Sitenews on Nanikore

Site News

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 00:42:33 +0000

Hello. Not often I post site news as such, but here’s a quick update. I’ve been streamlining things a bit behind the curtains - removing and merging a lot of tags, removing a couple of categories, fixing some links and images and such. Semi-related to that I’ve been trying to make any inbound 404 error handling a little better too. I’ve also continued to remove very old entries which are somewhat archaic and not interesting - this blog has been around for 18 years and it’s old enough to have a beer in many parts of the world, so filing away some bits can’t hurt.

I’ve also added ‘proper’ GDRP and cookie notifications too, but if you have any issues, please take a moment to fire me a note on the contact page.

This should all be seemless and make the site a little better.

New Header Photo: View from the Skyline

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:09:39 +0000

I’m trying to keep to a new header photo every quarter, and for once, I was torn between some of the photos from the New Year’s Day morning, but I thought that was a bit obvious, so I decided to go with one which had been post processed in a Path App filter, and in black and white, because that has to make it look more atmospheric, right? It was the view from the Izu Skyline road, looking south east over the bay at Odawara.

New Header Photo: Ice

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 03:02:15 +0000

I just swapped theme on this blog from ‘Enterprise’ to ‘Twenty Ten’ which has a banner photo area, so I thought I should at least put one of my own photos up there. After thinking about it for at least thirty seconds as I scrolled through iPhoto, I plumped for a small section of the photo below, which is of a glass of iced water I was served in Tokyo Disneyland. Don’t ask me why - I like photos of iced water, so here is my new header photo: ice. For those who are into these things, it was taken with a cheap Canon IXY 30S.

Brightblack's name origin turns 25!

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 13:01:48 +0000

Brightblack’s name origin turns 25!! The origin of the name of my other website (brightblack.net), the ZX Spectrum, was launched twenty five years ago, and though the butt of many jokes, the machine was a tiny computer but for its time it was cheap, and I’m sure a few future IT people first experienced computers, and games for the first time on it’s little, odd rubber keys.

Anyway, I still have one in the loft at the parental home, and the emulator on this MacBook, so I still keep the fire burning. I have also mentioned that the name of my regular website brightblack.net is actually derived from the ZX Spectrum: it had 8 colours accessible through BASIC, and to double that to a whopping 16, you use the BRIGHT command, and I always thought that the idea of ‘bright black’ was kind of a funky concept, so when I was looking for a name and a URL years later (one drunken night), that was the one I chose.

Nanikore - > WordPress 1.2

Sun, 30 May 2004 09:48:53 +0000

As some of you may have noticed, the blog looks a bit different. True, the logo has changed a bit, but also, I’ve migrated the blog from MovableType 2.661 to WordPress 1.2. Having played with WordPress for a while I thought it would be much easier for a simple blogger like me to update, tweak and generally play with. There’s no disrespect to MT though - it’s a fine product.

If you see any strangeness in viewing the new version of the site, please let me know!

MovableType 3 update

Mon, 17 May 2004 03:38:28 +0000

I sat down and looked at the new MT license, and the costings, and I think I fall under the ‘Movable Type Free’ system, as I’m one person with one blog. Yes, despite the furor, there *is* still a free version.

What’s the next step up? A USD70 license, which will go up to USD100 at some point. That’s a big price leap, Six Apart! My issue here would’ve been graduation, though they have introduced ‘bolt on’ licenses for extra blog and authors at USD10 a go, which is a fair offer.

Since I wrote my last post, I did find some other revisions circulating, such as there being one license per CPU, which has now gone - I think this was a crucial change for many users, whether they knew it or not. Good move there SixApart.

Let’s say something here though, that to be honest has been said best on Daring Fireball- MT is still a great piece of software.

However, for those who freaked out at the first sight of the words ‘commercial license’ and a dollar sign, the damage to SixApart may have already been done. They’ve already gone looking for alternatives, when they didn’t before. This isn’t a lapse of MT3, this is a lapse of SixApart’s announcement style, and a certain type of user. In many ways they’re victims of the community they sought to build.

I’m a small player in all of this - I post bits a couple of times a week, that’s all, so I was looking for more informed opinion, and despite the following two links’ authors being plug-in developers for MT, I think they make valid points:

First Brad Choate, uber MT God, and then MT-Blacklist author Jay Allen.

Upon reflection, I support Six Apart as a young company. They aren’t open source, it’s not a GPL piece of software and never has been. It’s a few people trying to kick off a business. Some of these people complaining run many blogs on the MT platform AND they probably have day jobs too to pay the rent. The bottom line is: How much is MT worth to you? And, how many donated under the previous honour system?

Maybe we’ve come to think that everything should be free on the net. The fact is, for a lot of people the MT platform makes their life a lot easier, a lot of companies use it; a lot of commercial websites use it (and yes, I include bloggers who run adverts on their pages in there). How many paid? Some people make money from ads on pages which run MT and see no reason to divert some of that cash to SixApart?

Will I stay with MT? Well, MT2.661 is serving me fine. Will I go to 3? Maybe, and even though I qualify for the Free version, I may donate anyway - I get value from it. However, when I look at the feature list, as a small time end-user, it doesn’t leave me drooling.

Maybe I’ll go to WordPress and follow my GPL obsession. Whichever way it goes, in the cold light of day I think it’s made a lot of people think about their blog, and their software. I hope a lot of people are honest with themselves and pay if they conclude that it’s money for something you use every day, doing something you care about - past, present and in the future.

MovableType to charge

Sat, 15 May 2004 22:15:54 +0000

Well, just a short time after Blogger’s new look and new features, so Movable Type have announced their MT3 Developer Edition, and hints on the new licensing they’ll use. One of the founders explains parts of it, but as you can tell by the comments on the bottom, virtually no-one is in favour of them.

I haven’t fully digested the license, but there’s a good chance I would have to pay for MT3 on this site… or just stay on this version, which is no bad thing. So far MT2.x has been donation ware - if you use it, you can donate money for it if you like. I must say that I DO donate for software like this that I use, and I see no reason not to. Six Apart, the developers of MT, have simply gone Pro on this release and obviously need/want a bit more payback from it. This I can understand, but at the moment some of the fees people are calculating are a huge increase. Remember - a huge increase generally means they were running lots of blog with lots of authors on big machines - maybe even be companies themselves.

I’m sure in the business meeting, Six Apart hoped many people would flock to their TypePad service for smaller blogs, but with Google now pushing their Blogger much more heavily, MT could’ve chosen the wrong time to do it. Also, there are now several fully open source Weblog engines around such as WordPress.

It’s not all over yet. The Developer Edition is not the general release and there is time to Six Apart to amend it, but I don’t see it coming - I see a lot of people staying on 2.661, other more tech savvy people getting a different (free) system, and the rest using Blogger.

In some respects, maybe too many didn’t donate?

Maybe more on this later.