In August 2004, I moved to Movable Type (see Change of platform…).  It was a good publishing tool and a huge step up from the type of programs I was using before.  Things have moved along though (six years in Internet time is like an era) and I’m now switching to WordPress.  It’s free.  It’s much easier to maintain for a non-techie and on the publishing side is much more complete and easier to use.  It also has an iPad and iPhone app to create articles.  From what I have read, it also seems to be the most popular platform nowadays for blogging.  Here’s to hoping that this great new tool will encourage me to write a bit more regularly…

I just discovered while tinkering with Movable Type that it was impossible to post comments to this site. Shock ! Horror ! Massive disappointment ! Now I understand why there were no comments. I thought I had the world’s most boring site and that nobody bothered commenting but now I feel like I might have lost thousands of valid, passionate and interesting insights ;-)) Anyway, it’s fixed so please feel free to use it to comment as much as you like (or else I have no further excuse, this blog must really be boring).

I haven’t posted a single article in October. I’m not proud of it. It’s a fact. It bothers me.

Let me say why… Blogging is a bit like keeping a diary except you know you have readers so you try to keep it interesting (and not too personal 😉 ). Regularity and diversity of subject make for interesting blogs even though some kind of continuity needs to be there to attract a core readership. A great example remains Give me spirit fingers who continues to maintain a high level of content, great regularity and great humor. By doing this, the author has made a loyal reader out of me and I read almost every post. There are others who react in the same way and thus is born a community of interest.

Allright, enough… Suffice it to say, dear Reader, that I have been very busy in October (Paris Fashion week). That I lost the hang of blogging. That I regret it. And that I’m back 🙂

For those of you coming to Ride Lightning today, you can’t fail to see the obvious changes in the look of the site. The change is more than cosmetic though. I have changed my publishing platform and switched to Movable Type. I want to explain why in this post.

I used to use iBlog, an elegant little desktop application for Mac that gives anyone the possibility to have a blog up and running in about 5 minutes. A great interface, perfect integration with key apps like iPhoto and iTunes, external partners (like Haloscan, Blogsnaps etc…) with which to enhance the functionality, all made me think I had found the perfect blogging tool. No hassle to get the aesthetic I wanted and a solution focused on me getting my content up there the way I want fast.

Why the change and for what ? I moved to what I guess is the most widely used platform : Movable Type. It’s a server side application, a lot more complicated than iBlog. While I’m at it I would like to thank two people specifically here for the invaluable help they gave me in this transition : Guy at Wakatepe (my host) and Elise Bauer who unwittingly gave me tons of useful tips through her wonderful site Learning Movable Type. I moved for the following reasons :

1) I wanted more control over advanced features such as trackback, comments, the html in my posts, pinging, xml etc…
2) I wanted to able to post from anywhere on Mac and Windows. iBlog is Mac only and bound to the computer it’s installed on (I never managed to get blogsnaps to sync correctly between my desktop and my notebook).
3) I wanted a platform that has possibilities for extensions (plug-ins), customisation, evolution and that has a community behind it to support me through the trials and errors that inevitably come with anything related to computers.
4) I wanted safety and easy backup possibilities for the posts I had already written (iBlog started to have a tendency to crash a bit too often for my comfort).

Movable Type seems to be the answer to most of my problems and though I have had to learn a lot fast, I’m quite satisfied for now with what I’ve been able to do with it. I will be adding new functionality and features to the blog as I learn more about this platform. Meanwhile the pleasure of blogging can continue 😉

On a final note, all the previous articles have been imported into the site so nothing was lost during this transition 😉 If you have any remarks about the site’s new look and feel, features you miss or anything else, please do not hesitate to post your comments !

Today I decided to add a section in my menubar with links to blogs I really like. Nothing special about this but I would like to take some time here to comment on the first blog I decided to put in this section : Give me spirit fingers dammit !

One thing I haven’t mentioned until now is that I work in the fashion industry. I don’t have a fashion section on this blog (though who knows, one day….) because by the time I get home I’m usually all fashioned out and prefer devoting my attention to other subjects. Yesterday while looking at the new blogs section on blogcatalog, I saw a new listing Give me spirit fingers dammit ! in a new category : society – trends. I decided to take a look and …. I loved what I saw. Here is a funny blog on trends and fashion seen from the Hong Kong point of view. Anyone who works for a french fashion company knows that asians are very fashion conscious and in cities like Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore, they are very sophisticated though they tend to take it all a little seriously. This site is incredibly refreshing taking it all with a grain of salt and sometimes a quite wicked sense of humor (whilst showing a very high level of fashion/trend awareness). I really had a lot of fun reading the posts and I look forward to reading more. Really a highly recommended blog !

It’s a strange thing to decide to publish a blog. After all, with the millions of sites out there, who needs another one ? Who cares ?

I guess the answer, for me, is that publishing this, something, anything, is now possible. That I now have a voice in the global village. That I can participate. And that I can share without knowing whom I’m sharing with.

The trigger for me though, and we might as well get started with the kind of stuff I intend to discuss, was the discovery of RSS (a week ago…. ;-( ) whilst searching how to get Avantgo working in Mac OS X (it’s possible…). I was immediately fascinated by the amount of feeds out there and the easy, effortless, way with which one can access them. Reading or more adequately, following a blog made sense all of a sudden. And so did writing one…

It’s sort of hard in the case of a blog (if it’s not related to a specialized subject or group) to give an object that makes sense. What follows probably won’t 😉

So why the Title ? Because this world is accelerating constantly. Because the pace of technology never stops. Because the journey is the reward. Because I’m a Metallica fan. This blog is my way of sharing, reflecting, musing, blabbing, on everything that holds my attention more than the usual 5 seconds. And so I hope you’ll enjoy ….