Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I had an attack of Tengwar last week, so here’s a new link list, far beyond the dimensions of my previous Tengwar entry:

• Haven’t the foggiest? Try Omniglot’s introduction to Tengwar.
• M?•ns Bj??rkman has a more detailed explanation of Amanye Tenceli.
• Nice fonts: Tengwar Annatar (my favorite), several at Orlando Bloom Central, also at Tyalie Tyelellieva, the standard fonts from Dan Smith, Tengwar and runes from DaFont (see the later pages), Tengwar Parmaite, Tengwar Formal, , ,
• My favorite Tengwar transcription program is YaTT
• Or try the on-line Tengwar transcriber.
• On using a Tengwar program to reproduce the Ring inscription.
• See the crazy things people do with Tengwar.
• Omniglot has a nice chart of Tengwar for English.
• Eric Raymond has la tenguar: a Tengwar system for Lojban.
• Prefer Dwarfish? Check out the chart for the Angerthas Daeron
• The Fellowship of the Wordsmiths can help you use Tengwar for Elfish.
• They’re the people translating the Silmarillion back into the original Elfish.

Here’s my ring inscription:

Awards of the day: the winners of the 2004 Stargate SG-1 Fan Awards have been announced.

I can’t believe I forgot to blog yesterday—maybe I’m all blogged out. Somewhere around here is my one thousandth entry, but it’s hard to tell exactly which one it was. If I had to guess I’d say my GRRM review was it, but this entry could also be the one.

I really ought to check my web stats more often. In the past month I’ve gotten over 5,000 hits on an obscure and uninformative blog entry from 2002—just a quiz post, and the quiz results there all have broken images.

Somehow this entry has been climbing up in the results for “Quizilla” in Yahoo’s and therefore MSN’s search engines for at least six months now. Why my silly quiz results and not someone else’s? Why that particular entry and not any of the others in my extensive quiz category?

I’d suspect one of the new trends in comment spam and referral spam, but there’s no spam on that particular entry to explain it . I can only conclude that something is amiss in Yahoo’s search technology. I use Google, so I don’t see this kind of result weirdness, but maybe Yahoo/MS people are used to it.

Get a real search engine, people.

It’s a link dump, but it’s a fresh one:

• Bitoogle, the Google of Bittorrent, looks great but is down for the count.
• A List Apart has a cool article on
  preventing bandwidth theft using mod_rewrite and PHP.
• Some fun free fonts from Letterhead Fonts.
• More spam amusement at spamusement—spam-based cartoons by stevenf, now with an RSS feed!

In other net news, yours truly is now a guest blogger at Gene Expression—today I blogged about creationist museums.

For reasons that shall go unmentioned, I’ve been looking for nice LotR fonts. There’s a lovely collection of rune and tengwar fonts at Orlando Bloom Central, but I was looking for the Latin alphabet in an Elfish style, or a nice Carolingian or Uncial font. Thundrune seems to have some.

Wired ran an article recently on bloggers burning out. They mean the big-time bloggers, of course, not us small fry, but the phenomenon is the same.

Although I’ve been burning out on fandom for most of the time I’ve been in fandom, blogging has never worn me down. I’ve been canning content recently where other bloggers might shut down, but the joy of blogging hasn’t gone away. In writing fanfic the tropes pile up until you’ve seen them all, but with link blogging, there’s always something new and fascinating on-line. You never really reach the end of the Internet.

I’ve been playing around with UTF-8 entities, since I always want one I can’t find. Here are some links I found:

• The Trouble with Em and En
• Unicode Display
• A Simple Character Entity Chart

I generated my own entity page with PHP as well. As soon as I decide where to put it up, I’ll link it.

