Fully Restored

Thanks to Yahoo's backup scheme, I have now managed to restore all of the post content that got wiped out by a RapidWeaver snafu.

I'm still not sure if Blogger is going to stick as the engine of my blog (the main deficiency being the inability to create a tag cloud on sites not hosted at BlogSpot).

This Is Now A RapidWeaver Free-Zone

After my catastrophic loss of data, I managed to recover about 90% of my posts. There are a couple of weeks of posts missing, and if I can, I'll try to reconstruct them, but for now, they're toast.

I'm totally off RapidWeaver now. I have migrated to Blogger. It took a little doing, since you can't easily bulk import data into Blogger, even with their beta import feature.

I'm looking into using a client to make posts, the two main contenders being Ecto and MarsEdit. I'm leaning toward MarsEdit right now, but I'm not totally sold on either product.

Some deficiencies with the restore - none of the recovered posts currently have tags. Since getting the posts back were priority one, the tags will reappear over time slowly. There might be some glitches, but I'll be making more adjustments over the next little while.

In many ways, I'm glad to have my blog back in the cloud. It's hard to abandon a paid software license, but if you can't trust the software to not lose critical data, it's a totally lost cause. Goodbye RapidWeaver, I hardly even knew ya.

Apologies, Site Broken

RapidWeaver managed to corrupt the data file for the site.

Now my site is full of empty and broken links beyond the front page.

WONDERFUL.

Words can’t describe my feeling, but the site is going to be dry for a few weeks as I decide a course of action for this site. I’ll probably lose a few weeks of data between what I currently have and my last backup.

Nevertheless, RapidWeaver is now dead to me.

Server Side No More

Well, hopefully this is the final platform change in the neverending effort that is the web site of Steven Ng. With a life that is as busy as it is, the blog format really isn't working.

I think the best way to approach such an infrequently updated web site is to keep it down to the basics and focus on a few key areas that are of interest to me:

• Tips for Mac Switchers
  
• Handy Lifehacking Tips
  
• Music I'm Listening To
  
• My Movie Watchlist
  
• Recent Good Reads
  
• Handy Tech Cheatsheets
  
• Any Nifty Tools I've Written
  
• Game Reviews
  
• Media Serving in the Home
  

I've never really been able to truly recover from leaving Blogger several years ago, being the control freak that I am. I haven't found that any server-based solution has really worked for me since. I've tried GeekLog, WordPress and MediaWiki. While great tools, they just weren't what I needed or was looking for. In the end, most of my posts were done on my iMac, so why not go back to the fat client?

Since I had an unused license for RapidWeaver from MacHeist 1, I figured I'd finally give it a shot. Of course, I had to pay to upgrade to the latest version, but it was well worth it. (And who says that Heist users don't pay for upgrades, eh, Gruber?)

In all fairness, I don't think RapidWeaver will be the only tool I'll be using for this site - it will probably be a combination of RapidWeaver (content and publishing), Coda (template coding) and CSSEdit (stylesheets). CSSEdit was a fortuitous acquisition from MacHeist 2. Image editing will be done via Pixelmator and iStockPhoto.

If you haven't noticed a trend, I'm a big supporter of independent software for the Macintosh. The greatest thing about indie software for the Mac is that you get fully functioned, polished software at a very reasonable price.

The template is not set yet, but I hope you keep coming back and enjoy what you see.

Cheers!