The single user Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard upgrade is only $29 and the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack (5-User) is only $49.

There now. Feel free to click if you love me. Or don’t. Regardless, $30 is a great deal. We bought a Mac mini at the beginning of July, so we can get the Snow Leopard upgrade for that machine for $10, it still makes more sense just to get the Family Pack for $50.

Although you don’t get the Apple Store experience buying from Amazon.com, you do get free shipping. And no tax.

w00t.

For instance, as cool as it is to have the ability to “ping” Twitter or Friendfeed or Facebook or whatever as soon as I post (negating using a WordPress plugin — and I have to use two, since Twitter Tools stopped tweeting my blog updates like, 6 months ago), I found out the hard way that it tweeted (or it triggered the tweet-function of one of the plugins) just by instituting a post preview. Ultimate fail.

The pros:

• The interface is slick — though I don’t absolutely love it, it is nice for stuff like dragging and dropping pictures (instant crop and whatnot)
  
• The blog-preview mechanism, though quirky with Twitter, automatically gets my template stuff intact. It isn’t a big deal to have to manually edit MarsEdit, but doing it instantly is certainly nicer.
  
• The support for ExpressionEngine is pretty hawt. I know MarsEdit does it, but it does it in kind of a kludgy way (and that’s the fault of multiple fields rather than ME itself, IMHO).
  
• Works as a Twitter or Microblog client too.
  
• Bookmarklet works with Vimeo, Flickr, YouTube, etc. for Tumblr like support.
  
• Built-in ping support for lots of other services.
  

Now the cons:

• The interface, while clean, is way more kludgy than it should be.
  
• Copied links aren’t auto-filled and changing a link is more difficult than it should be.
  
• The list mode, while attractive to look at, is annoying to use as you have to double return to get a new bullet and press the button to toggle between ordered, unordered and off.
  
• No excerpt field. That sucks
  
• Tags and keywords are on the same line and can be hard to differentiate.
  
• Said Twitter issues/conflict with other plugin.
  
• Doesn’t feel complete.
  

So ultimately, I think I’m going to give this a pass. I’ll try it again in the coming days, but right now, it isn’t as good as MarsEdit, even if some aspects have a little more exterior polish.

I had an amazing time, and I met so many incredibly cool people. The fellow speakers on my panel, Jeff Croft, Dan Rubin and Garrett Dimon are all amazing, and it was a true honor to meet and speak with them. Seriously, you guys rock my world. Thank you to everyone who was nice enough to attend our session and for your feedback and comments.

J. Cornelius at Coffee Cup and everyone from Blue Flavor were such amazing hosts (Keith, Nick, and Jeff again — you all rock).

Over and beyond that, I met so many awesome people and attendees, I can’t adequately list them all now.

I’m going on vacation for a few days with Grant, so I’ll have plenty of time to write stuff up more coherently.

Suffice to say, I had an amazing weekend, met great people, drank great drinks and learned a LOT. Oh — and Grant finally saw the beauty in Django. So we can now be nerds who hack together. Yay!

Out!

Nothing has made me more sad than the total lack of a blogging application for the BlackBerry. Within two weeks of launching the App Store, both TypePad and WordPress. Meanwhile, I’ve spent like 4 and a half months trying to find a decent WordPress or other blogging app for BlackBerry, with no luck.

Thanks to the always wonderful Twitter, I was alerted to the fact that SixApart actually released a TypePad app for BlackBerry back in May. So close, yet so far (if it were 2003 and I were looking to migrate from LiveJournal to a hosted service, I would have probably gone to TypePad — but it is 2008 and I want my own software installation — I’m sticking with WordPress unless Expression Engine 2.0 blows me away or I decide to roll my own Django thing). Fortunately, I decided to try Google again for BlackBerry blogging apps. Although the BlackBerry market of good third-party software is woefully underdeveloped, I am excited to say I have discovered a workable MetaWeblog API solution.

The program is called BBMetaBlog and as best I can tell, it was developed as a blogging tool for the Lotus Note and Lotus Domino servers/platforms. As such, things like categories and tagging is all handled by a different application that is designed to run on Lotus Domino servers. However, because Domino/Notes uses the MetaWeblog API for its blogging engine, any XML-RPC capable platform, meaning WordPress, can take advantage.

