If you are one of the folks who prefers to receive my blog via email, I’ve installed the subcribe2 WordPress plugin. See the subscribe page for the appropriate links to setup your subscription.

Let me know if you have any problems with it. I installed it, and have subscribed myself and successfully received the last few posts, but I haven’t tested it as a non-admin users. Note that it’s nowhere near as cool as Conversant’s email interface. You can’t respond to the email posts and have them work as comments or anything.

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After much consideration, hestitation and general mixed feelings about the idea, I’ve decided to move into a new blog. This is blog is powered by WordPress. I’ve imported all my old content back to when I started blogging in Conversant in early 2000 (I blogged in Manila for a bit before that).

Conversant continues to be a great blogging/CMS platform, and I have a lot of attachment to it since I’m a major contributor to the codebase — however, I’ve been trying to do a number of things to force myself out of my comfort zone lately, and this is one of them.

So here I am. Continuing to spew my usual mix of randomness into the void.

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[moved post to a page]

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The doors have opened on the first Conversant patterns contest. A relatively new Conversant feature, patterns are sort of like themes, but control not just the appearance, but entire structure and functionality of a Conversant site. Pretty cool stuff. Guess I’ll have to get something worked up. Besides, I need a new iPod.

Of course, my biggest concern about the contest is that it ends in June. Certainly the grand prize 60gig Video iPod will be obsolete by then, won’t it?

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That’s right, ladies and gentleman, the software I’ve used for this weblog for the last 10 years or so is now out of private beta!

Nice job, Seth! Weblog II is powerful and flexible stuff!

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Macrobyte rolled out new security features in Conversant today. For the average non-technical Joe, I’m sure blogger, Live Journal, etc, are fine — but I pity the geek blogging in anything but Conversant. You don’t know what you’re missing. Incredible flexibility.

Thanks to Clark for sponsoring developement of this feature.

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As Seth mentions, he’s added Trackback support to Conversant. This is something I’ve been looking forward to…it’s a very cool cross-reference system for the web. I imagine I’ll be giving a lot more trackbacks than I receive — but that’s fine. Nice work, Seth!

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Seth posted a long overview outline about Conversant — the software that runs this website. I love Conversant, it’s a great tool once you “get” it. Unfortunately, I think this outline draws attention to one of the main reasons more people haven’t “gotten” it. While very powerful, it’s never been focused on a particular killer application that demonstrates it’s power easily to a new user. It’s flexibility is incredible, but to get new users involved it’s really going to need that killer focused application with a great UI and initial experience. If there was only someone around to fund the development of that killer app.

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As Seth noted, Frontier is being split off from Userland and released open source. I have a lot of history with Frontier, and this site runs in Conversant, which runs on top of Frontier — so it’s an interesting development to me.

I still haven’t seen mention of the licensing terms, and it’s not clear to me if they are now going to give it away, or just provide access to the source.

Regardless, it’s a platform I’m happy to move away from as fast as possible. I expect this will just turn out to be another twist in Frontier’s tumultuous history.

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Brian Carnell has praised Conversant before, but he wrote another nice piece today. Always good to hear, since there’s still a good bit of my code running in Conversant’s veins.

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Another new Conversant website, designed by yours truly, has gone live today. It’s a minor update to the website for my employers construction division, Bonded Lightning Protection.

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I’ve added support for WYSIWYG editing to this site, using Conversant’s new HTMLArea3 plugin. At this stage it’s a bit of an experiment, because I’m not that fond of WYSIWYG HTML, but some other people using this site might be. It defaults to on for all new topic, reply and edit forms.

You need to be using at least Mozilla 1.3a, Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1, or IE 5.5 for it to work. You can enable/disabled it with a cookie by using the “WYSIWYG on/off” button in the side bar ( button will only appear if you are logged on ).

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I finally added a channel list in the sidebar of this blog. Most posts are categorized by topic…Conversant’s new Weblog II page gives you an easy way to filter the weblog to only show posts in certain categories. Try it, click on the “music” link in the “Channels” box in the sidebar, and you’ll see only the posts I’ve categorized as “music” related. Cool!

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Dave Winer’s new killer app doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to people using Conversant…since searching is built in, but I guess if you don’t already have it, it sounds pretty neat.

Look…try the form below to search this weblog…and get a filtered view of the weblog showing only posts that match your search:

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I just upgraded my home page to Conversant’s new beta Weblog II page type. The existing weblog page in Conversant was one of the first things implemented in Conversant, and didn’t take advantage of a lot of the newer features. Weblog II is incredible — it’s not done yet, but is already one of the most powerful online journaling tools around. Hopefully, in the coming months I’ll get a chance to take advantage of some of those features here!

Note that my RSS feed has moved to: http://greg.turtleprod.com/index/rss

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Seth’s been working on a converting a client’s site to Conversant recently (it was a Manila-based site) — really shows off some of the CMS muscle behind Conversant, check it out: Acme Bookbinding.

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