You’ll find the site at its new home at scottandrewbird.com. Pull up a chair; make yourself comfortable.

Why switch at all?

Most of my sites are running on Movable Type – and have been for several years. A large part of the decision to switch was simply based on the fact that I’m comfortable with MT. This certainly isn’t a WordPress vs Movable Type thing.

Transferring the content

No doubt there’s a simple way to transfer data from a free, hosted installation of WordPress to Movable Type 3.x . After spending a few hours looking for it (I like to automate things like that), I ended up just copying the data across manually. This didn’t include the comments; they’re still available on the old site if necessary.

A couple of thoughts for anyone who’s considering the WordPress -> Movable Type Move :

Currently, WordPress and Movable Type use very different formats for their exported site data (for backups). I haven’t yet taken a good look at the beta of the upcoming Movable Type 4.0 (which boasts far too many improvements to take in at a glance), but the WP 2.x vs MT 3.x situation is :

WordPress 2.x exports posts in a slightly customised XML format is calls WXR. The files exported here can be easily imported into other WordPress installations, but require a fair bit of tweaking before Movable Type 3.x understands them.

Movable Type 3.x by contrast still makes use of formatted text files. As with the WordPress files, there’s no problem importing these files into other MT 3.x installations; the challenges begin when the destination application changes.

One solution to the WordPress -> Movable Type problem is provided here; unfortunately that is aimed solely at self-installed versions of WordPress; not the freely hosted environments provided at wordpress.com. If anyone knows of a similar script to convert local files prior to import, I’d love to hear about it.

I first came across the concept of a 30 day trial – at least it first sank in – after reading Steve Pavlina‘s excellent article 30 days to success. Having subsequently used the idea with great success during my initial foray into the world of biphasic sleeping, I know just how powerful it can be.

For 30 days, Covey urges us to :

Make small commitments and keep them. Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

That sounds like a very worthwhile trial indeed – and mine began today. Feel free to let me know if I step out of line.

Love it.

As cable TV isn’t set up to be financially beneficial for someone like me (you really need to watch a lot of television before it’s worth the trouble), I download shows whenever possible. The MacBook doubles as a portable television.

My constant dilemma is this :

For shows that are not screened here at all (or several years later, such as Top Gear), if they aren’t available for sale or legal download, is it reasonable to turn to other sources?

By ‘other sources’ I mean purchased DVDs from friends overseas, recordings of the shows that have aired on their local networks, and even the many torrent sites aimed at this type of material. It’s a battle that wouldn’t even occur in many other fields – can you imagine walking into a shop-filled street and shouting ‘will anyone take my money’?

After importing a few thousand bookmarks, one of the first things I did – perhaps a little vainly – was to bookmark a few of my own sites, just to see who was also saving them. I discovered a few people with similar interests that way; so it seems that even vanity has a positive aspect.

Now to streamline that process a little.

The quickest way I found to track a number of things regarding my sites has been through XML feeds, and this is no exception. To set up a feed which will let you know each time your site is bookmarked :

• surf to del.icio.us/url

• enter the address of your site

• copy/paste the RSS link at the bottom of the page into your favourite feed reader

That’s it. Now you’ll be notified of new admirers whenever they appear.

At least they were.

The cleanup fell into two distinct phases:

• getting rid of the excess and putting them online (where they’re easy to share)

• syncing the online bookmarks with the local machines

For now – today at least – I decided to tackle the first part. That would at least leave me with nothing to manage locally.

The process was broken down into the following :

Remove duplicates

For Firefox users, the simplest way to do this is with the BookmarksDD add-on. This is available from mozdev.org and it’s use is fairly self-explanatory.

Unfortunately it only deletes one duplicate at a time, so it may take a while; I’d suggest moving everything into just a handful of folders for now (and setting it to automatic).

NB : Don’t forget to take a backup of your bookmarks before you start deleting things. Just in case.

Manually delete unwanted bookmarks

Once the add-on has cleaned things up a little, you’ll probably see a number of bookmarks that really shouldn’t be there at all (especially if you use the ‘bookmark all tabs’ feature occasionally). Go through and delete any you find.

Sort into folders

Now’s the time to put everything back into folders. No need to get too carried away here; it will, however, help del.icio.us tag things (the folder names you choose will become the starting tags for the import).

Export bookmarks

Open your bookmarks (Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks) and export them to a file somewhere (File -> Export). The simplest place is your desktop.

Login to del.icio.us and import bookmarks

Head over to del.icio.us and either open an account (free) or sign in to an existing one. Once you’re in, under Settings you’ll find an Import/Upload option. Follow the instructions and import the file you saved above.

Tidy them up and share them

By default the newly uploaded bookmarks aren’t public. Go through them and share them as desired. This is also a good time to perform any minor editing of their saved names.