Neato. There are a few caveats:

• Because this was developed to work with a pre-existing blog system, tags and categories don’t work. I haven’t messed around with it enough to find out if you create a default category if that will pass through or not. If it will, I might just make my default category “BlackBerry Mobile” or “Mobile Posts” to help keep things clean.
• While it appears as if you CAN edit past entries, those entries don’t actually show up to be able to see them to edit.

Still, it’s better than nothing.

To get this to work (and I’m running everything off of a BlackBerry 8320 running 4.2.2 (they haven’t updated to 4.5 in the States yet, at least not at T-Mobile)), download the program using the OTA link above. Run the application and click on the “Configure” button. Enter in the username and password for you WordPress blog (or other MetaWeblog API blog software) and leave Location and Category at their defaults. On the line that says access URL, for WordPress users, enter in: http://www.yourblogdomain.com/xmlrpc.php — other MetaWeblog API programs might have a slightly different syntax, so check with your software.

That’s it.

Now you can create new posts and send them straight from your BlackBerry!

Note about WordPress 2.6 and later If your first installation of WordPress was version 2.6 or later and you have never used a third-party blog client before, you need to enable Remote Blogging from the Settings –> Writing tab:

Just make sure you select XML-RPC.

If I knew anything about programming for BlackBerry, I’d try to take on this thing (since it is Open Source) and modify it to work better. Until then (or until a better option becomes available), this will suffice.

In the comments of that entry, Patrick was running into some problems — it seemed like maybe he had missed a step. It occurred to me that it might be really beneficial to have the entire process documented in a screencast, because some people do better with a visual guide, and for anyone unfamiliar with their command line, seeing what you are supposed to do can be really, really helpful.

So I whipped up a video tutorial on Thursday. I wanted to have it posted earlier, but I wanted to stream it as a QuickTime file (for optimum quality/performance) and I had to tweak the settings of the QTSS server I’m using and then figure out the best way to embed the content. I was out all day yesterday and I didn’t really get a chance to look seriously at embed options until this morning. The solution I ended up using is Shadowbox, a JavaScript AJAXy media player.

You need QuickTime or VLC or something to view the file. If you need it in another format, I can try to acquiesce

For the demo, I’m assuming you are using my backup_server.sh script, but the steps are the same even if you are using your own.

Small Player

Medium Player

Super Huge Player

Enjoy! If you have any more questions, just leave them here and I’ll try my best to answer them.

Update: I posted a video tutorial that walks through all of these steps here. I still recommend reading through this page because the video tutorial assumes that you will be following these steps.

This a tutorial for creating an automated back-up system for (mt) Media Temple’s (gs) Grid Service. Although it will almost certainly work on other servers and configurations, this is written for users who are on the Grid who want an easy way to do automated backups. I personally feel most comfortable having my most important files backed-up offsite, so I use Amazon’s S3 service. S3 is fast, super cheap (you only pay for what you use) and reliable. I use S3 to store my website backups and my most important computer files. I spend about $1.50 a month, and that is for nearly 10 GBs of storage.

You can alter the script to simply store the data in a separate location on your server (where you can then just FTP or SSH in and download the compressed archive), but this process is assuming that you are using both the (gs) and S3.

This tutorial assumes that you know how to login to your (gs) via SSH using either the Terminal in OS X or Linux or PuTTY for Windows. If SSH is still confusing, check out (mt)‘s Knowledge Base article and take a deep breath. It looks more scary than it really is.

Acknowledgements

I would be remiss if I didn’t give a GIGANTIC shout-out to David at Stress Free Zone and Paul Stamatiou (I met Paul at the Tweet-up in March) who both wrote great guides to backing stuff up server side to S3. I blatantly stole from both of them and rolled my own script that is a combination of the two. Seriously, thank you both for your awesome articles.

Furthermore, none of this would even be possible without the brilliant S3Sync Ruby utility.

Installing S3Sync

Although PHP and Perl script exist to connect with the S3 servers, the Ruby solution that the S3Sync dudes created is much, much better.

The (gs) already has Ruby on it (version 1.8.5 as of this writing), which is up-to-date enough for S3Sync.

OK, so log-in to your (gs) via SSH. My settings (and the defaults for (gs), I assume) are to place you in the .home directory as soon as you login to SSH.

Once you are at the command line, type in the following command:

wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/ServEdge_pub/s3sync/s3sync.tar.gz

This will download the latest S3Sync tarball to your .home folder

tar xvzf s3sync.tar.gz

This uncompresses the archive to its own directory.

rm s3sync.tar.gz</p>

<p>cd s3sync</p>

<p>mkdir certs</p>

<p>cd certs</p>

<p>wget http://mirbsd.mirsolutions.de/cvs.cgi/~checkout~/src/etc/ssl.certs.shar</p>

<p>sh ssl.certs.shar</p>

<p>cd ..</p>

<p>mkdir s3backup

That will delete the compressed archive, make a directory for certificates (certs), download an SSL certificate generator script, execute that script and create a backup directory within the s3sync directory called “s3backup.”

Now, all you need to do is edit two files in your newly created s3sync folder. You can use TextEdit, TextMate, NotePad or any other text editor to edit these files. You are only going to be changing a few of the values.

I edited the files via Transmit, but you can use vi straight from the command line if you are comfortable.

The first file you want to edit is called s3config.yml.sample

You want to edit that file so that the aws_access_key and aws_secret_access_key fields correspond to those from your S3 account. You can find those in the Access Information area after logging into Amazon.com’s Web Services page.

Make sure that the ssl_cert_dir: has the following value (if you created your s3sync folder in the .home directory): /home/xxxxx/users/.home/s3sync/certs were xxxxx is the name of your server.

You can get your entire access path by typing in

pwd

Save that file as s3config.yml

The next step is something I had to do in order to get the s3 part of the script to connect, but it may not be required for all server set-ups, but it was for the (gs).

Edit the s3config.rb file so that the area that says

confpath = [xxxxx]

looks like this

confpath = ["./", "#{ENV['S3CONF']}", "#{ENV['HOME']}/.s3conf", "/etc/s3conf"]

Writing the backup script (or editing mine)

OK, that was the hard part. The rest is pretty simple.

I created the following backup script called, “backup_server.sh” This script will backup the content of the domain directories you specify (because if you are like me, some of your domain folders are really just symlinks) and all of your MySQL databases. It will then upload each directory and database in its own compressed archive to the S3 Bucket of your choice. Buckets are unique, so create a Bucket using either the S3Fox tool or Transmit or another S3 manager that is specific for your website.

This is the content of the script:

#!/bin/sh</p>

<h1>A list of website directories to back up</h1>

<p>websites="site1.com site2.com site3.com"</p>

<h1>The destination directory to backup the files to</h1>

<p>destdir=/home/xxxxx/users/.home/s3sync/s3backup</p>

<h1>The directory where all website domain directories reside</h1>

<p>domaindir=/home/xxxxx/users/.home/domains</p>

<h1>The MySQL database hostname</h1>

<p>dbhost=internal-db.sxxxxx.gridserver.com</p>

<h1>The MySQL database username - requires read access to databases</h1>

<p>dbuser=dbxxxxx</p>

<h1>The MySQL database password</h1>

<p>dbpassword=xxxxxxx</p>

<p>echo <code>date</code> ": Beginning backup process..." > $destdir/backup.log</p>

<h1>remove old backups</h1>

<p>rm $destdir/*.tar.gz</p>

<h1>backup databases</h1>

<p>for dbname in <code>echo 'show databases;' | /usr/bin/mysql -h $dbhost -u$dbuser -p$dbpassword</code>
do
if [ $dbname != "Database" ];
then
echo <code>date</code> ": Backing up database $dbname..." >> $destdir/backup.log
/usr/bin/mysqldump --opt -h $dbhost -u$dbuser -p$dbpassword $dbname > $destdir/$dbname.sql
tar -czf $destdir/$dbname.sql.tar.gz $destdir/$dbname.sql
rm $destdir/$dbname.sql
fi
done</p>

<h1>backup web content</h1>

<p>echo <code>date</code> ": Backing up web content..." >> $destdir/backup.log
for website in $websites
do
echo <code>date</code> ": Backing up website $website..." >> $destdir/backup.log
tar -czf $destdir/$website.tar.gz $domaindir/$website
done</p>

<p>echo <code>date</code> ": Backup process complete." >> $destdir/backup.log</p>

<h1>The directory where s3sync is installed</h1>

<p>s3syncdir=/home/xxxxx/users/.home/s3sync</p>

<h1>The directory where the backup archives are stored</h1>

<p>backupdir=/home/xxxxx/users/.home/s3sync/s3backup</p>

<h1>The S3 bucket a.k.a. directory to upload the backups into</h1>

<p>s3bucket=BUCKET-NAME</p>

<p>cd $s3syncdir
./s3sync.rb $backupdir/ $s3bucket:

For (mt) Media Temple (gs) Grid Server users, you just need to change the “site1.com” values to your own domains (you can do as many as you want) and substitute all the places where marked “xxxxx” with your server number (again, you can find this by entering “pwd” at the command line) and with your database password (which is visible in the (mt) control panel under the “Database” module.

Make sure you change the value at the end of the script that says “BUCKET-NAME” to the name of the S3 Bucket you want to store you backups in.

Now that you have edited the script, upload it to your /data directory.

Change the permissions (you can do this either via SSH

chmod a+x backup_server.sh

Now, test the script.

In the command line type this in:

cd data</p>

<p>./backup_server.sh</p>

<p>

And watch the magic. Assuming everything was correctly input, an archived version of all your domain directories and all of your MySQL databases will be put in a folder called “s3backup” and then uploaded directly to your S3 server. Next time you run the script, the backup files will be replaced.

Check to make sure that the script is working the way you want it to work.

Automate the script

You can either run the script manually from the command line or set it to run automatically. I’ve set mine to run each night at midnight. To set up the cron job, just click on the Cron Jobs button in the (mt) Admin area:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

and set you parameters. The path for your script is: /home/xxxxx/data/backup_server.sh.

Enjoy your backups!

One note: The compressed domain archives retain their entire directory structure, as such, there is a .home directory that may not appear in Finder or Windows Explorer unless you have invisible or hidden files turned on. Don’t worry, all your data is still retained in those archives.

Update (7/27/2008): If you are getting an error that says something like Permanent redirect received. Try setting AWS_CALLING_FORMAT to SUBDOMAIN

Add the following array to your s3config.yml file AWS_CALLING_FORMAT: SUBDOMAIN

The error is either because your bucket is in the EU or there is something else funky with its URL structure. Changing that value should allow the script to perform as intended.

Edit: OK — That worked just fine. I’m on an Intel Mac, Leopard 10.5.2 — using the latest version of Flash and I just inserted the image from the Post page in WordPress. I selected the image, added the parameters I wanted and clicked “insert into post” — then I set-up my formatting.

Update 2: The AWESOME Mark Jaquith just added a comment — apparently this is either a Bad Behavior plugin incompatibility (so use Akismet or Defensio and disable BB for now) or something with the mod_security Apache module — which may be falsely marking WP 2.5 as malicious code. If you have Apache access, I guess you could try whitelisting WordPress (not sure how to do that — anyone smarter, chime in), but this is probably something you’ll want to bitch to your host about.

Thanks Mark!!

So, earlier this week I posted about how successful my WordPress 2.5 move was — and it was — and talked about how I was going to be moving to Media Temple. Well, that move didn’t go quite as smoothly as I had hoped — but in ways that were pretty much all my fault. I figured I would take the time to share what I did correctly, and what I totally fucked up in doing — in the hopes that some other people might be saved some headache/heartache.

To start, I should provide some background. Back in November of 2003, 1and1 was making its big US debut and they offered 3 years of free hosting (including, I believe, a domain name — for one year) for free to people who signed up under some special plan. Now, at the time, I had been paying for my domain, filmmania.net for about three or four years (I can’t remember if I signed up for it the summer of 1999 or 2000, probably 2000) because I was like, “hells yeah, I’m finally going to create my awesome web site” and then it was just a custom e-mail address for like 3 years. So I signed up, thinking that I would actually do something this time. I’m a huge liar, as it took ANOTHER FOUR YEARS for me to get off my ass. I’m awesome. In that four years, I’ve gone from the free package to the Home package to the Business package. All without doing anything but storing my MP3s and legally (coughyeah, rightcough) obtained software on the server.

Although I had never been fond of 1and1’s tech support, or lack thereof, I had seldom actually needed to contact them. I figured I would see how my blog was doing, evaluate my hosting needs, blah blah blah. Well, other than some ugly downtime in January — and the increasing unreliability of their mail servers (which used to be freaking fantastic — now I’m stuck using Google Apps, which I really don’t love — but am thinking about paying for a good mail only account somewhere to host my MX tables…whatever), the service has remained fine. Not great, but fine.

When I decided to launch an upcoming video project, I knew I wanted to be with a more reliable host — and not on the typical shared hosting system. To me, it was worth paying twice as much a month do that (in truth, if it ever comes down to it, I’ll freaking get a dedicated server and manage it myself — I’d rather not, but I’ll do that — I’m frugal, but not cheap, especially when it comes to services — and I stayed with 1and1 more because I had been there for SO long rather than the price), so I signed up with Media Temple at the end of February.

My biggest fear in canceling my 1and1 account was retaining my domains. In addition to the three package provided domains I had as part of my Business packages, I had four or five other domains and the instructions from 1and1 were ambiguous at best in terms of cancelling hosting but not domain registration. Plus, Google turned up plenty of horror stories. In order to limit the fallout of canceling my account as much as possible, I created a new “domain only” 1and1 account and started to migrate all my domains there. This is why most of my domains just lead to a landing page. I need to create a new one in Media Temple and direct them all to that directory/DNS, but whatever. Over the last month, I went ahead and migrated every URL over to the domain only account, got Google Apps to handle e-mail, blah blah blah. The last one to remain was christinawarren.com — which was still on my 1and1 hosting account. So I had to transfer it to the new domain only 1and1 account (what, they have great domain prices and I’m fine with keeping them there) and then change the name severs to Media Temple and blah blah blah. Hence, I knew downtime would be coming.

OK, sorry for making you read all of that — for the actual crux of the post,

Although I had planned for the extended DNS downtime (I had no way to access the refresh time on the DNS server), backed up my MySQL database from 1and1 and prepared to move swiftly, I still made some mistakes.

1. Not realizing that my WordPress URL settings would affect where the site itself was directed — meaning, that while I was waiting for the DNS to update, I couldn’t have my blog already in place because my database back-up just re-directed to christinawarren.com, which was still not resolving. What I SHOULD have done was backup the important tables, posts, pages, comments, etc. and skipped users and wp-config settings. That way I could have manually changed that after the DNS resolved, but still had access to my site and known what everything looked like. Instead, I had to wait for the DNS to resolve to the new address and then configure the blog — this was problematic because…
2. The backup that I had from my site (WordPress runs an automatic backup thanks to this plugin and e-mails me the MySQL file every Sunday morning) was done prior to my WordPress 2.5 upgrade. This wasn’t hugely problematic, but it meant that my easiest course of database backup was missing my most recent entry/comment. I actually hadn’t planned on using this backup at all, I just figured I’d dump the MySQL database from my other phpAdmin setup and reimport, as I have on my MAMP installs. This was compounded by the fact that the export I did from my old MySQL database wouldn’t import properly at first. I was a dumbass and didn’t realize I had to comment out (or just delete) the “create database name XXX” line at the beginning of the file, so that my new phpAdmin would be able to accept it. What I SHOULD have done was run a complete backup, including all plugin tables BEFORE ever changing the DNS entries. Upon first running into the MySQL import error (and at that point, I was even having problems importing the older backup from Sunday that I had NOT intended on using), I did something VERY, VERY stupid:
3. I changed the DNS/nameservers back to 1and1. It only took an hour or so to propagate — I figured switching it back wouldn’t be that time consuming and then I could do a proper backup. In theory, this would have made sense. But remember that whole part about how I switched my domain name to a domain only package? Yeah. BIG MISTAKE. Big. Huge. (that’s from Pretty Woman, by the way) It didn’t take long for me to realize that I couldn’t just point the DNS back to 1and1 because at this point, my domain was no longer on the same account as the hosted files — and trying to set it at its hosted directory on the OTHER account was painful and while probably technically possible, no fun whatsoever. Huge mess. Huge, huge mess. I thought I would be able to get it to point at another site, the one domain that was still ostensibly linking to my 1and1 hosted files (meaning I’d just redirect christinwarren.com to boxtopfilms.com which was pointed at the WordPress directory on my host), but the fact that WordPress was setup thinking that christinawarren.com was the blog’s URL caused the site to redirect from boxtopfilms back to christinawarren.com which then just redirected back to itself in an endless loop. So I couldn’t access the admin page of WordPress to do an in-blog backup and my website was just a mess of redirects to itself with massive errors for anyone visiting. I changed the name servers BACK to Media Temple, wanting to forget the whole nastiness every happened. At this point, I went to bed

When I woke up Friday, I was able to retry uploading my backup MySQL database and that got things working, I was just missing the entry from Sunday morning. Later that afternoon, Grant informed me that I needed to comment out stuff to get the MySQL working properly, I successfully got the full file up in a new database, switched databases, and voila.

So, in short:

*Don’t compound a mistake by making a bigger mistake. *Make sure you do a complete in-WordPress backup BEFORE switching hosts *Don’t compound a mistake by making a bigger mistake (this one is important)

The end.

Out.

So now that I have had the phone for a little over a week, I figured I might as well write up my thoughts, particularly from a Mac-user standpoint.

The Phone

The Size

The device itself is simply awesome. Although I had played around with Grant’s Curve a bit, I was still sort of hesitant in the whole Curve/Pearl debate. Since early 2001, I’ve always had small form factor phones. The best cell phone I have ever owned, the Nokia 8290 (oh, how I loved that phone. LOVED. The Samsung flip/color phone that I replaced it with was junk, the Sony Ericson look alike was awful, and the Magenta Razr captured my heart, but not in the same way) was incredibly tiny and I like being able to have a phone I can stick in my pocket. Keep in mind, I’m a size 0, so my pockets are a bit smaller than most. So it wasn’t ever really a debate over features, Curve won that battle easily, it was about size. Ultimately, Wi-Fi canceled everything else out and I stopped considering the Pearl.

I can honestly say that I’m really, really happy with the size of the phone. It’s the same thickness as m Razr is when closed, only slightly longer and actually, only slightly wider. I can’t quite put it in my pocket, but I can slip it into a small handbag. Plus the belt clip case I bought (again, that’s an Amazon.com affiliate link — but seriously, I wish I had searched Amazon before buying from Crackberry, it was $20 there and $30 directly from BlackBerry. I overpaid for the silicon cover too.) is still small and compact.

The Feel

The screen and text is very readable, especially after I tweaked the default font. It’s bright, but still works well under direct sunlight. When using the default browser or Opera Mini (can I just comment on how bizarre it is to actually have a reason to use Opera? Freaky.), everything looks nice and graphics are clean and clear. Opera does a great job (!) with re-creating that “real” web experience. It isn’t the iPhone, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the Razr.

The keyboard, is unsurprisingly, the absolute best in the business. I’ve already mastered thumbing with one hand. Yes, I’m officially that annoying BB user. Le sigh. I have always hated T9 typing. Hated it. I hated it so much, I almost never sent SMS messages because it would mean either plodding through with T9’s sucktastickness or resorting to typing like AIM a la middle school (i.e.. “r u there? wh8 r u doing 2day?”), and to be honest, I rejected the impulse to type like a moron in 8th grade, I really didn’t like the idea of doing it as an adult. The downside? Now that I can send e-mail, SMS and MMS messages (and do IM) so quickly, people are going to think I’ve lost my mind. OK, so it’ll be nothing new for my Twitterati, but everyone else might be disturbed/alarmed/surprised.

The Phone

Everything else aside, this is still primary a phone for me. I don’t have a landline anymore and my cell phone IS my lifeline. The main reason I had to get a new phone was because my old phone had this annoying little quirk of, I don’t know, not letting me answer calls, randomly shutting off, randomly shutting its LCD screen off while still working, fun stuff like that. My mom thinks I just wanted a new phone — and I won’t lie, I did, but if this was just about buying a new toy, I would have made this purchase back in October, when I was first allowed to according to my contract — not at the end of February.

So far, voice quality has been great. I haven’t used the speaker phone that much, but it’s nice — and everything else is very, very clear.

I’ve asked people who call me how I sound and have received absolutely no complaints. I’ll also give the thumbs up to T-Mobile’s whole UMA thing — basically it allows the phone to switch from the EDGE signal to wi-fi depending on what signal is stronger, and it makes the transition seamlessly. I’m not paying the separate UMA fee for unlimited calls from wi-fi, but I would certainly consider it if I found I needed more minutes.

The interface

All in all, I’m impressed. It’s an easy to use and intuitive phone, obviously there is some learning curve — though I’m pretty learning curve immune for most products. The average user would probably have to take a few days to get used to the whole thing. Really, I just needed to learn the shortcuts for stuff.

The default web browser leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, it is a huge improvement over my last phone, but it’s not a great experience. Furthermore, I’d like to be able to make Opera Mini my default browser. Opera is actually kind of kickass. Who’da thought, right?

As for the other built-in apps, like BB Messenger and the e-mail and whatnot, no complaints. I do wish RTF e-mail was available — apparently that is coming with the next software update. As it stands, you can pay $30 for HTML mail now, but I’m not going to do that.

