for-real-things-I-know

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Those vague little dots on top of the water on the right are oceanliners, for all my east and west coast friends who haven't seen a Great Lake yet.
Posted by Hello

7 Comments:

the girl said...: I really hate having to log into blogger to post comments because I hate Blogger. ::grrrr!::

That's so neat, isn't it, giant ocean liners in a lake?

Have you ever seen that Jim Jarmusch film, Stranger than Paradise? There's this one fantastic scene where the characters drive up to the edge of one of the lakes in the winter and stand out and stare at it, and all you can see is white. Seriously. It's a quiet scene, the characters just standing in this windy nothingness, and it goes on for a few minutes.

Eric said that in the winter the lake in Chicago would be filled with these amazing ice formations, jutting upward toward the sky.

I'd like to see all that someday.

I've heard that the beaches in Michigan are some of the nicest when it comes to the Great Lakes. I hope to go swimming with you someday!

(By the way, I'm learning to swim. It's kind of neat!); 6:55 AM
the girl said...: I can FTP files up to my webserver, if that's what you mean.; 4:01 PM
the girl said...: Oh, and by the way, have you checked out TypePad? That might serve your needs better.; 4:08 PM
Solomon said...: On "To Be Determined" you wrote, "You should be able to upload them from there, although I’ve never used that feature because I do something called FTP." Maybe you were just talking about attaching files to your posts with FTP. I thought you meant that you could use FTP to add a new post entirely.... Sorry to confuse, actually using FTP is kind of new to me... Hell, all of this (HTML, blogging, reading blogs, FTP, publishing indexes, etc.) is new to me--I might have to ask for your help sometimes, although Janella has found out I'm stubborn when it comes to asking directions for something computer-related that I think I can figure out myself. A fault.; 4:13 PM
Solomon said...: I didn't check out Typepad. The reason I rushed to Blogger was because Picasa (photo organizing software) and Hello (a peer-to-peer image sharing software) were bought by Google and integrated with Blogger, so I can just send a photo with text from Picasa through Hello and into Blogger while I'm editing the image.; 4:19 PM
Solomon said...: Oh. And all of that is free (except Comcast), so far at least. Typepad looks like it costs money. I'm all about free.; 4:23 PM
the girl said...: My friend Heather might still have some free TypePad keys.

Anyway, FTP is simply a way to transfer data from a local source to a remote source, and vice versa, the source being the directories where one stores the files. Movable Type, my blogging software, is an application, rather than a directory, so it's not a place where you actually store files. The files themselves live in a directory, and my blog entries are actually stored in an MySQL database. In addition, MT itself and the files and scripts that make it up live on the webserver as well. What makes MT different from Blogger or TypePad or some of the others is that MT is one of the applications that you have to install and maintain yourself, whereas Blogger already lives on a webserver and making sure that it works isn't your responsibility.

Anyway, back to images: I FTP them to the directory where I would like them stored and then create a web page for them to be displayed using a text editor called Emacs, as typically I'm presenting my photographs in a static web page as opposed to a blog entry. Moreover, when you are posting images in a blog entry (or any web page), the images don't actually live in the application or the entry or page itself. They live in whatever directory they call home and a small piece of code in the html document tells your web browser where that is, and the browser then attempts to understand how to display it. That's the part I didn't post yet in that entry, how to do the code. I'm sure you've probably already seen how to do that by now, although there are a couple of shortcuts in MT (using tags that are MT specific).

I either write the HTML (actually XHTML) while logged into a shell on the server, or I write the page offline and then also FTP to the directory where I would like the files stored. Having worked at Columbia for four years, I am very comfortable working in a UNIX shell and actually prefer it. It's faster for me and I feel like I have more control. To blog, I am satisfied with typing my entries into the web browser because I sometimes like to add additional HTML tags to my entries and also have this little application called Textile that does neat things like turning my straight quotation marks into curly ones and all that without my having to get out a book and type out a little code.

I always see things about setting up one-click publishing and all that, which Movable Type does offer and you can probably set up, and ways to email entries to your blog and so forth, but it's just not an interest of mine. You know, you get comfortable doing things a certain way and that's just how you do them. Sometimes the things that are supposed to simplify your life just confuse you or seem like a waste of time learning. Also, I'm typically using several different computers on a given day, and sometimes those sorts of things require cookies or bookmarks or whatever.

Miss you.; 7:18 AM

For Real Things I Know

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Wednesday, August 11, 2004

7 Comments: