Jeroen Sangers

You can't do knowledge management until you accept that you can't manage knowledge. — Luke Naismith

Widgets are the fastest and easiest way to configure your sidebar. Just open up the widget administrator and drag and drop widgets on the sidebar. A great feature for novice bloggers, who don’t have the technical knowledge to tweak sidebar templates.

Unfortunately, the default Movable Type templates don’t use widgets, which means that to enable widgets on your site you will have to tweak the sidebar template… ouch!

I know, the default sidebar template offers a far more advanced features than the widget engine can offer, with variables and MTIf constructions. The default sidebar template is a lot cooler without widgets, but also very hard to tweak.

In my opinion, the default sidebar template should include a check on the number of widgets configured. If no widgets have been configured, it should show the fancy sidebar, but as soon as I configure widgets, it should hide the normal sidebar and show the widgets. This is also what many templates in WordPress do and gives you the both of two sides: a fancy sidebar for starters which is easily adaptable by weblog owners.

Spain is a country of bureaucracy and civil servants. Many people I speak to have only one dream: becoming a civil servant. Unlike most other modern countries, in Spain civil servants earn way more that people working in companies. Add to that some very good secondary labour conditions and a contract for life without performance objectives, and you can understand why most people working for companies envy those others.

Just an example: most teachers earn about 25% more than I do (and my wage is higher than the average company worker). For that money, they work 18–22 hours a week at the school, plus some hours at home for preparation and revision of exams, while I work 8,5 hours a day, five days a week. Furthermore, while I have four weeks of holidays, they get two whole months in summer, two weeks at christmas and another week at eastern!

Other civil servants might not have such a long holidays as the teachers, but they do enjoy other benefits. Knowing all this, I am still surprised whenever I see the huge economical growth Spain is making with such a big and inefficient civil overhead.

As of today, Brain Tags is not a stand alone blog anymore, but uses my central Movable Type installation at Ai-No. Hopefully you haven’t noticed anything of the changes, as I have been able to limit the downtime to only two minutes (the time necessary to delete an account from the web server and configure an add-on domain.

As Ai-No has its own blog which I will use for meta-blogging, there will obviously be less meta-blogging going on over here. So this blog will concentrate more on technology, web development and my life in Spain. Thanks for your patience, and stay tuned for more…

The past days two posts have been published on other blogs, based on my experience and knowledge available on El Canasto.

Last Saturday, I wrote an entry on What’s The Next Action called On-line GTD with Nozbe and Google Calendar, in which I explain how two on-line services can be used together as a complete productivity tool.

And yesterday my second guest post (which I wrote some weeks ago) was published on GTD Experiences. The post is called Getting GTD Done, and gives nine tips that in my experience help when implementing the GTD method. This last post is also available in Spanish on El Canasto.

Now it is time again to write on my own blogs…

Behind the screens, various big changes are happening on my blogging environment. As you see in the sidebar, I currently maintain have four weblogs.

The oldest of the four is Brain Tags, running since ages on Movable Type. Then I have a weblog called The Wizard of POS, until today running on the same MT installation as Brain Tags and available at ‘pos.braintags.com’. There is also an old blog about my web hosting adventures, which I haven't updated in ages, called Brytenet weblog and just as the rest of the Brytenet site managed with eZ Publish. And finally I have my successful Spanish productivity blog El Canasto maganed with WordPress.

Quite a mess, isn't it? Add to that the fact that I have been experimenting a lot with non-public weblogs, and you'll get an idea of what things look like.

So I decided to clean things up, and do it well. You'll notice from the links in the side bar that I have presented my blogs as The Brain Network, a name I never have been satisfied with. Anyway, I acquired a new short and flashy domain name (of course hosted by Brytenet) and made a fresh MT4 installation. This will be the home of Brain Tags, The Wizard of POS, El Canasto and a new network blog (I still have to decide whether I want to continue with the Brytenet Weblog).

Until now I have re-created The Wizard of POS, imported all existing entries, comments and trackbacks, and tweaked the default template. And by the way, I gave it its own domain name, pos-wizard.com.

There is still a lot of work to be done (and I have little time), but I already feel good about the new home for my weblogs and am looking forward to being able to manage all my blogs from a single screen.