Im still trying to figure out the best Twitter option. I don’t know the Twitter shortcuts for SMS sending very well, so I haven’t used it that much. SXSWi is in like five days, so I better learn. I wish that there was a Twitterrific for the BB that would let you directly reply and send DMs to tweets. Twitterberry is a great interface, but without that feature, I almost wonder if I should just subscribe to SMS updates of people I frequently tweet with or what.

I haven’t used too many BlackBerry apps, and I don’t want to judge third-party software in this review, but as I use it more and more, I’m sure I’ll come to have my favorites/least favorites.

Conclusion

For a phone, I couldn’t be happier. I’m finding more and more things that I like every day. I still need to test voice notes to see if there is a delay, as some other users have experienced — but as a phone, I love it.

Synching with the Mac

And now the second part of the review, how well does the BB integrate with the Mac? For reference, I’m on a BlackBook 2.16 C2D with 2 GB of RAM running the latest version of Leopard (OS X 10.5.2 as of this writing).

Going into this, I knew that the BlackBerry was not natively supported on the Mac. Like Windows Mobile, third-party syncing solutions do exist. Plus, I have VMWare Fusion (again, affiliate link but if you are interested in running Windows or another OS on your Intel Mac, Fusion is hands-down, the BEST. And it’s $42 after rebate from Amazon, which is awesome), so I know that if I absolutely need to use BlackBerry Connect, I can.

Although there are Mac synching solutions available, for users who are not on a BES (the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, meaning, users like me who are not using it primarily through their employer), those options are far from robust. The two big options are PocketMac for BlackBerry, which is now a free download and MissingSync for BlackBerry.

Let me save everyone $40 right now — MissingSync is total crap. It outright sucks. I had originally installed PocketMac, because it was free and I wanted to give it a spin. To use MissingSync, I had to uninstall PocketMac. OK, well that makes testing side by side kind of hard, but whatever.

I used it for about five minutes, it promptly fucked up my address book synching system (I had just gotten my computer address book the way I wanted it too, and I specifically said for it to overwrite the address book on the phone) only to have the old address book on my phone’s SIM card come back to me. Joy.

It was also slow as hell, didn’t look like it offered a way to install programs (which PocketMac can at least sort of do) and the interface was pretty terrible. Fail. Total, total fail.

PocketMac isn’t a complete win — I quickly learned to NEVER under any circumstances sync my e-mail on my Berry with my Inbox (meaning that the Berry mail would be downloaded) because it doesn’t either account for duplicates or the fact that it went to a different inbox messed things up, I don’t know — it took forever and made my fans come on at full blast. I’ve got to investigate IMAP support for the Berry to see if I want to try doing that. That might be the best thing.

So synching mail is something you don’t want to try, but synching address books was easy — you know, as long as Missing Sync doesn’t come along and reimport all the shit from your SIM card and overwrite everything. It says it can install programs, but I haven’t gone through lots of testing in that regard. I can charge my BB from the USB PC connection, so that’s nice. I still have to play around in terms of ring tones and wallpaper transfers. Something tells me I’ll need VMWare for that to really happen.

I hate that Bluetooth doesn’t work on my BlackBerry with my Mac. PocketMac only works with USB — not with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Rumor has it RIM is developing a Mac version of BlackBerry connect — I really, really hope they do — as it would help me out a lot.

Final Verdict

After like 9 days with this thing, I’m in love. I can totally see myself becoming even more addicted. And although Mac integration isn’t great, it’s not awful. PocketMac, which is free, gets the job done — the $40 MissingSync is total crap, but at least I don’t have to pay for something just so it will work.

As for the phone — it rules.

What I hadn’t really taken into account, until I saw Linda’s comment, was that stuff that I write as merely an exercise in venting my frustration, can potentially impact how people perceive a product/tool. Whoops. I’ll try to clearly mark that kind of stuff in the future. I don’t intend to use this site/blog the same way I used my journal all those years, but I also don’t intend to stop writing about the more mundane blatherings/bitchings.

I’m working on a more thorough analysis for Download Squad, but after reading Linda’s comment, I thought now might be a good time to share some of my own evaluations/thoughts on the different blogging platforms/Content Management Systems. Aside from actually kicking myself in the ass enough to do it, choosing a blogging platform was as much of a roadblock for me to start this site as finding a good design. In fact, I’d say those two things were the two elements I let allow me to put off starting this pseudo-professional space for as long as I have.

