Angry in the Great White North

Well, this is my third inaugural post, because this is the third incarnation of Angry in the Great White North. It first existed as a Live Journal, then as a blog using Blogger hosted on Blogspot. It is the Blogspot version that most of you are familiar with.

You'll see some changes in the new blog. Of course, the URL "http://stevejanke.com" is different. Don't forget to update your bookmarks and blogrolls. The layout of the blog itself is not unlike the original blog, though with a number of refinements based on what I liked and disliked about "Angry v2.0", and also taking advantage of the freedom that Movable Type provides in managing the look of the blog.

Blogger provides a rudimentary commenting system and no trackback mechanism. Like most Blogspot denizens, I used Haloscan to provide those functions. It worked, but then I was limited to what features Haloscan provided, as well as having to maintain comments and trackbacks via a separate program from the blog. Now of course, they are integrated into the blog software itself, which simplifies things for me immensely.

This blog is PHP-based, which allows me to enhance the blog with server-side extensions. For those who don't know the difference, Blogger can be enhanced with Java scripts, because Java scripts are executed on the client. In other words, to Blogger, a Java script is just more text. When it reaches your computer, you have to have Java enabled, and then your CPU executes the program I transmitted to you. Not only am I stealing your CPU cycles, I could be doing something malicious. PHP is server-based, which means the dynamic execution takes place on the MuNu computer, and only the results sent to you. Expect more changes, some subtle, some major, some invisible, as I learn more about PHP plug-ins and decide on more enhancements.

Already one enhancement is GZ-compression. In this case, a PHP program executes that compresses the text of the blog page before sending it over. You get a much smaller file to load, and your browser automatically handles the decompression. This means much better load times even over poor connections.

In the hope of making your visit to my blog more enjoyable, I've reduced the number of ads as I try to make a go with BlogAds exclusively. So far no paying customers, but it's early. QuinnLaw is an advertisement for my lawyer, and I'm running it at no charge. She's an excellent attorney and has done great work for me, above and beyond.

What about the old posts? They'll be coming over soon. A technical limitation at MuNu prevents me from using the normal technique for moving Blogger posts over, but as soon as it is resolved, I'll be pulling them over. So for now, feel free to visit the old blog for more recent posts. All new posts are going here exclusively.

What about old comments? I can't promise that they will make it, but I have been reading some posts that describe methods for pulling them over, and I will try to make it work. But I'm less confident about those.

As always, I welcome critical comments and the ones that I like I will act upon. I hope you all find this new blog as much fun to read and post to as you did the old one, because it was because of you that the old one enjoyed as much success as it did. And for that I'll always be grateful -- thanks.

Steve (aka Angry in T.O.)