Be humble

I have been having great fun using Dean Allen’s new beta product Textpattern.  It promises to be a robust and useful product as it matures.  Clearly a writers tool – which I believe is exactly what Dean intends.

Staring at the ceiling last night I realized that, to me, the key feature of Textpattern is the inclusion of Textile.  The other features, some yet to come and some already included, will struggle to meet the already robust pMachine product features.

I wonder if concentrating on developing Textile to the next level is likely to prove more useful to the writing community – rather than developing a stand alone web writing too?

Mad Dog comments on placebo!  I think he is on to something.

This is for CMax:

These friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds. Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival florist across town thought the competition was unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. He went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored him. So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town to “persuade” them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he’d be back if they didn’t close up shop. Terrified, they did so, thereby proving that Hugh, and only Hugh, can prevent florist friars.

Two boll weevils grew up in the deep South. One went to Hollywood and became a famous actor. The other stayed behind in the cotton fields and never amounted to much. The second one, naturally, became known as the lesser of two weevils.

Don’t use your shop vac to vacume highly flammable material.

Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet.  He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him.... what? (Oh man, this is so bad, it’s good) A super callused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

Lou first led me to pMachine, the software that this blog is running on.  It is a sweet and mature package with superb support from the author.  It does many things, IMHO, right.  I subsequently had a look at Movable Type, another blog package that has some very strong features.  At that point, I was beginning to feel comfortable with pMachine and could spot some shortcomings in MT that caused me to continue with what I was (and still am) using.

Enter Dean Allen of Textism and his new beta product Textpattern Dean is following the idea that people who like to maintain blogs may not want to spend a lot of time learning and using difficult (for many of us), coding methodology.  I agree and I think he is really on to something.  You can see the beta running at Bozo’s site (first cousin of HB). 

I think Bozo is going to continue the journey with this beta package.  Despite the early beta issues, the promise of a robust product being developed by a team that seems to understand the needs of the users (much as the team at pMachine does) indicated it will be a fun journey.  Stay tuned.

Dateline March 01 :: Humblebub

By oil stock if you have the money.  If I have this right, between today and March 21 we will know if we are at war.  My take is that in the next 3 weeks bubba will either lead us into a conflict that makes no sense or we will have an extended period for the talking weenies politicians to work out a compromise.  I think it can go either way, but we will know within 3 weeks.  Lets see if I am right.  Buy oil anyway.