I didn’t do a regular upgrade, and even then I don’t really remember how long it took last time,[^1] so I have no idea if it installed any faster. DiskWarrior seemed to be getting lost scanning my hard drive, so I did the _format, install, restore_ dance. The installer’s install/restore mode didn’t seem to be working either, did those two separately.[^2] My free-space story seems much like Erwin’s, with an additional uncertainty point thrown in for good measure — Migration Assistant copied over my old /Developer directory (with a new name), so I had two copies of the developer tools installed for a while.

All that being said, here are a few things that I’ve noticed:

#### Pros

- [Mail][] seems a lot faster.
- All of my [Dashboard][] widgets survived.
- Mercifully, iPhone developers no longer have to download the entire
developer tools package every time they want a new iPhone OS SDK.[^3]

#### Cons

- None of my Menu Extras survived.
- Imagine, for a moment, that you had put Script Editor in its own
Library (Window Menu → Library) under Leopard or other cats prior.
You might have thought that you would now have an [AppleScript Editor][]
reference in there. You’d have been wrong. Instead, you’d now
have a grayed-out, iconless reference to Script Editor.
- My nearby PC is still just as confused when I use “`” inside the window
switcher[^4] as it was before I upgraded my Mac to Snow Leopard.

[^1]: I frequently start the OS install and then go do something else
while it cooks.
[^2]: Possibly due to impatience more than anything else.
[^3]: Admittedly, this is mentioned other prominent places, but it’s
worth repeating.
[^4]: Alt-Tab, and if you’re running Vista or newer, Windows-Tab as well.

[erwin]: http://is-here.com/archives/2009/08/29/835/
[mail]: http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/mail-ical-address-book.html
[dashboard]: http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/apps-and-utilities.html#dashboard
[applescript editor]: http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/apps-and-utilities.html#scripteditor

> Facebook is a good counter-example of a conceptually complex communication system that is very popular. My pessimism/skepticism regarding Wave is probably biased by my own strong preference for conceptual simplicity; I have not and don’t intend to sign up for Facebook.

At some point I realized that I tend to log into [Facebook][] only when someone tells me I’ve come up in a conversation there. I tend to appreciate simple solutions to complex problems. [Erwin][] _was_ the last person I knew that hadn’t completely given up on IM; if you can’t say it on [Twitter][], send an email. IM might not be that complicated, but Twitter so simple that you can’t explain its appeal to someone. Facebook is sprawling.

[fireball]: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/05/30/google-wave
[facebook]: http://www.facebook.com/
[erwin]: http://is-here.com/
[twitter]: http://twitter.com/

*[IM]: Instant Messaging

Me
: Do you still have this thing? (Hands over a driver CD)

Boss
: Sure. (Tries to hand me the corresponding device)

Me
: I’m not looking for the device, I’m trying to get rid of the CD.

#### Background

When I had the first mostly-complete draft of this post put together, I thought I had a pretty good idea what the new setup was going to look like. This doesn’t look an awful lot like that version. That being said, my list of what I want the new system to do isn’t all that different than it was when I started.

So, in no particular order, here’s what I was looking for:

1. [Markdown][]. Writing in HTML sucks. Sure, I still _use_ HTML, but
trying to write in it is just stupid.
2. [Markdown Extra][]. I put footnotes in some of my posts. The original
Markdown syntax doesn’t support them.
3. Low Maintenance. Most blogging software requires that I, as a user,
pay attention to security releases and update things regularly.
Historically, I haven’t been great at doing this on my site.
4. Control. I want to be able to use my own templates, my own CSS, and
have the same permalinks that I had before.
5. Portable. I frequently play around with templates, style sheets, etc.
on my staging server (Apache on my MacBook Pro) before pushing them to
the real site. All things being equal, I’d like to do this with the
real data, rather than made-up data or old data from the last sync.

As far as I know, none of the systems out there do everything that I want, although some come close than others. I think #2, and therefore #1, conflicts with every hosted blogging service except for [Tumblr][]. #3 conflicts with most non-hosted blogging software. #4 is a problem with some hosted blogging services, but not others. #5 conflicts with almost everything.

Unsurprisingly, not all of the desired features above occurred to me at
the beginning of this process. I had been working on a custom system, but that doesn’t really fit with #3, since I would be doing all of the
maintenance. Sure, I could build a system with no internet-accessible
moving parts,[^1] but I would still be building just about everything
myself.

