Nashville Is Talking Meetup

Last week, on Thursday night, I went with Kerry Woo to an event WKRN News 2 was throwing for Nashville Is Talking. I wrote a little bit about it before hand, but I didn’t write much because I didn’t really didn’t know what to expect.

Kerry picked me up at the house and we drove to Wolfy’s Den together, arriving at the perfect time, 15 minutes after the start of the party. As we arrived on the 3rd floor, I scanned the room and confirmed my expectations — I didn’t know a single person there. Of course that didn’t stop me. I made my way to the bar, ordered up a Yazoo Hefeweizen and started making the rounds.

As I introduced myself, I found that there was a pretty diverse group there. It wasn’t just “geeks”, but professional writers, WKRN video journalists, mobile content distributors, and bloggers of every type. Kerry was a huge help, because if I found myself in a lull, I could make my way to where Kerry was standing and he’d make an introduction to get me jump started again.

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“Nashville Is Talking” Shindig At Wolfy’s Tonight

Tonight I’ll be heading downtown to Wolfy’s for a shindig that WRKN’s Nashville Is Talking is putting together. I’ll be going with Kerry Woo, so I know I’ll have a good time because he and I never have a shortage of things to talk about.

I’ve just been doing my own thing and not really paying attention to what’s been happening with “Nashville Is Talking”, so I’m a bit clueless about the whole “scene”. According to Kerry, “this will be the first all-encompassing blog meet-up sponsored by News 2 in over a year.” He’s been pretty plugged in to the blogging scene here in Nashville, so I’m interested to see what it’s all about. From the sound of things, it appears that there’s a fairly vast community that’s connected to one another.

Wolfy’s bar is not open to the public, so it will be open just for this private affair. News 2 will be picking up the tab for appetizers, and there will be a full bar, albeit not an open bar, but that’s probably for the best. Nothing pretty about a pack of tipsy bloggers.

Anyway, if you’re downtown tonight, be sure to stop by Wolfy’s and say “hey!”

Well This Sucks

I’m a big fan of desktop weblog clients. They make it really easy to publish and manage a weblog and my favorite for Windows has been Zempt. It’s an open source project, which means that it’s free to use, and it strikes the right balance of features and simplicity. Great little app that I recommend to everyone I can.

Unfortunately, Adam Kalsey made the announcement today that there will be no future development for this wonderful program. Luckily for us, he’s keeping the files on Sourceforge, so we can still download and run the program to our heart’s content. I know that there hasn’t been any updates in over a year, but it’s still sad to see the final nail put in the coffin.

Writer’s Block Or Writer’s Cramp?

I have really done a poor job of writing for the past few months on this weblog. There for awhile I was in a good routine where I would write almost every day, but the past few months I’ve been near speechless. Only one entry for September and four for October, so what gives? Well I’ve been thinking about my lack of content for the past week or so and have come to the realization that it’s not just one thing that has kept me from publishing. It’s several things that have caused a cascade effect of writer’s block.
Crazy Schedule
For starters, my schedule has been insane since May. Every weekend has had something brewing, or needed attention. From company visiting, to business trips, to NPUG meetings, there seems to have been something going on almost every weekend. Couple hectic weekends with running your own business and that leaves you with a pretty busy schedule. A schedule that doesn’t leave a lot of time for writing pity prose everyday.

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Ladies And Gentlemen, Start Your Engines!

When SixApart released the 3.0 version of MovableType, there was a lot of confusion and consternation. Although it was released as a “Developer’s Release”, the general sense of the weblog community was that of disappointment. Although the 3.0 release was geared toward developers only, many regular users were dismayed over the lack of features, or improvements and felt no compelling reason to upgrade. Of course this release wasn’t meant for regular users like you and me. The purpose of 3.0D was to encourage developers to upgrade their Plugins with the new architecture SixApart created. Which is why there was a Plugins Developer’s Contest offering $20,000 in prizes. Now that the winners have been announced, SixApart recently made another small announcement regarding MT 3.1 and I have to say – get ready to upgrade!

My Experience With 3.0
As a friend recently told me, when I get into something, I don’t go half way, it’s all or nothing for me. So naturally, I purchased a personal license and upgraded to 3.0D the day that it came out. My experience over the past two and a half months has been MUCH better than I expected. It’s been very stable and I only ran into one or two little quirks here and there, but nothing that I would consider a bug per se.

As much as I’ve enjoyed 3.0D, I had to agree with most folks who didn’t upgrade in the fact that there wasn’t a very compelling reason to upgrade from 2.66. There simply weren’t enough new or improved features.. Most of the changes between 2.x versions of MT and 3.0D were mostly behind the scenes. I noticed that the software ran faster and I liked the new design of the user interface, but that’s not a lot of motivation for most users.

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