<rick_c> when i used wp a lot i used a remote client most of the time. since i'm usually in habari now, i've discovered the reason was i don't like the wp interface.
<rick_c> i've even written in my local habari install, then cut and pasted to my wp blog. :)

Things have been incredibly busy and stressful at chez nous recently. The beloved is acting in a senior role for a couple of months, which basically means she's doing two jobs, I'm trying to get some serious work done on my PhD so I can submit before the end of the year (a little late, but not outrageous), we're looking at interstate business opportunities, considering getting some work done on our house (it _really_ needs it), I'm trying to continue to contribute to Habari, and there are all those other little bits and pieces of life that seem to take up so much time, some good some bad. Oh, and going to French class once a week. The long and the short of it is that I haven't had much time or brain space for blogging for a couple of weeks.

I try to average a post every two days, 15 posts a month. Most of the time I make it somewhere near that, but I won't this month unless some really exciting things happen in the next day that I really have to blog. So the question I have for you today is, if things are hectic and there isn't much blogging happening, but the blog isn't headed for the deadpool any time soon, should bloggers tell their readers (or reader) that it's temporary? Are you as a reader just going to be annoyed at a content-free post clogging up your newsreader, or do you like to hear this stuff from the people you read? Does it depend on who they are? Is a one-liner along the lines of, "Madness in the house (not the band), having a blogging break for a couple of weeks," worthwhile? How many questions at the end of a blog post is overkill? Oh, that's another topic ....

My new buddy Andy C recently said to me:

I used to enjoy blogging a lot more and I actually have a couple of humourous blog articles that I am genuinely quite fond - no more than that - proud of.

Twitter is just the ultimate in 'disposable' blogging. All that crap posted from Heathrow T5 just fills my time in. It's hardly earth shattering, is it? God - I can't remember any of those stupid tweets (apart from the lads in Yellow Lurex suits that was pretty funny) let alone be proud of all those throwaway one-liners.

But Twitter (or at least micro services like it, as on Andy's advice I'm trying out FriendFeed) is much more than that. The things I know about Andy have mostly come from that disposable blogging. It's exactly that reason that I think there is room for blogging and Twitter; blogging enables all sorts of complex ideas to be thrashed out, and I can get a real idea of what someone thinks, but through tweets I get to know the _person_. Of course there's a bit of a blurring between those two as well, but individual tweets don't have to be things of which to be proud. The body of tweets is indicative.

Over on wordpress.com,

... everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb.

• Free Space to Three Gigabytes « WordPress.com

I can't help but feel that this is a step in the wrong direction for a blogging platform. The assumption is that you're using your blog to manage your media. I would only need that much space because there's no easy way to access the media in the places where I've already got it hosted. If I already use Flickr for my images, if I already use Viddler for my videos, why do I want to manage those media separately with my blog? [Yes, I chose to illustrate my point with the only two media silos implemented so far for Habari. It's only because I'm biased.]

Other than that, I'm sure it will make a lot of people happy.

After mucking around with Habari for the last few months, including porting the Connections theme, and loving the community, I'm now posting from my brand new, shiny Habari installation.

I'm sure there will be some fine-tuning of the theme over the next month or so, to move it from alpha to beta. There are a few issues I know about already, like incomplete support for multiple entries, and there may be other things I don't know about. If you find anything, please let me know.

Thanks to all the Habari community for helping me migrate.

Thanks to concise advice from Owen Winkler (aka ringmaster), my test Habari install now has the same URLs as my existing WordPress blog. That means that when I move, all my links will still work. It would have been a pain to redo all my internal links, but those three sites out there in the wild web that link to me are really valuable ...

For reference (lines wrapped for clarity): INSERT INTO habari__rewrite_rules (name, parse_regex, build_str, handler, action, priority, is_active, rule_class, description) VALUES ('display_entry', '%(?P<year>\\d{4})/ (?P<mon0>\\d{2})/ (?P<mday0>\\d{2})/ (?P<slug>[^/]+)[/]{0,1}$%i', '{$year}/{$mon0}/{$mday0}/{$slug}', 'UserThemeHandler', 'display_post', '8', '1', '0', '');

[Update: Don't copy and past the query above, you'll get spaces in your regex that break it. Use this text version instead. Also, make sure you change the table name to the correct prefix, habari__ is the default and most likely.]

When travelling, I keep a journal. I've been doing this for almost eight years now, with varying degrees of commitment, and have filled a couple of moleskines. This last trip to Iran is the first trip I've done since I started blogging and using Twitter, but I realised that I've been doing both for years, albeit low tech paper based blogging and tweets. Typically I'll have a couple of entries like, "Mannequins are freaky enough but someone got an import deal in Iran for extra freaky mannequins" and "Found veggie soups!" and then a longer entry about somewhere we've visited or what we've done for the day.

So - and I suspect isn't just me - my blog and Twitter are fulfilling specific and different writing needs, needs that I've had for a long time. I wonder if the people behind Twitter were conscious of this, or was it just a random lark?