It’s bad enough watching most powerpoint presentations in person, so I almost never am willing to watch a streaming video of one after the fact. But as I was cleaning out my inbox today, I stumbled across a link a colleague had sent me to a presentation at this years OSCON (Open Source Conference) by Dick Hardt of Sxip.
I would have deleted it, if it hadn’t included glowing recommendations from both Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig—two people whose opinions I don’t dismiss lightly. So I took a chance and clicked on the link.
Wow.
Now that’s a good presentation. Visually effective, great style, good enough to survive transformation into a low-bitrate streaming presentation.
(Update: Had I read more of the archives of Presentation Zen, I would have realized that Hardt uses a style much like that of Larry Lessig [whom I’ve never had the privilege of meeting or even listening to], and which has even been named “The Lessig Method.”)
Ever since I upgraded to Movable Type 3.2, rebuilding has been much slower on my current host. That’s caused two problems, one just annoying and the other more serious. The annoying part is that marking comments as junk (an all-too-frequent need) forces a rebuild, which is painfully slow and often times out on the intranet at work. The serious part is that most incoming trackbacks are failing, probably due to timeout issues.
So tonight I’m going to try switching from static to dynamic publishing—for the non-geek readers out there, it means that most pages on the site won’t be saved as individual static documents, but instead will be generated on-the-fly when you request them.
If the site breaks in the process, don’t panic—it’s all backed up. Worst case I’ll revert back to original settings and live with the problems. Best case it’ll be working perfectly in a few minutes, and trackbacks will start working as they should again.
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Update: It worked. Only two real problems, which were relatively easy to fix. The first problem was that I use mt-textile and smartypants for text formatting on the blog (the former lets me use things like underscores to create italicized text, or asterixes to generated bulleted ists; the latter handles typographic niceties like em dashes, curly quotes, and true ellipses). Those text processors don’t work properly with dynamic publishing, but I found this post on Movalog with information on how to fix that. The second problem involved the fact that I had some custom PHP code in my templates that used movable type tag variables—apparently since the dynamic templates are PHP based, this causes some problems. There are apparently ways to call the variables, but I didn’t feel like mucking with them, so I just changed the few instances to non-variable code (using http://mamamusings.net/ rather than the BlogURL variable, etc). Not the most elegant fix, but it was expedient, and now it all works. And since I’m planning on a site redesign over the holidays, it wasn’t worth spending too long on the template code.
The good news is that the trackback problem does appear to be fixed—a number of new trackbacks have appeared over the past few days, after a long dry spell that I suspect was technological (especially since I saw several inbound links on other sites that hadn’t registered here). Mission accomplished!
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