mere cat

Welcome to mere cat 2.0!

Yes, welcome. Actually it’s more like 4.0, since this is the fourth redesign, but two dot oh has so much buzz going for it these days, and this place could sure use some buzz. Besides it really is only the second design at this here domain of merecat.org, so there. You don’t have to do anything special to begin enjoying mere cat 2.0 immediately, except endure this welcome message. (It’s almost over.) If you read mere cat via an RSS feed, please use either one of these new addresses: ATOM at https://merecat.org/atom.xml or RSS 2.0 at https://merecat.org/index.xml.

Mere cat 2.0 doesn’t actually have any Web 2.0 features; it’s just a Plain Old Blog. The biggest difference from 1.0, however, is that now there are comments, giving you one more avenue to harass me electronically. And please do, I love the attention. Seriously, and sincerely, thanks for reading mere cat.

WARNING: Blogging-about-blogging content ahead! Stop reading now! This is your last chance!

Last year around this time, I switched from hand-coded pages to Blosxom, a lightweight Perl script that makes building a blog dead simple. Blosxom allowed me to automatically generate an RSS feed so mere cat could be included in aggregators like Philly Future and indexed by Technorati. All the cool kids had a feed; I wanted one, too. That was fine, but despite its charms, Blosxom wasn’t as full-featured as, for example, Word Press or Movable Type. For one thing, it lacked comments. Another drawback was that it wasn’t clear (to me) how to convert all my existing pages and integrate them with a Blosxom-based blog. I started looking at other packages.

If I didn’t have this legacy content and didn’t want to break any links, I might have had more choices, but after considering my needs, it looked as though Movable Type would be the best choice for blending my existing pages (which are relatively static) with a blog (with its dated entries). It wasn’t easy, but I succeeded in bending this intractable software to my indomitable will. I also used the switch as an excuse to simplify my design. And here we are.

There are some people I would like to thank. For advice about configuring Movable Type, there are simply too many people; someday I’ll take the time to do it right. For the look, I was inspired by the design of Douglas Bowman’s Stopdesign and the color scheme of Mediterranean, a style by John Whittet at css Zen Garden. This site is only a very faint echo of their outstanding work. Finally I would like to thank my long-suffering wife Anne, whose boundless patience with my obsessions is rewarded, so she says, by my smile of satisfaction when it’s all over. I love you.