the film, but he stopped short of really exploring the opportunities.

Oh, well. Maybe in the sequel.

A quick tip of the design hat to Bryan Bell, whose blog now features some stunningly beautiful mountains-and-clouds artwork as its header. Good on ya, BB.

Warren Ellis reads our C3 blog. Whoa.

Yesterday afternoon I spent a couple really terrific hours geeking out over the work of Alex McDowell, the production designer for Minority Report, The Corpse Bride, The Terminal, Fight Club, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and a number of others. McDowell is the new artist-in-residence for the Media Lab, working with Tod Machover on this crazy new robot opera project, and yesterday he gave his "this is who I am" presentation with a Keynote presentation of concept art and commentary from his films.

One of the major highlights was hearing McDowell describe how his sets are often characters in their own right – a cliche that gets bandied about quite often by pretentious set designers, but then he demonstrated how in his case this makes total sense. For instance, he showed us a top-down view of the Precrime Unit in Minority Report, which is laid out like the ripples emanating out from a pebble thrown into a pond, which is pretty much the effect the precogs were having on their society. He also told us about how the crumbling old house in Fight Club is barely in the script at all, but the design team created this amazing backstory for this industrial baron who had bought this Victorian mansion but abandoned it when the factories and other industrial fallout engulfed the green space around his home. In the 70s it had been converted into a duplex, but was then abandoned again for the squatters to move into – which parallels the life of Edward Norton's character, living an increasingly IKEA-ized lifestyle until it all becomes too much for him, which opens up his brain for Brad Pitt's character to move into. Wicked cool in and of itself, but then he also told us a story about how they used chemicals to artificially age the building and make the paint peel, but big chunks of the paint kept falling off the walls because the chemicals worked too well.

I think my favorite story, though, was how his teams are using Maya to do things that I would have never expected. Previz, sure. Special effects, sure. But these guys used Maya to create a massive matte painting for the backdrop to the terminal in, well, The Terminal. First they modeled this virtual terminal at JFK and then plunked it into a model of the real JFK, then forced the perspective on it so it would be semicircular, then sent it to a matte painting shop to create this ginormous piece of art to stick outside the set's windows. McDowell chuckled as he noted that they did this instead of bluescreening so that Spielberg wouldn't shy away from having the windows in the shots – since anything done with bluescreen was going to be somewhere around $75,000 to composite. Wow.

Have I mentioned lately that I love it here?

So the last five days now have been spent largely in a sort of reorientation. This is good, since it's largely what I needed to use this summer to do. In my last post I mocked Apple's made-up term 'phofilmusigner', but I think the reason it rankled me is because it hit a little too close to home. Part of my trouble right now is that I am simultaneously a phofilmusigner and not enough of one.

Right now my primary interests are as follows:

• storytelling
• writing
• art
• filmmaking
• gamemaking
• photography
• web design
• music
• poetry
• comics
• animation
• design in general
• teaching
• technology

This list can be further (weirdly) broken down into the following:

• storytelling
  • writing
  • art
  • filmmaking
  • comics
  • gamemaking
• art
• writing
• filmmaking
• gamemaking
• comics
• poetry
• photography
• web design
• music
• design in general
• technology
  • digital storytelling
  • digital art
  • digital poetry
  • web design
• teaching
• digital storytelling
• digital art
• digital poetry
• web design
• storytelling
• writing
• poetry
• comics
• film

My great long-term plan is to move back to Ohio, land a teaching gig at someplace like Kenyon or Wooster, and do pretty much what I'm doing now only with a better paycheck. I want to own land, support a family, and make stuff – furthermore, to be encouraged by the school to make stuff. I'd still do consulting work, but with a broader scope. I could consult about different media types, I could consult on implementations of new media in business environments, I could consult about how best to use new media types in entertainment... So much I could be doing. The trouble is, teaching requires a PhD, and CMS doesn't offer that yet. The Media Lab certainly does, and I've had my eye on the Media Lab as a possible post-CMS direction for years, but I'm a little freaked out by the concept of being in school for another five years after I wrap my current master's. True, I'm doing very well here at MIT and I don't want to leave, but there's something about being in school now until I'm 34 that blows my mind. I've always sworn that I wouldn't have kids until I could support them, and the idea of trying to support a family on a grad student's budget is terrifying. Still. The idea of staying around to play at MIT for another fistful of years is wonderful, and the idea of getting my PhD here makes me grin from ear to ear. So what do I do?