For everyone who has spent more than a holiday in Spain and for whom some of the following are true…

1. You think adding lemonade, fanta or even coke to red wine is perfectly acceptable. Especially at lunch time.
2. You can't get over how early bars & clubs shut back home —surely they're shutting just as you should be going out?
3. You aren't just surprised that the plumber/decorator has turned up on time, you're surprised he turned up at all.
4. You've been part of a botellon.
5. You think it's fine to comment on everyone's appearance.
6. Not giving every new acquaintance dos besos seems so rude.
7. You're shocked by people getting their legs out at the first hint of sun — surely they should wait until at least late June?
8. On MSN you sometimes type 'jajaja' instead of 'hahaha'.
9. You think the precious aceite is a vital part of every meal. And don't understand how anyone could think olive oil on toast is weird.
10. You're amazed when TV ad breaks last less than half an hour, especially right before the end of films.
11. You forget to say please when asking for things — you implied it in your tone of voice, right?
12. You love the phenomenon of giving 'toques' — but hate explaining it in English
13. You don't see sunflower seeds as a healthy snack — they're just what all the cool kids eat.
14. You know what a pijo is and how to spot one.
15. Every sentence you speak contains at least one of these words: bueno, coño, vale, venga, pues nada…
16. You know what resaca means. And you had one at least once a week when you lived in Spain.
17. You know how to eat boquerones.
18. A bull's head on the wall of a bar isn't a talking point for you, it's just a part of the decor.
19. You eat lunch after 2pm & would never even think of having your evening meal before 9.
20. You know that after 2pm there's no point in going shopping, you might as well just have a siesta until 5 when the shops re-open.
21. If anyone insults your mother, they better watch out…
22. You know how to change a bombona. And if you don't, you were either lazy or lucky enough to live somewhere nice.
23. You're either a Los Serrano person or an Aquí no hay quien viva person.
24. You don't accept beer that's anything less than ice-cold
25. The fact that all the male (or female) members of a family have the same first name doesn't surprise you.
26. The sound of mopeds in the background is the soundtrack to your life.
27. You know that the mullet didn't just happen in the 80s. It is alive and well in Spain.
28. You know the difference between cojones and cajones, tener calor and estar caliente, bacalao and bakalao… and maybe you learned the differences the hard way!
29. On a Sunday morning, you have breakfast before going to bed, not after you get up.
30. You don't see anything wrong with having a couple of beers in the morning if you feel like it.
31. Floors in bars are an ideal dumping ground for your colillas, servilletas etc. Why use a bin?!
32. You see clapping as an art form, not just a way to express approval.
33. You know ensaladilla rusa has nothing to do with Russia.
34. When you burst out laughing every time you see a Mitsubishi Pajero
35. You have friends named Jesus, Jose Maria, Maria Jose, Angel, maybe even Inmaculada Concepcion…
36. When you can whistle at or applaud a tia buena and you get a wink instead of the middle finger.

Lately, especially since I use Twitter, I receive a lot of URLs in TinyURL format. That made me think: if TinyURL gives out a unique URL each time it is used, when will they run out of URLs?

On their site they state that they have more than 42 million of them, which doesn’t sound like an awful lot. All TinyURLs I receive have a six character identifier, such as 3bso2z. A little calculation (six positions with 36 options per position) gives me 2.238.976.116 unique identifiers. More than two billion, that sounds already better. And if they run out of Ids, they can simply use seven or eight characters, which I still consider tiny. Eight positions give 2.984.555.162.628 (2 trillion!) unique identifiers!

It is clear: TinyURL is here to stay.

Now that Movable Type 4 has been released and leaped ahead of WordPress, the old discussion of static publishing versus dynamic publishing shows up again. Movable Type by default uses static publishing (it generates static HTML files with are served to the visitor) while WordPress uses dynamic publishing (all content is served directly from the database). What method is better?

As usual, the answer is: it depends…

Static publishing requires less server resources per visit, but it takes longer before updates (entries, comments and template changes) are visible. With dynamical publishing, your changes are immediately visible to your visitors, but you’ll need more power to serve those pages.

For most bloggers it won’t make any difference, as they hardly tweak their templates and receive few comments and visitors. However, if you like tweaking your templates, you might want to go dynamic, and popular blogs are better off going static.

But wait, I can hear you think: there are some very popular blogs using WordPress… That’s right, and without exception they use some kind of caching method to lower the server stress. On the other side, Movable Type can also run in dynamic mode (which is what I use for this blog), and you can specify for each template whether it should be served statically or dynamically, allowing you to optimize your site’s performance.

Conclusion: for low-traffic sites, it doesn’t matter whether you publish static or dynamic. If you have many visitors you probable want to use static or hybrid publishing.