#### Contestants

I was looking mostly at hosted services — if I was going to use a traditional dynamically generated blogging package, it might as well be [WordPress][], which I was already using anyway. Being hosted services, they all satisfy the _low maintenance_ requirement. Again, in no particular order:

[Wordpress.com][]
: No Markdown or custom templates. While the service doesn’t let you choose
your permalink style like the software does, they seem to use the correct
setting by default.

[Blogger][]
: No Markdown, wrong permalinks. I _think_ it has full customization.

[TypePad][]
: No Markdown Extra, as far as I know. I’m assuming it passes muster on
permalinks, since I’m pretty sure Movable Type does as well.

[Tumblr][]
: Wrong permalinks.

- – - – -

Obviously, Tumblr was the leader of the hosted services. I think the only other major shortcoming was the lack of syntax highlighting. Sure, that wasn’t in my original list of requirements, but its awfully nice, and last I checked [Gist][] hadn’t updated to a version of [Pygments][] that does [AppleScript][].

In the end, I chose WordPress, with a different theme and almost an entirely different set of plugins than I started with. My new theme is a fairly simple [Thematic][] child theme. The only custom plugin is a text formatter that I’ll probably release through the standard channels sooner or later.

The current version of WordPress does okay on the _low maintenance_ requirement, since it can update itself and most plugins automatically. I have a lot less effort sunk into my theme than I used to, and I’m liking that. My text formatter still needs some work, but it gets the job done.

So, what did I learn in all of this? I honestly have no idea, but with any luck, I won’t forget it for a long time.

[^1]: Indeed, this is exactly the sort of system I was was working on for
a while.

[brent simmons]: http://inessential.com/2009/01/30/new_publishing_system_tour_of_my_head
[markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
[markdown extra]: http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/
[wordpress]: http://www.wordpress.org/
[wordpress.com]: http://www.wordpress.com/
[blogger]: http://www.blogger.com/
[typepad]: http://www.typepad.com/
[tumblr]: http://www.tumblr.com/
[marsedit]: http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/
[applescript]: http://www.apple.com/applescript/
[pygments]: http://pygments.org/
[gist]: http://gist.github.com/
[thematic]: http://themeshaper.com/thematic-for-wordpress/

*[RSS]: Really Simple Syndication
*[HTML]: HyperText Markup Language
*[CSS]: Cascading Style Sheets

[show]: http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=220533

First, he explains how, exactly, we know elvis is dead:

Jokes.com

Vic Henley – Lessons of Graceland

More Funny Videos
Comedians on Tour

Get Funny Ringtones
Stand-Up Comedy

This was his closer — its hilarious:

Jokes.com

Vic Henley – Scoops’ Hat

More Funny Videos
Comedians on Tour

Get Funny Ringtones
Stand-Up Comedy

So kumbaja motherfuckers and merry christmas!

The Colbert ReportMon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Operation Humble Kanye

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O’Reilly Interview

- Progressive lack of sleep[^setup] combined with jetlag does not seem to help
this process. The day that it took me only a small part of was Monday.

- I’ve got quite a few feeds that can be disposed of quickly for various reasons:

– A couple of them are (I assume) broken, because most or all of the feed pops
up as unread whenever a new item is added or (sometimes) just because it
feels like it.
– For some sources, I have to subscribe to multiple, overlapping feeds to get
all the stuff I’m interested in.[^wired]
– Some have such a low S/N ratio that I either don’t bother with them and hit
_Mark All as Read_[^mailorder] or I tend to skim the item titles a page at
a time looking for stuff I care about rather than spacing through everything.[^vt]

- Unsurprisingly, you notice how much material is repeated feed after feed far
more when you’re reading most of a week’s items rather than a couple of hours
worth.

At any rate, I’m back to my old daily process of asking myself why I’m subscribed
to so many feeds that are full of crap.

[^setup]: This has been a problem for the setup week for [Caraoke's][caraoke]
first showing every year we’ve done it.
[^wired]: [Wired][wired] is the poster child in this category.
[^vt]: [VersionTracker][vt] is the poster child here.
[^mailorder]: Mail order sites dominate this category.

[caraoke]: http://vwcaraoke.com/
[wired]: http://www.wired.com/
[vt]: http://www.versiontracker.com/

*[S/N]: Signal/Noise