This Blog Has Moved

The blog has moved - please update your bookmarks. See end of post for more details.

After blogging for almost a year using Thingamablog, I have decided to switch blog platforms.

While Thingamablog is a great idea in theory it doesn't work out that well in practice - at least not for me. The basic idea of Thingamablog is that there is no server software required - all HTML is generated on the client and then uploaded to the web directory of your choice using FTP. I carried around my blog database on a flash drive in my pocket at all times and could blog both from home and my office.

The problem was that the FTP upload became slower and slower as the database grew in size. Because I run the database from my removable drive I once did the mistake of removing it too early from the computer with a corrupted database as result. Of course there were no backups.

I decided to do away with my web page as well and merge the information into the blog instead. Of course I still want to be able to blog from any location I want, and avoid ads. And get it for free.

Blogger.com is my new blog home - setting up and migrating the data was a very simple procedure. Of course a hosted solution doesn't offer the same customization benefits as a WordPress installation on your own server but it's enough for the purposes of this blog. I decided on blogger.com over WordPress's hosted solution because of the greater customization offered in designing the HTML.

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New blog URL: http://jonasmartinsson.blogspot.com

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Back in Blog Business

I am back from a long blog break which became much longer than scheduled. We went for two weeks' vacation in Sweden, which was excellent. Coming back to Israel I realized that I had forgotten my USB disk in Sweden. The disk contained my blog database, so I asked them to send it to me. A week ago it arrived, but the Thingamablog database had been corrupted for some reason; I guess it didn't like all the traveling... A lesson as good as any to take backups more seriously.

Now I have finally managed to restore the database to a state more or less as it was before, and the blog should get going again.

Microsoft Resolves Controversy (WTG!)

Shortly after I published my previous blog post regarding the Made In Express Contest controversy, Microsoft contacted me. They said that they had conducted a review of the final results and had decided to award the amount of the Grand Prize to both of the First Place winners!

So what swayed Microsoft into changing their attitude? I am not saying that my blog post did it, but I like to think that it played a part in their decision. Another huge contributor to this decision was Channel9 user Minh (thank you!), who called up Mark Jewett at Microsoft to get some answers. The phone conversation was recorded and you can download the mp3 from here.

Way to go, Mark Jewett and Microsoft! I know that you took a a lot of abuse in the C9 forums but the way that you resolved the situation impresses me. Thank you!

Setting up this blog

Welcome to my blog! I looked around for some different options in getting this thing to run. My previous experiences are with Blogger and I did not feel like barking up that tree again for various reasons.

My requirements were that I wanted to integrate this blog with my web site that I am setting up at the same time. This web site is running on one of the free hosting services, so I am unable to install MovableType or any other blogging infrastructure there. That's when I found the wonderful open-source Java application called Thingamablog which allows you to keep your whole blog on a local database (or a USB flash drive as in my case) and then publish the whole blog including RSS feeds to any web server, only requiring an FTP connection.

I am also able to customize the HTML design exactly as I want it with Thingamablog. So far I am very impressed...