If CMS doesn't have a PhD in place by this time next year, the Media Lab makes the most sense to me. I like their hands-on approach (I definitely like the making of stuff more than just the criticism of stuff), but to get in I need to really crank up my programming skills. I have some experience programming for the web, sure, but there's a world of difference between the C++, Python, Java, etc. set of programming skills and the ActionScript, JavaScript, PHP/MySQL set of programming skills. This is not to say that I can't do it – I know that I can, and I've been meaning to for years. but the idea of trying to get myself caught up to speed in this area in the next few months is daunting, to say the least – and that's certainly when I'd have to do it – and do it well – if I want to jump over to the Media Lab in – gulp – one year. Worse, I need to have my application together by this fall. If I want to be doing work in mobile media and ucomp, which are really starting to excite me, I think I need to start learning Java – specifically, J2ME. What's one more project for the summer, right?

Jeez...

I received an email newsletter from Apple yesterday with the headline "Phofilmusigner" – apparently a linguistic mash-up of photographer, filmmaker, musician and designer. They're promoting their newly-redesigned Apple Pro site, which is indeed sharp, but phofilmusigner? It sounds like some Swedish pop band...

Just a quick note here to point out that I just added an MP3 of me reading one of my recent poems, Bilbao, in anticipation of future possible podcasts. That is all.

My old brother David from my Advisory Board days is back in school too, down at the Digital Animation and Visual Effects School in Florida, and boy howdy is he doing some amazing stuff down there. If you swing by his Photojournal you can see some of his new work – make sure to check out the zombie head, the bouncing balls, Pinkeye and the demo reel. Good on ya!

Have been struck with an immense pang of future homesickness, a bizarre disease where one longs for someplace he's never been. Only in my case, it's a house in Ohio with a teaching gig at Kenyon. Yeah. That'd work.

Interesting piece in today's New York Times (free subscription required, yadda yadda yadda): Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules. Nothing too terribly astonishing here, except for perhaps the exclusion of the otherwise ubiquitous Cory Doctorow – but there are some funny bits:

Mr. Chandra, a former computer programmer who already reads e-books downloaded to his pocket personal computer, said he saw no point in resisting technology. "I think circling the wagons and defending the fortress metaphors are a little misplaced," he said. "The barbarians at the gate are usually willing to negotiate a little, and the guys in the fort usually end up yelling that 'we are the only good things in the world and you guys don't understand it,' at which point the barbarians shrug, knock down your walls with their amazingly powerful weapons, and put a parking lot over your sacred grounds. "If they are in a really good mood," he added, "they put up a pyramid of skulls."

I have well passed the stage in my academic career (in which I am inexplicably scoring better grades at MIT than Kenyon) where I read something like this and instantly think, White Paperrrr...

Holy catfish! A great big congratulations to my friends Andrew Huff and Cinnamon Cooper, who just tied the knot in New Orleans!
Conga rats to the Huffencoopers!

One of my great long-running personal projects is to watch all 100 films on the AFI Top 100 list, a scheme greatly aided by my Netflix account. Today, while continuing the listmaking that I'd started in earnest yesterday, I watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a 1948 John Huston film starring Humphrey Bogart. Bogart plays Fred C. Dobbs, an American down on his luck in Mexico who heads for the hills with his friend Bob Curton (Tim Holt) and the archetypal "crazy old prospector" Howard (Walter Huston) to seek their fortunes in gold. The film is often mentioned in the same breath with the Indiana Jones films, which makes sense – it's easy to see where Harrison Ford could have been studying Bogart for how to play the unshaven, rugged treasure seeker type. It doesn't have quite the same sense of sweeping cinematography, nor does it have quite the same sense of humor, but swap out bandits for Nazis and pans of gold for the Ark of the Covenant and yeah, sure – you can definitely sense the lineage there.

The Trasure of the Sierra Madre is one of those films that clues a modern viewer into where some of our contemporary cliches and references may have originated – the aforementioned "crazy prospector" is in full effect, complete with shuffling dance steps when he finds the treasure. Also present are the rotund, gap-toothed bandit whose wide sombrero brim takes a bullet (a classic Yosemite Sam gag), the shot where the main character is washing his face in the river when a villain's reflection appears beside his own, the character unhinged by greed who wavers between honor and treachery, and even the arrival of the calvary – in this case, the federales – to save the day. Oh, and this is pretty clearly where the line "Badges? We don't need no steenking badges!" came from, although to clear up any misconceptions, the line is actually, "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't need to show you any steenking badges!"

Heh. That's why I like this project – exploring the genealogy of cinematic cliches.

Today was a very long, very odd, very wet type of day. I woke up this morning raring to go and Get Things Done, an ambition which got dampened (quite literally) by the onslaught of yet another rainstorm dumping down on Boston at around 9:30 AM. I grumbled for a bit and went back to checking my email, confident that it would abate by the time I'd have to leave to make it to the bank by noon. Hah. Around 11:15 I was shrugging on a fleece and grabbing my umbrella, because it was still amazingly cold and amazingly wet for a summer day. Seriously, people – what the heck. Any Bostonians out there want to let me in on the joke? Is summer in Massachusetts always this... Damp?

