But no blogging, until now.

About 1 PM, a huge cell drifted north out of Broward County, and hit us with a major squall. There were gale-force winds, and lightning. One bolt struck seemingly next door (I know that there was no delay between flash and boom, and it was pretty damned loud), and then the power went out.

When the rain and wind let up enough to see, I looked out in the front yard, and saw a line drooping in front of the house. Its end was in the next-door neighbor’s yard. Fortunately, it had fallen from the live side, so it wasn’t hot.

I called Florida Power and Light to report the downed line. To add to the fun, there was a work crew across the street putting cement shingles up on to a roof, with a huge truck sticking out of the driveway, with other workers’ trucks around, making it harder to get the power company’s cherry pickers down the street.

It wasn’t that big a deal–we’re always prepared for a hurricane here–but it meant no work involving computers or the Internet, which pretty much, for me, means no work, other than making a few phone calls. Also a good opportunity to hang out in the neighbor’s driveway, drinking cold brews, King-of-the-Hill style.

Anyway, power’s back up, obviously, and I’m back on line. And back to work.

I think that I’ve got the RSS feed working now, over to the left. If someone wants to try it, let me know if there’s still a problem.

[Update a few minutes later]

Whoops. Guess not. Ive no idea what the problem is.

OK, I’m not actually going to bother to set up a reader poll. Just comment here. The issue is blog format on the main page (and perhaps archive pages as well).

When I moved to the new blogging platform, the default for things like permalink, author, comments, trackback, categories, etc., was to put it at the top, right after the post title. I had it there for a while, but a few days ago, I moved it back down to the bottom of the post, where it had been for the previous six years. Does anyone have any strong feelings about it one way or the other? My thinking was that it was a cleaner post the way it always was–title, then post, then other stuff. But if people are reading and only interested in space posts, or political posts, it might be better to tell them up front (and also tell them how many have commented on it).

I guess the question is, how much information do folks want before bothering to read the post (assuming it’s a long enough one for it to matter), and does that desire override the aesthetics of not interrupting the flow between title and text? And (of course) are there other issues that I haven’t considered?

[Update in the late evening]

Folks, I know it’s frustrating, but this is not the post in which to complain that my blog comments section crashes browsers.

First of all, it doesn’t crash browsers (AFAIK). It merely times out. It always times out, whether by posting comments or posting or updating posts. That’s the nature of the beast as a result of the “upgrade” to MT 4.0.

I am most painfully aware of it. That’s why I warn people before they post comments about it. I’m working on it, but I don’t know enough about MT to fix it, and I haven’t gotten any offers from anyone who does to help.

My current thinking is that I’ll put author and category at the top, because those are the things that people would like to know as an input to their evaluation as to whether to read or not. The other things (comments, trackback, Digg, Technorati, etc.) will go at the bottom, because those are things that one wants to deal with after reading the post.

Any major objections?

[Update on Saturday morning]

As to the IE6 crashing problem, I have no idea what to do about that short of not providing a link to Amazon. I’m reluctant to do that, because it’s one of the few sources of income that I get to support this blog. If someone can look at the code and tell me if there’s something I can fix that still allows it to work, I’ll be happy to do that.

[Early afternoon update]

OK, per some good suggestions in comments, I’m going with author, date and categories at the top, so people can judge whether or not they want to read it. I’ll do permalinks, comments, trackbacks and referrals at the bottom.

Still working some of the other issues.

[Late afternoon update]

For what it’s worth, I just tried with IE 6.0.2800.1106, and have no problems. No crashing, and it takes me to Amazon. So there’s something else going on than just IE6.

Despite the vast suckitude of the Movable Type documentation, I’m slowly starting to figure things out. One of the nice features of the upgrade is that it allows multiple categories, rather than just one, and I’ve finally figured out how to display them. Not only that, but you’ll see that if you click on a category associated with a given post, that you’ll get an archive page of all posts in that category. That will allow those who complain that they come here only for the space stuff, or only for the politics, to customize the blog to their own tastes (assuming that I do a good job of categorizing things).

Unfortunately, it’s a huge page, because it contains literally every post in that category that I’ve ever written. It’s a fast load for me, because I have a good connection, but I may change it so that it only gives you the previous (say) month’s worth of posts, to help those that are more bandwidth challenged. This feature will also allow folks who have me in their blogroll with specific interests to link to that specific interest (e.g., fellow space bloggers might want to just link to the space posts). If I can figure out a way to build a link (and archive page) with a filter for multiple categories, I’ll let folks know, but at least some customization is doable now.

I also have to pretty up the archive pages so they look like this one.

And I still haven’t solved the timing-out problem, so we’ll just have to continue to suffer with it for now, until I can get some help from an MT guru.

I’m getting this error on every page of my management site:

Use of uninitialized value in pattern match (m//) at website/extlib/I18N/LangTags.pm line 394.

I did a Google for that exact error, and only came up with one hit, which wasn’t very helpful (I’ve tried recopying the extlib files, and even wiping out the directory and copying them as new), but it still gives the error.

I will, say, though, that going from 4.01 to 4.1 has cleaned up some of my GUI problems. The big issue at this point is getting it to complete the publishing task without hanging (which is what’s causing the time outs when y’all comment).

I’ve shut down comments (I think) temporarily while I attempt an upgrade from MT-4.01 to MT-4.1, in the modest hope that it will straighten out some of the problems I’ve been having with timeouts. Hopefully not for long.

[A few minutes later]

OK, I’ve updated. Let’s see if we’re still having problems.

[Update a few minutes later]

Nope, still hanging up.