I just remembered that a little more than a year ago I took off my watch. The main reason was that my skin was irritated by the leather in the hot weather. And I knew that I didn't really need a watch, as I spend most of my days behind the PC with a little clock in the corner, and usually wear both my mobile phone and my Palm with me.

Now, after more than one year without wearing a watch, I don't miss it at all. Not only because I have clocks in other places, but most of all as time is not that important. While wearing a watch I found myself checking the time several times a day, while actually I only have four moments on the day on which I really need to know the time: the moment I have to wake up (taken care of by the alarm clock), the moment I leave the office for my lunch break (I will notice as my colleagues will leave too), the moment I go back to my office after lunch (which is after the weather forecast on TV finished) and the moment to go home after work (once again, I only have to follow my colleagues). For none of these moments I need a watch.

The more I think about it, the more useless watches appear. In fact, nowadays they only serve as a fashion accessory or in case you are out without a mobile phone. The watch has become a relic from the past.

Most of you know that I also write in Spanish on my other weblog El Canasto, and you might even have visited it to see what it looks like.

I just remembered that two months ago I published an entry in both Spanish and English, participating in a meme about my ‘killer’ GTD set-up. Basically I describe how I work and what productivity tools I use. If you’re interested, just head over to My Killer GTD Setup, which might also help you learn a little bit of Spanish as the translation is right next to it.

In the coming years I would like to see politicians wear maintenance uniforms instead of business suits, because when they wear business suits they represent business. When they wear maintenance uniforms they are the servants that they are supposed to be.

— Danny Hoch

The productivity guru of the moment, Tim Ferriss, writes in his book how he was able to reduce the amount of e-mail received by setting up an autoresponder to tell that he only reads his e-mail once a day and that it is better to phone him for urgent matters.

I believe him, when he tells that this technique has reduced his e-mail load significantly. But what he doesn’t tell is what happened to the number of telephone conversations he received. In my case, I notice a clear increase in telephone calls when I am very busy and cannot answer e-mails within the usual 12 hours. And guess what, when I am very busy, the last thing I am waiting for are telephone calls! When somebody phones me, that person decides what I will be doing for the next two minutes and when I will give attention to him (now!), while with e-mail I am the one deciding who should get my attention and when.

Tim’s trick only works because his workload is very low. When you’re workload is higher and you need to spend more time in the zone, it makes more sense to change your voice mail message to tell people that you can only be reached by phone during one hour a day and that they get faster response when they send their inquiry by e-mail.

30 minutes after updating this site to Movable Type 4.0 RC2, I read this. Back to work…

For quite some time I have been happily using coComment. For those who don’t know this service: coComment basically keeps track of the comments you leave on web sites. If you’re like me, reading and commenting on many sites, it can be difficult to track the replies to your comments. coComment captures your comment and tracks the conversations started by those comments on a single page instead of having to revisit all sites you’ve commented on.

Yesterday coComment released a new version, bringing more social features. By doing that, they threw out the real value of their service: tracking conversations. The new page reserves 75% of screen real estate for groups, friends, favourites and neighbours, leaving just enough space for only five conversations:

Furthermore, all my conversations have been marked as unread, and I could not find an option to mark them all as read. This is not an upgrade, this is a downgrade!

For quite some time, my old domain jeroensangers.com had been in monkey mode. That is to say, there was nothing interesting at all, except for a photo of me in my younger days.

For a long time I wanted to put up something more useful, but never started.

And you know how it goes: the moment you start, you can’t finish anymore, and within a small period of time my new site was finished. I installed Joomla!, chose one of the default themes, removed a whole bunch of clutter and wrote a few simple texts. And there it is, my new personal hub, where you can read all about me:

Whenever I had an idea for a blog post, I used to create a new entry on that particular blog, jot down my idea, and save the post as a draft. As soon as I had more time, I checked the list with draft posts, chose a draft, and finished the post.

What had worked perfectly for a long time, lately became a burden. The problem is that over the time I have collected a great number of interesting themes to write about, resulting in a big amount of drafts. Some of those drafts only contain an URL, while other are more elaborated. In short, it became too difficult to find out quickly what was what.

So now I have changed my blogging workflow. I transferred all my ideas to Google Notebook, where they are nicely ordered per blog. On that page I can see all ideas with their actual content at a single page. One glance on my Notebook, and I can quickly decide what to write. Furthermore, with the Google Notebook Firefox extension I am able to select a text on a random web page and copy it together with the address of the page to my Notebook.

From now on, drafts in my blogging software are actually pieces I already have started to write, which usually are only a few. This set-up keeps things clear, and speeds up my blogging workflow.