Delete the local bookmarks

Once you’ve made sure that everything looks fine online – and ensuring you have a local backup, in case of disaster – delete your local bookmarks. Most of them, anyway (it’s always handy to have a few for regular things such as your webmail account).

Next (hopefully tomorrow) comes the interesting part; syncing the online bookmarks with each computer. Should be fun.

eBay

This all ended rather abruptly when I packed everything up and shipped it all – myself included – back to Australia (actually I travelled via aeroplane, but you get the idea). There was simply no room to sort through everything and dispose of it accordingly.

The other night my dad mentioned that he had a few items to sell as my parents are doing a little home renovation. I suggested that I could use my account as everything was already set up, and my interest was re-discovered.

This morning’s routine was quite simple : open each box (I still have a number of things in storage, ready for their new home), and take out anything I didn’t really want to keep. These items formed a large pile; the sorting phase is next (rubbish, saleable, charity). Then the fun really begins.

If you’re thinking of embarking upon a similar journey, here are a few things to keep in mind :

• Decide whether you want to keep something or not; sort the pile later. If you try sorting as you go you’ll end up putting a lot of things back in the cupboard / on the shelf, telling yourself ‘nobody would buy that’.

• Once you have the items you wish to sell, begin with the cheapest ones first. If something goes wrong, you’re less likely to lose sleep over a damaged book than a damaged car. This also gives you a chance to establish some credibility (via positive feedback – assuming you sell goods as advertised, pack them well and ship them on time) before you get around to selling the larger items.

• If you have thousands of books in the house but really can’t bring yourself to get rid of them (I can definitely relate to that), start by putting all of the duplicates in a pile. Once you see all of these together, everything else becomes a little easier.

• When you’re sorting your ‘unwanted items’ pile into rubbish/saleable/charity (I’m including recycling in the rubbish category here), consider the approximate cost of postage. For small, heavy, inexpensive items you may be better off simply giving them to a friend, donating them to charity or holding a garage sale.

• Don’t feel too bad if you’re tempted to buy something occasionally. After all, that’s what the site is all about. My personal rationalisation – if I buy one book for every 10 that I sell, I’m still a long way in front; and will have a smaller, better book collection to show for it.

Tomorrow the auctions begin. Looking forward to it.

If you find yourself in the same boat, you’ll be pleased to know that there’s a growing community of users out there who are bent on tweaking the design. Same interface, different CSS. Simple.

Personally I’ve only tried this on Firefox – my weapon of choice. However, I’m sure it won’t be long before other browsers follow suit; and I’d love to hear from anyone that’s got everything working with one of them.

The process for Firefox is simple. Copy the code below, paste it into your favourite text editor, and save it as userContent.css (as plain text). Place the file in Firefox’s ‘chrome’ directory. Restart Firefox.

Log in to Gmail, and things should look quite different. Modify the CSS to suit your own taste, logout and restart Firefox. Repeat as necessary.

A note on the userContent.css – this was written by chezar, commenting on this article over at Persistent Info. Despite the article’s age, everything works just fine.

The code itself

Here is the CSS code. Just copy/paste it into a text editor and save it as userContent.css. Enjoy.

@-moz-document url-prefix(mail.google.com/mail/), domain(mail.google.com)
{
body{
background-color: #ebe2cd !important;
}

/* header image */
div#ds_inbox img {
display: none !important;
}

div#ds_inbox {
display: block !important;
background-image: url(http://skingmail.com/images/gmaillogo.gif) !important;
width: 143px !important;
height: 59px !important;
background-repeat: no-repeat !important;
}

/* regular links */
span.lk,
a.lc,
a.lk
{
text-decoration: none !important;
color: #9f3638 !important;
}

/* read/unread row colors */
table.tlc tr.ur {
background-color: #d3cbb8 !important;
}

table.tlc tr.rr {
background-color: #ebe2cd !important;
}

table.tlc tr.ur td,
table.tlc tr.rr td{
border: 0 !important;
}

/* message hovering snippet expansion */
table.tlc tr.ur:hover,
table.tlc tr.rr:hover{
background-color: #ffc !important;
}

table.tlc tr.ur:hover td,
table.tlc tr.rr:hover td{
border-width: 1px 0 1px 0 !important;
border-color: black !important;
border-style: solid !important;
vertical-align: top !important;
}

table.tlc tr.ur:hover .sn,
table.tlc tr.rr:hover .sn{
display: block !important;
white-space: normal !important;
}

/* and email address display */
table.tlc tr.ur:hover td span,
table.tlc tr.rr:hover td span {
display: block;
}