Some timely Mac and blog links:

• Unsanity has a user-friendly fix for the new Mac hole, called Paranoid Android.
• [Update:] Daring Fireball recommends RCDefaultApp over MoreInternet for Mac hole-patching.
• Phil Ringnalda does a comic reading of the new MovableType license.
• A classic MT rant: So long and thanks for all the trackbacks.
• WordPress releases a slightly less flaky release candidate. (I’m still waiting for the final release.)
• Ace of Spades is shocked when a Liberal Writer Almost Mentions Discovery of Sarin in Iraq
• [Update:] Google Groups Beta offers Atom feeds for newsgroups. It doesn’t look too useful for busy groups like ASC, but it’s perfect for slow ones like rec.humor.funny. Thanks to persistent.info for this and other links about converting NNTP newsgroups to RSS feeds.

I promise I’ll move on from the tempest-in-a-template after this, but Mena asked for trackbacks on how people use MT and if I can’t forgive like Phil Ringnalda at least I can explain. So, in return for years of blogging pleasure, here is my story:

I used to have a single MT installation with three blogs, two users accounts, and one user. I used my real username on my main blog, and a fake user to create two demo blogs. The demos of my old MT styleswitcher and adaption to MT of a color rotating template are still running at my previous host. I’m not sure whether the fake user approach would violate the one-user rule, but in any event the real me is no longer active at that installation.

My main blog moved with me to my new host, and I also started a second blog here for updates on the ficml project. That second blog has two users, but for convenience I decided we would both post using my user account and with the username removed from the templates - making our posts the anonymous declarations of FicML. So am I one user with two blogs, or two users with two blogs?

But that is only the beginning of my accounting problems. As explained in a previous post, my free, non-commercial host runs a single MT installation for all resident bloggers. I have no idea how many of us there are. So the unbelievably nice guy who provides not just our MT installation but PHP, MySQL, bandwidth and other goodies for free might have to pay hundreds of dollars to upgrade to MT 3.0. He may be all the way off the pricing chart for all I know, yet with no income from us leeches to pay for MT.

I admit that at the time of my move I had doubts about putting my blog into someone else’s hands, but it turned out fine. I got MT (currently 2.661) and MT-Blacklist with no installation or upkeep hassles. I worried about backups, not about a sudden change in licensing that would make my two little blogs into a $700 commercial enterprise. Of course each blogger here at irth.net could run his own MT installation (since every one of us is a non-commercial user) - so what’s the difference, really, in having us all joined up into one big installation? The answer would appear to be $700 - the price for being an unbelievably nice web hosting service.

The folks at SixApart must find it hard to have made such a popular piece of software and yet have no income to speak of from it, but there’s not much money to be had in blogging to begin with. The application service providers (TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal) get money out of only a portion of their bloggers - we MT users being the free end of the TypePad pricing spectrum - and those who pay for it are generally the more popular bloggers who have the ad income or the LJ fanbase to support their higher service levels.

Charging big bucks for MT, however, is not selling a high-end blogging service - it’s selling the right to be an MT application service provider. That’s a job most people do for love, not that they have a choice in the matter. What end-user will give their money to some upstart ASP who paid SixApart $700 when they could use TypePad instead? How do you attract paying customers from a non-paying user base? That’s the problem SixApart is trying to pass on to MT users.

I’m just not seeing the revenue stream here.

In a burst of energy better spent elsewhere, I tweaked the blog style to match my site a bit better. I’m still not fully satisfied with it, but it’s close enough for the time being. And it was unexpectedly easy - unlike MT, WordPress has just the one template file, in simple HTML with some PHP floating around it. MT, on the other hand, had a zillion templates, each of which I had to wrestle to get it to match the main site style.

I did have some problems, but they were mainly a result of being too geeky for my own good. For example, my tab navigation is generated with PHP - my PHP was fighting with WordPress’s PHP over the variable $siteurl. I renamed my variables, but what I should have done was put a static copy of the navigation into the template. But there were so many things in there already that were dynamic and could easily have been static that my little nav tabs seemed like a drop in the bucket. I did hard-code the title of the blog, which hasn’t changed in years and really doesn’t need to be fetched from the database every time.

I’d offer my revised CSS for public consumption but since I both changed the WP template and integrated the CSS into my larger site style (jp_tab.css - body class “wpblog”), it wouldn’t be much use to the beginning WP user.