After that, though, I spent a couple really, really good hours in Starbucks. My housemates had already laid claim to the laundry machines, so I pocketed the quarters I'd fetched from the bank and settled down with some chai and my laptop to try and plot out a course for the summer. I'd actually spent most of Thursday and Friday feeling increasingly stressed out about the stuff I need to do this summer, which was a marked downturn from my high spirits from only a few days before. This shift in mood was directly attributable to my trying to knock a couple of things off the to-do list while seriously underestimating the amount of time and effort each of those things would require. In the past, this sort of thing has led to a deeper and deeper downward spiral, but this time I elected to do something more pragmatic about it.

I use a Mac checklist app called Process to keep track of my ridiculous to-do list. The program comes with built-in fields for priority and due date, and I'd already customized it with another field for "cost/value", but today I added a new field called "estimated time". Wow. By forcing myself to break down each to-do item into actionable sub-items, and then assigning each one of those a halfway realistic time estimate, it rapidly became apparent that some things are likely to take five times as long as I'd originally guessed. This is the best kind of knowledge – the kind with which you can actually do something. I wound up having to leave off the project late in the afternoon due to a previous engagement (haircut) but my goal for tomorrow is to finish fleshing out the list and assign costs and estimated times to everything on it. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of stuff will get shunted onto secondary lists, because how can you assgn an estimated time to something like "Read the Modern Library 100 Best Novels" or "Watch the AFI Top 100 Films"? (Well, okay – the answer to the latter is '200 hours', smart guy. Yeesh.)

So, yes. Much progress, and getting this kind of a handle on things makes me feel much better about matters. Hopefully after tomorrow I'll have a good battle plan all sketched out for the summer.

Oh, and anyone in the Boston area who needs a good haircut – Elizabeth at Pyara in Harvard Square definitely knows her way around a pair of clippers.

I had the plan all worked out in my head. I'd done the preliminary research, I'd laid the groundwork, now all there was left to do was the doing.

Whoo boy.

What I was trying to do (still am, actually – if anyone can help make this work I'd be grateful): use RSS aggregator functions to collect my entries on other weblogs and systems (43Places, 43Things, Corkd, etc.) and get them all to automatically appear as posts here. There are multiple tools out there that claim to be able to do this (Feeds.app and Reblog, to name two), but I've been banging my head against this problem for the last couple of hours, due to the constraints of Dreamhost.

I never thought I'd type that phrase, so for the sake of incredulity I'll do it again: the constraints of Dreamhost.

Feeds.app requires additional Perl modules to function, so I need to have shell access to the server to add the missing components. No big deal, but I've now been waiting almost fifteen hours for the "instant" permissions change (from FTP-only to FTP-and-shell) to take effect. Next!

As for Reblog, I got the whole thing almost working until it came time to install the Movable Type plugin, and then I slammed into the proverbial brick wall. The error it threw was a generic "internal server error", and my time spent on the Eyebeam support site only revealed that the Reblog guy, Michael Frumin, is something of a jerk. In one instance he went back and forth with a user (who was even offering to pay Frumin to make the plugin work) over and over before finally telling the poor user to change hosts, and on another thread Frumin rudely told a politely confused user to "forget about the categories" that the user needed, and then brusquely declared that the user "wasn't using [a product] correctly." Wow. Not only am I now not surprised that Reblog isn't working, I have no desire to waste any more time making it work. If the thing ever breaks I know exactly the level of support I'd have to look forward to.

So now I'm considering options. I still like the idea of being able to make a post in one place and have it syndicate itself here, but this is rapidly demonstrating that it may be more of a headache than it's worth. Anybody out there have any great ideas?

Slowly, bit by bit, the new Tip of the Quill is coming online. I spent a big chunk of the evening tonight formatting the individual entry pages for the new version, so they're mostly ready to roll. There's a bunch of functionality that I'd specially-built into the old TOTQ that I think I'm going to leave out of this version for now – but I'm also hard at work trying to set up things like cron jobs and custom perl scripts to do some nifty stuff here that I couldn't do before. Wish me luck – I'm hoping to get this finished by the end of the weekend...

Also. It is worth noting that little bits and pieces of the site are being updated as well, to incorporate a little bit of the new look ("new look" meaning "new headers and a little flourishy dingbat here and there, cribbed from Inkblots, of course") and those are coming online in odd bursts. There will be pages that have been updated and pages that haven't popping up in random intervals across the board, most likely straight through Monday.

Also also. The other thing that's appearing here now are a number of strange little best practices that I've been picking up across the Net. Hence the new modified Biography page with the "short" bio, a lesson learned from Kevin, whose new site is a really pretty piece of work. More of these will appear as the new site unfurls.