/* labels should still be inline */
table.tlc tr.ur:hover td span.ct,
table.tlc tr.rr:hover td span.ct{
display: inline;
}

table.tlc tr.ur:hover td span[id]:after,
table.tlc tr.rr:hover td span[id]:after{
content: attr(id);
display: block;
margin-left: -38px; /* hack to hide “user_” id prefix */
color: #b6af9e;
}

/* sidebar links */
div#nav table.cv,
div#nav table.cv td {
background: #ebe2cd !important;
}

table.cv td.tl,
table.cv td.bl {
height: 0 !important;
}

/* both current and other */
table.cv td span.lk,
div.nl span.lk{
display: block !important;
background: #d3cbb8 !important;
border: solid 1px #b5ae9f !important;
-moz-border-radius: 6px !important;
padding: 2px !important;
margin-right: 5px !important;
}

/* just the current one */
table.cv td span.lk {
background: #d3cbb8 !important;
border: solid 1px #b5ae9f !important;
}

/* unselected ones */
div.nl span.lk {
background: #ebe2cd !important;
border: solid 1px #ebe2cd !important;
}

div.nl span.lk:hover {
background: #d3cbb8 !important;
border-color: #b5ae9f !important;
}

/* hide “New!” super-script */
div#nav sup {
display: none !important;
}

/* side border */
div#co div {
border: 0 !important;
}

/* top/bottom bar */
div#tc_top table,
div#tc_top table td.tl,
div#tc_top table td.tr,
div#tc_top table.th,

div#tc_bot table,
div#tc_bot table td.bl,
div#tc_bot table td.br,
div#tc_bot table.th{
background: none !important;
}

div#co div#tc_top,
div#co div#tc_bot {
border: solid 1px black !important;
-moz-border-radius: 8px !important;
padding: 2px !important;
margin: 5px 0 5px 0 !important;
background: #d3cbb8 !important;
}

/* selection links in bar */
div#co div#tc_top span.l,
div#co div#tc_bot span.l{
color: #9f3638 !important;
}

/* mailbox contents */
div#co div#tbd {
background: #ebe2cd !important;
border: solid 1px black !important;
-moz-border-radius: 8px !important;
padding: 4px 0 4px 0 !important;
}

/* labels */
div#nb_0 {
background: none;
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
border: 0;
}

div#nb_0 div {
background: none;
padding: 0px;
margin: 0;
border: 0;
}

div#nb_0 div div {
border: solid 1px #56765e;
-moz-border-radius: 6px !important;
padding: 0 1px 0 0 !important;
}

div#nb_0 div div div {
border: 0 !important;
padding: 0 !important;
background: none !important;
-moz-border-radius: 0 !important;
}

div#nb_0 div.s,
div#nb_0 div.h{
padding: 1px 3px 0 3px !important;
background: none !important;
border-bottom: solid 1px #56765e !important;
-moz-opacity: 0.5;
}

div#nb_0 table,
div#nb_0 table td.tl,
div#nb_0 table td.tr,
div#nb_0 table td.bl,
div#nb_0 table td.br {
background: none !important;
}

div#nb_0 table.nb {
background: #d0e7c5 !important;
-moz-border-radius-bottomright: 6 !important;
-moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 6 !important;
}

div#nb_0 table.nb div.lk {
text-decoration: none !important;
margin: 3px 0 0 3px !important;
}

/* edit labels links */
div#nb_0 table.nb div#prf_l {
margin-right: 50px !important;
-moz-opacity: 0.7 !important;
}

/* hide invite link */
#il {
display: none !important;
}

/* hide footer */
div#ft {
display: none !important;
}
}

A new book, however, might just change that.

My primary reason for using text editors rather than word processors is their simplicity; it’s very much a black and white world with little or no formatting. It encourages writing rather than tweaking.

This reason can also be a limitation. For a 1,000 word article I really don’t mind typing things in full, repeating headings and inserting the occasional hyperlink manually. In fact, in a strange, slightly controlling way I quite enjoy it. It’s all part of the process; part of the fun.

However, a 100,000 word non-fiction volume is quite a different proposition. There are more people involved (whether they’re co-writing or simply reviewing your work) and this brings a much greater need for organisation. Page numbers, footnotes, indexes and so on.

I spent some time yesterday looking at the various word processing options for OS X. The one that caught my eye was Mellel (Hebrew for ‘text’), an application developed by Israeli company RedleX. It has some glowing reviews, and after a short play around with it I can see why.

Quite simply, it does precisely what I need (and much, much more).

As with any new piece of software I use, I’ll give it a solid run for a week or so. I’m certainly not expecting any problems though; so far it looks great. As long as it holds up OK, the Script Frenzy should be a good way to really put it through its paces. Now, all I need is an idea.