Very neat. At TravBuddy you can check the countries you have visited, and they will produce a good-looking map for you.

Holiday is over, the hard life is back!

After a bad start, our holiday was great! We spend one week in St-George’s-de-Didonne (tasting oysters and great wines at the beach) and one week in St-Jean-Pied-de-Port (hiking in the mountains and eating some of the best tapas).

One of the first things I did after coming back was fixing this site by upgrading Movable Type to the latest beta release. Of course I know that I shouldn’t have upgrated the software just before leaving for vacation, but I took the bet and lost…

Next week we’ll be going camping in France. That means amongst others that we will be making quite some kilometres, and if you know me a little bit you know that I am not that fond of travelling large hours.

One way to make the trip more pleasant is music.

The traditional source of music was the radio, but when travelling long distances in several countries, you’ll loose your station every two hours. The past years we brought some CDs with us, but CDs are bulky and we can only take a few of them.

For this year’s trip, I bought a Belkin TuneBase FM, allowing us to listen to all the music stored on MJ’s iPod.

The TuneBase converts the iPod into a radio station. It has four button to select pre-stored frequencies and up and down buttons for manually selecting frequencies. All we have to do is tune our car radio to the TuneBase frequency, and we can listen to all the music stored on the iPod.

We’re ready for the trip!

Every once in a while when I log into Movable Type, I am happily greeted by the following message:

If I press the ‘Begin update’ button, Firefox will crash. So I open good ol' Internet Explorer, and update the database. After that I switch back to Firefox and go to phpMyAdmin to fix the mt_permissions table.

I love beta software!

when the message “Please wait while we install product X. This may take several minutes” stays on screen for almost two hours.

Last week Six Apart released the beta for Movable Type version 4. Until last weekend I didn’t have the time to have a look at it, but Sunday I downloaded the files and copied them to my server.

Of course things went wrong, as was to be expected with a beta release. I know that you never should install beta releases on a production environment, but I took the risk anyway as this weblog is partly a playing ground. I am a long-time Movable Type user, and suspect that my database is full of legacy data of old settings and plugins.

After copying the files, I went to the new MT Dashboard, and found out that all images had been scrambled. I suspected that my FTP application accidentally had uploaded them in ASCII mode, so copied them again in binary mode, without result. I checked the files I had downloaded from Six Apart, and yes, they were scrambled as well. So I downloaded the tar.gz file instead of the zip, uploaded the images again, and the images came up correctly.

The second problem I encountered was more serious. The dashboard showed up OK, but whenever I tried to access one of the blogs, I got an error message:

invalid permissions for author 1 at lib/MT/Author.pm line 337

This one took a little bit more to solve, but at the end I found out that newly created users don’t have this problem. After comparing all settings in the database between my old users and the new user, I found the culprit: In the table ‘mt_permission’ I found duplicate record for my user ID with permision_blog_id = 0. After removing the duplicate records, the error did not appear any more.

Now I am able to get into my blogs, and as you see, write new items. However, as soon as I publish a new entry I get another error message: Fallback Is Required At Lib/mt/util.pm Line 1331. I haven’t solved this error yet, but found out that I can simply rebuild my site to make the entry appear.

As you can see, I also changed the design of the site. I was getting fed up with the previous design, and at the same time wanted to see what new template features came with MT4, so I reset the templates to the new minimalist theme. The coming days I will be studying and tweaking this design to my own tastes, so things might change a little bit.

One thing I noticed already is that the default templates do not use the widget manager, basically because the new sidebar template module offers filtering by template type, giving the possibility to show a different sidebar on different types of pages.

Other things they copied from WordPress are Pages and a file manager (with tagging!!!).

There are still some other things to be fixed, such as activating trackbacks. In the blog’s configuration I see that this has been deactivated on a system level, which is not the case. So far I like MT4 a lot. It is fast, pleasant looking and I am happy with new features such as the file manager, entry auto-save and interactive template errors.

Mark, a loving husband, was in trouble. He forgot his wedding anniversary and his wife was really ticked off with him. She told him, "tomorrow morning I expect to find a gift in the driveway that goes from 0 to 200 in under 6 seconds, AND IT BETTER BE THERE." The next morning, Mark got up really early before work. When his wife woke up a couple of hours later, she looked out the window, and sure enough, there was a small gift-wrapped box sitting in the middle of the driveway. Confused, the wife put on her robe, ran out to the driveway, and took the box into the house. She opened it, and found a brand new bathroom scale. Mark is not yet well enough to have visitors ...

Via Michael Sampson

youtu.be/FdTOFkhap…