So I’ve decided that it’s time to move on to a more advanced blogging solution. Blogger has been a good solution for me these past few years. One of the other sites I administer is still “Powered by Blogger,” and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Blogger is still where I’d direct someone who was interested in setting up their own blog, especially if they weren’t all that computer literate. But at this point I’m feeling a little constrained by the black box that is Blogger, and especially the inability to easily customize it.

My new blogging software will almost certainly be Typo, although WordPress is waiting in the wings if things don’t work out with Typo. I downloaded Typo 2.6.0, the stable release, and am experimenting with it at home. I was pleased at how easy it was to get Typo up and running, at least with the WEBrick server option. I downloaded Origami, the winner of a recent Typo themes contest, and it looks very nice indeed.

One issue that I’m going to have to deal with is what to do with the existing blog entries from my Blogger account. The first option is to just leave this blog as-is, and start from scratch with Typo. In that scenario, existing links to this blog (if they’re out there) won’t get broken. What I don’t know is how Typo will react if it’s presented with a URL for one of those older articles. A different option is to try to import the old articles into Typo. Typo doesn’t have a converter utility for Blogger blogs, but this guy has written about his experience in moving from Blogger to Typo, and describes (among other things) how he migrated his Blogger data to Typo using Typo’s RSS feed importing tool.

Another issue that I need to investigate is whether my ISP supports Typo. I know that they support Ruby and Rails, and worst case I can probably upload the Typo files to my account. I briefly considered switching to Planet Argon, which offers a really inexpensive Typo hosting plan, but they still haven’t responded to the inquiry that I e-mailed to them yesterday and I’m getting other reports that the service just isn’t there. And that’s too bad, since they’re probably nice folks, but what can you do? The only other ISP I would seriously consider switching to at this point is A Small Orange. I’m already hosting another web site there, and I’ve been pleased with the service and uptime.

To give you some idea of how little we’ve been using our Windows-based desktop PC since we switched to Apple notebooks (my PowerBook and Denise’s iBook), I found cobwebs inside the PC’s case last night when I opened it up to replace the dead CD-ROM drive.

I love it when the collectibles dealers come to the mall. Today I picked up a 24×36 poster of the cover of Superman #233 as well as a Limited Collector’s Edition Batman vs. Ra’s Al Ghul, both drawn by Neal Adams.

Some people have way too much time on their hands.

Well, Steve referred to it as the “fastest notebook ever.” Don’t know if that means the fastest Apple notebook ever, or fastest notebook ever made by anybody.

Oh, who cares; I want one. It’s just as well that I can’t afford one right now anyways. By the time I can, they will be well past the first revision of these suckers and more native applications will be available. Perhaps the price will even have dropped by then. Sigh.

Plogit is an open source blogging client for PalmOS. If you can read this, it means that I got Plogit to work!

Edit (from the PC): Well, it sorta worked. The article’s title didn’t come through properly and instead ended up in the article body. I will have to investigate this a bit more…

Yes, I know that Mac OS X Tiger users have had Dashboard for a while now, but this looks pretty sweet to those of us stuck using Windows at work. I have yet to read about Yahoo! Go but it sounds promising, too.

I haven’t had much time to write about one of my favorite Christmas presents because I’ve been spending so much time playing with it. When I started trying to implement GTD in early 2005, as an attempt to get my act together, one of the investments I made was to buy a Palm Zire 31 handheld. Although my previous attempts to actually get in the habit of using a PDA had always failed, things finally clicked for me this time around and it has been a really indispensable tool for me. In October, when Palm announced the new TX handheld, I knew that I wanted one. And since I’ve been a good boy, Santa brought me one for Christmas.

One of the unexpected cool things that you can do with a Palm TX (and other modern PDAs, to be fair) is watch movies. It turns out that the TX’s 480×320 screen provides a really decent picture quality, and with the use of free software like the excellent TCPMP, you can watch movies in a variety of file formats. I’m told that the battery life for the TX is pretty good and that watching movies doesn’t eat up the battery as much as you might expect, so I’m looking forward to having this with me the next time we fly somewhere.

There are a few other applications that you’ll want to add to your collection after you pick up TCPMP:

• nosleep software’s FileZ is a free file manager that is indispensable.
• MetaViewSoft’s PalmPDF is a free PDF viewer that is much better than Adobe’s aging PDF viewer for Palm OS. I do hope that MetaViewSoft is going to focus some attention on the UI for PalmPDF, though, because although the PDF rendering is really great, the UI is really lousy and awkward to use.
• Plucker is a free offline HTML and eBook reader. If you like Plucker, you might want to check out Sunrise, which is a good replacement for the Plucker Desktop software.
• Mobile Stream’s free “Home” button for the TX (look near the bottom of the screen) is nice little hack that replaces the magnifying glass “Search” tool in the lower left-hand corner of the TX screen with an infinitely more useful home icon.

My only real disappointment with the TX isn’t a complaint about the device itself, but rather VersaMail, the mail client that comes preinstalled on it. After entering my ISP’s e-mail account settings and playing with VersaMail for a just a short while, the program crashed and reset the TX. Thinking it was a fluke, I tried using VersaMail again but it continued to crash. A quick Google search revealed that this is a well-known problem, and the workarounds suggested by Palm just didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Fortunately, I do have some options. SnapperMail, Agendus Mail and Eudora Internet Suite are some of the third-party solutions that I’ll be evaluating in the coming weeks, and I feel pretty sure that one or more of them will fit the bill. If you have advice about some other mail programs for Palm OS that I should be considering, let me know!