thirdbIT

So we’ve moved the site over to Wordpress from Typo. We experimented with two rails-based blogging engines, Typo and Mephisto (which seems more popular in the rails world right now), but Wordpress is a mature and widely adopted platform and in the end it made more sense to us to go with it. We’d rather not be solving software problems others have solved a million times over. (Which is why we also won’t be producing a to-do-list app any time soon. Online to-do lists! A billion to choose from, and yet somehow, none of them make my work get done. Though actually, I just bought a copy of the PDF book Flexible Rails, since I’ve decided to pick up AS3/Flex in my spare time, and the tutorial project in the book is, of course, an online to-do list.)

I’ve been delaying posting this notice because I keep looking for a blog post I read a month ago which convinced me I ought to think about Wordpress, as it was an explanation for a rails blog running on WP, and a damn good explanation at that. But I can’t for the life of me find it again. I found several other people who moved to WP after experimenting with the rails blogging engines, but not the post I remember. The explanation was, basically: right tool for right job. WP is good tool for blogging. No need to reinvent. Etc. Except the post was more eloquent than my restatement. Oh well. Lost in the ether.

Also, Max had to run a cron job doing some voodoo the details of which I forget to keep the Typo instance in good shape. Wordpress is faster, and, we hope, more stable. (No, I am not making a comment about the stability and speed of Ruby on Rails in general, just a statement about one instance of one app on one host. YMMV.)

Anyway, Max has a script for migrating the database from Typo to WP, and he’ll post it any second now.

Max and I have another blog. It’s lightly anonymous, and we’re trying to maintain some semblance of separation between that online life and this one. We refuse to have only a professional online existence, because our lives are not just about work. Not that there’s any way we’ll keep all personal references out of this one. But, you know, in general, we’re gonna try not to talk about politics, sex, mental illness, cute things our kids do, etc., here on three bits.

But I can’t stand the idea of feeling like we’re ‘hiding’ something, or always worrying about covering our tracks between the blogs, or that someone will discover our other blog and feel shocked and betrayed by the information that is on it. So I’d like to take this opportunity to give you the highlights of our other blog:

We think George Bush should be impeached. We’re members of Amnesty International and the ACLU. Our kids are brilliant and beautiful, and say really funny things all the time. They are most certainly geniuses. When I was pregnant with my older kid, Ari, I got suddenly suicidally depressed and had to go on sick leave. Those darn hormones, what kidders they are! With Aya I puked the whole time and was so anemic I had to get a blood transfusion. Again, those crazy female hormones. Love ‘em. I don’t plan to get pregnant again, ever. We’re concerned about global warming and peak oil, and we worship Al Gore, and while we wish he would run for President, we’re not actually sure he should, for his own sake, not because he’d be a bad president, because he wouldn’t be, he’d be an amazing one. We’re into local, organic, small-farm foods. We insist on continuing to call Whole Foods Bread and Circus, and think it was the stupidest marketing decision ever for them to change the name. I mean, where would you rather shop? Obviously at a circus. Um, what else? Oh, we swear. We hate Hummers. We are sometimes intemperate. In our other online life, I still write more than Max. Not such a blabbermouth as his wife, he’s not. Or, as Willow once said “I too know the love of a taciturn man.” That’s a Buffy reference.

Okay then, that’s pretty much it. Hope you’re satisfied now.