Not Moving from Movable Type

Movable TypeFor the time being, I’m sticking with Movable Type as the publishing system for Subtraction.com as well as A Brief Message. It’s not that I’m still enamored of it; as anyone who’s been patient and persistent enough to post remarks on my posts lately (thank you, by the way) will attest to, my particular installation of Movable Type is often painfully slow, and the version that I’m using, 3.33, gets longer in the tooth every day.

I’ve complained about this before, but the reason I’m staying put is that the switching cost is too high for me at the moment. I just can’t imagine investing the time necessary to re-create these templates in another publishing system; that’s a project for when I get laid off. I’m also holding out hope that a coming revision to its promising but not quite ready for prime time fourth version will modernize Movable Type sufficiently that switching to a competing package will offer fewer advantages. I still maintain that going over to WordPress would be trading in one set of problems for another (I know there will be many people who disagree with me on that point).

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Form of… a Book about Forms!

If you design Web pages with any kind of transactional component and you’re not paying attention to this, then you should: the talented interface designer Luke Wroblewski is currently in full promotional mode for his upcoming book “Web Form Design Best Practices,” to be published soon from Rosenfeld Media.

Clearly, they’ll have to come up with a sexier title than that if they ever adapt the book into a major motion picture, but at least it makes no bones as to what it’s about: designing highly intuitive and efficient forms for capturing user inputs on the Web. You can get a kind of preview of the content over at his blog, where this one essay on optimizing sign-up forms for wireless networks will teach you more about the art of interaction design than most courses will teach you in a year.

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The Little Keyboard That Could—n’t

iPhone KeyboardLet’s not even talk about the horrible wincing I did when I learned that Apple lowered the price of its iPhone today by US$200 — a mere eight and one-half weeks after I dutifully and idiotically waited in line to buy one. Apparently, there are some avenues of recourse available to us early adopters, but here’s my take: I have neither the time nor the energy in my life to go charging back up this particular hill. I knew what this thing cost when I bought it, and I knew it was going to go down in price one day, and so here we are.

In a tangentially related matter, the lower iPhone prices and the introduction of the iPod touch presumably means that more and more customers will soon be exposed to the wonders of Apple’s multi-touch, software keyboard. On that, I have something to say.

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