They are going to play it again tomorrow (Sunday, 30th May) so don’t miss this opportunity if you are in Oslo! One word of warning though: the actors speak pretty fast and for me it was fairly hard to follow the story by the dialogue. Luckily I knew the story so it wasn’t a problem. Thus, by all means go see them tomorrow if you can, but read a summary of the story if you don’t know it already, it will make sure you can follow everything ;-)

Edit: forgot the time, it’s at 19:30.

The core of the book is about what’s wrong with many presentations. The points are made in a clear way and there is a lot of useful advice to improve your presentations and your slides. There are many examples, some of the most enlightening ones being of the “before and after” type.

After reading the book I felt I had learned a bunch of useful things, so I decided to go over the slides for a talk I had prepared but not given yet, to try to improve them. Looking at them with a new perspective made some of the problems evident. Also, I felt that correcting those problems wasn’t very hard: the hard part was seeing them in the first place.

I have to say I’m very happy with both the book and the results of having gone through my slides. I totally recommend slide:ology if you want to learn more about presentations and how to prepare slides.

So, after the last upgrade and the frustrations that came with it, I decided to ask around for good blogging software. The main contenders I had in mind were WordPress and Movable Type. Most of the people who replied talked wonders about WordPress, but I decided to try both. WordPress’ installation was ridiculously easy (I’m talking about installing my own copy, not opening a blog in wordpress.com obviously) and I had a working blog pretty quickly. Also, at least the first impression of the UI is that it’s very slick and easy to use. It shows maturity. Movable Type was easy enough to install, although I did have some problems (mostly due to my own stupidity, but still). The first impression was that Movable Type was much “heavier” and maybe a bit too much for a single, personal blog. So I decided to go for WordPress, which was the one that I had been recommended by most people anyway.

So, the first thing I had to do was exporting the content from Typo’s HCoder so I could import into WordPress. I quickly found some script for Typo that would export in WordPress’ format, for easy import. It worked very well, although I did a problem with the tags: they were treated as normal categories, so I ended up with many categories and no tags (and a huge, horrible, impossible to navigate sidebar with dozens of categories). I started to look around, and I couldn’t find a spec for the wxr format. Maybe I was naive thinking that there would be one, but hey. In any case, eventually I figured out that I had to change the:

<category>rants</category>

to

<category domain="tag">rants</category>

for the tags. The categories had to stay as they were, but luckily for me, all uppercase names were categories, and all lowercase names were tags, so I could do the trick with vim with:

:%s/<category>\([a-z]\)/<category domain="tag">\1/

After that, I could import back all the content, but then I had the next hurdle: the style of the blog. I didn’t mind if the design wasn’t exactly the same, but I was used to the old one and didn’t want to change it too much, so I used the excellent Opera Dragonfly to inspect the styles of the old blog, and I slowly copied the most interesting values (colours and font sizes mostly) to the equivalent CSS classes in the WordPress theme. I’m happy with the result, so I think I’ll leave it as it is for now.

Last, but not least, I wanted to try to keep the old URLs working. I did two things for this:

1. I added some URL rewrites to keep Typo’s feed URLs working. However, the Atom ones also redirect to the RSS ones, I wonder if that’ll be a problem.
2. I changed the default permalink settings in WordPress so they matched what I had in Typo. Hopefully almost all blog posts will actually keep the URL and the migration to WordPress won’t be very traumatic. You tell me if I’ve broken anything ;-)

One thing that I don’t like about WordPress’ blog editor is that apparently it doesn’t allow you to write in some Wiki-like syntax, like Markdown or Textile. I know Movable Type does have it, but several other things made me stick with WordPress and I’m happy overall. At least for now ;-)