For whatever reason, ecto is no longer playing nice with Moveable Type on my host. I don’t know what the deal is, and for the time being, I have chosen to Reggie Roby ecto and go with MarsEdit – it’s a lot more raw-HTML, but it posts reliably (even if it isn’t keeping a log of all posts).
(It’s particularly galling that I have to run a freakin’ SCRIPT to put paragraph breaks in there.)
In 2010, my goal is to either get a cleaned-up Moveable Type 4 install under the hood (complete with the neat new templates) or shift to WordPress at long last. I’m not moving – having my own reliably secure service, for free, which is not being leveraged to sell me stuff, is EXTREMELY important to me. But at some point, I just have to knuckle down and learn how to make this stuff work.
Along similar lines, I am giving serious thought to pooling any Christmas money I get and splashing out on a Dell Mini10v. Now, this is not just gadget glee at work here. It will be a straight-up PC, portable, small enough that I can back the whole thing up on a thumb drive, and suitable for all manner of experiments, including but not limited to:
* Hackintosh
* The limits of Windows 7 Starter
* Sugar
* Ubuntu Netbook Remix
* Chrome
* Xubuntu
* An attempt to live purely in the Google ecosystem for a couple weeks
* An attempt to live outside the Apple ecosystem for a couple weeks (read: doubleTwist to the max)
* An attempt to live entirely without Google/Apple/Microsoft just to see if I can
* The final determination of whether a $300 Atom-processor machine really is “good enough”
I did a hell of a good job living up to my resolutions this year – I think most of them will get a check when I do the rundown the last week of the year. So now comes 2010 – and one of the things I want to do is get back to learning things. I want to plunge back into Windows and Unix and Perl and make myself technical outside the Mac realm again. And if it takes the total immersion approach to do it? So be it.