Every six or seven months for the past couple of years, I kept coming back to the question, “what blogging platform should I choose?” I would type in comparisons for WordPress and Movable Type, hope to find something recent, try to read up about how something worked with my host, hope that that was recent, etc., etc. I would dabble with a few here and there, but because I love to procrastinate (and am great at rationalizing my procrastination), it took me a long time to get to where I am.

In the last month or so, I have taken a much closer look not only at WordPress (which I am using to run this site), but also the newly released Movable Type 4.1 OS, the RC2 candidate for Drupal 6 and the recently released Joomla 1.5

Read on to see some of my brief thoughts on each. As I said, I hope to have a more thorough evaluation up on Download Squad soon. Worst case scenario, I’ll just do the series here.

1. WordPress (.org)

Pros:

• Free
• HUGE user community for support/plugins/themes
• Very, very easy to set-up, especially for people who still get squeamish over FTP (to those people: start getting comfortable or go with a hosted solution — you have to use FTP if you want to maintain your own site/blog)
• Supports multiple users with WordPress MU
• One installation can run multiple blogs
• The commercial counterpart, WordPress.com (and its company, Automattic), just got a huge bankroll in Round “B” funding. Yes, they are separate entities, but that kind of funding means that the commercial arm will be around for a long time, and by extension, have a vested interest in continuing to develop WordPress.org. This isn’t going to die from lack of updates.

Cons:

• Not as secure as some of the other options, namely Drupal. It is imperative that you always keep your installation updated, and updating is a bit more difficult than just installing.
• The Dashboard kind of sucks. It’s supposed to be updated in the forthcoming 2.5 release, but right now, it’s ugly and not always easy to manage
• Because the community is so large, it can be difficult separating the good from the useless. Parsing all the information into something usable and useful can be difficult.
• As soon as something becomes successful, you see the grifters come out from under their rocks. Meaning you can find plugins with ad-code for the creator invisibly inserted, themes with hidden ads, etc., etc.

Bottom Line: For new users, this is probably the best of mainstream options simply because of how much support exists. The number of tools and plugins available dwarfs the competing platforms and development is always active. If you have the time to code your own stuff and don’t rely on plugins as much, looking at other options might be beneficial, especially when it comes to web-based management and security.

1. Movable Type 4.1 Open Source

Pros:

• The first stable release of Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) is now available, a return of sorts to the pre-2004 licensing brouhaha.
• Once installed, is very easy to manage from the Dashboard.
• Lots of plugins and themes are available (be sure to check that they are compatible with your installation)
• MTOS and MT 4.1 have some really great built-in features like multi-user support, OpenID, custom fields, author avatars, etc.
• Again, the company behind the project is self-sustaining and not likely to disappear anytime soon.

Cons:

• The installation is a bitch. A total, total bitch. I’ve finally got it down so that I can get it running as fast as I can get WordPress set-up, but it took far too much time and too much documentation to figure it out. You have CHMOD all the CGI files, which is fine, but then you have to make sure that your server can support CGI enabled folders, otherwise the CGI has to go in a separate place. Then there’s the whole “mt-static” quandary. I didn’t have to move my CGI scripts or the “mt-static” folder, but the documentation wasn’t overtly clear about how those two steps are not always required. Install is a total, total bitch.
• They are still trying to push the commercial vein for Movable Type 4.1. I get and understand that, but I have questions about how frequently MTOS will be updated and what kind of community support it will truly have.
• The development community isn’t as active as WordPress and many of the styles and plugins are for older versions of the software.

Bottom Line: After it’s installed, this is a pretty elegant CMS with a nice interface and lots of available options. It isn’t as supported by the community as WordPress but many of the built-in features take care of some of those problems. If you truly want your blog to be an extension of your web page and manage both together, MTOS seems to do a better job, especially with Static Content, than WordPress.

1. Drupal

Pros:

• Free
• Very secure
• A true CMS, very dynamic/scalable
• Active development community (caveat, not the same as active style/theme community)
• Very easy to manage more than one site or multiple users

Neutral:

1. No, I’d prefer no to link to it — I did reference it in an earlier post and am working on importing the best of the 1000 or so entries into a “Christina’s Past Writings” section, but you really don’t want to read about my various dramatic experiences starting at the end of high school and going through college — well, my traditional college experience; the fact that I’m taking forever and a day to graduate is neither here nor there.