How many failed attempts at gaining traction on this greased pole lie in Google’s wake depends on how generous you are in determining failure and how broad a view you take of what precisely constitutes social networking. Products such as Orkut, Buzz and Wave immediately spring to mind. One could argue that Orkut and Buzz have been limited successes — after all, both still exist today — whereas it’s hard to argue that Wave succeeded in gaining a foothold for itself at any level.

No matter, our attention was assertively grabbed in the last couple of days of June by the appearance and media feeding frenzy surrounding the launch of Google+. Opinions vary widely from “Google’s Facebook killer” through “Twitter should be concerned” all the way to “fundamentally different from either Facebook or Twitter”.

To my mind, Google+ combines the best of Facebook and Twitter. It provides the former’s ability to track friends and share photos, videos and links, but it also learns from Twitter that not every relationship is symmetrical, so whilst I may want to read everything you produce, you might not want to see anything from me. Google+ embraces this not uncommon case, thereby allowing a publisher’s relationship of a single producer to multiple consumers.

Added to this is a serious attempt at providing a better virtual representation of the way we interact with people in real life. Whereas Facebook views all of your contacts as friends, thereby devaluing that currency, Google+ realises that not every relationship is a friendship. Some are with family members, people with whom we have little choice but to associate. Others are with colleagues, most of whom we would categorise as acquaintances, not friends. Other relationships are those we have with our (young) children, and yet others are completely one-sided, people who have no inkling of our existence, but whose on-line utterances we wish to follow for the same reasons we might read their blog.

It’s clear that some of these relationships are mutually exclusive. For example, I may not want my young children to see some of the photos and videos I might post to family and friends. Equally, I may not want my colleagues at the High Court to know about my fascination with bukkake or my cannabis growing hobby.

Even within the group of people I could accurately designate as true friends, it’s important to realise that this grid of people is not a mesh. No one person knows all of the other people in the grid. Here, the individual user forms the hub of the wheel and all of his friends are the spokes, some of whom have links to each other. So, I may wish to share a story with a bunch of people I have known since secondary school, without sharing it with colleagues from my last job who I have since promoted from acquaintance to friend. After all, the story might be an old one and be utterly meaningless to anyone not involved in the events described.

Google+ more accurately maps the complex relationships of real life human interaction to the virtual world by introducing the concept of circles. This allows you divide people into groups of friends, acquaintances, colleagues, family, Dutch speakers, obnoxious but entertaining, etc. The number of circles you can create is unlimited and you can file people in more than one.

Now, it becomes possible to share content with the union of multiple circles. It’s not yet possible to share with only the intersection of two circles, but I’m hoping this will be added at some point, thus enabling a link to an article in De Volkskrant to be shared only with people who are both friends and Dutch speakers.

Google+ has addressed many of my objections to social networking platforms. Not only has the awkward sharing model been addressed, but the very fact that it is Google behind this product, not Facebook, immediately reassures me that privacy and security will be less of a concern with this new platform. Frankly, I trust Mark Zuckerberg about as far as I can throw him, which is much less far than I’d like to throw him. Google’s no angel, but I trust them with my data. I have the added advantage of having worked there for a number of years, so I have actual knowledge of the company’s intentions on which to base my trust.

That really leaves only my objection to the closed door policy of social networking market leader, Facebook, by which I mean that the company — or more accurately, its users — is responsible for the sequestration of vast quantities of interesting content that would hitherto have found its way onto a home page or blog. If you’re not a Facebook member, you can’t see what your friends are writing. I still have no idea what’s on my wife’s wall. Maybe it’s just as well.

Google have addressed this issue by allowing postings with a scope of public. These are placed on the user’s profile page, where they are visible to all and sundry, whether or not the reader is a registered user of Google+.

I favour open communication, even when I know I hold a contentious view, so all of my Google+ postings over the last couple of weeks are in plain view for all to see. Nevertheless, I intend to expand on a few of these in the next 24 hours to give people who are accustomed to reading the blog an update of what’s been happening in our lives over the last few weeks.

If you’re interested in trying Google+ but haven’t received an invitation from any of your friends, send me an e-mail to that effect and I’ll rectify that situation.

In the future, I can see more and more of our postings finding their way to Google+ as the primary means of distribution, as it’s so much easier there to put one’s thoughts before an audience. Whereas a blog requires people to regularly visit your site or to sign up for notification of new postings, typically by e-mail or by subscribing to an RSS feed, a service such as Google+ significantly increases the opportunity for people outside one’s closest circles to become aware of our postings, by suggesting to friends of friends that they, too, follow what we share on-line. Often, these friends of friends are people that we, ourselves, know; just not terribly well. However, there may still be enough interest there for someone to consider their postings worth reading.

Until there’s a way to automatically propagate postings on this blog to Google+ and vice versa, you may wish to check both venues for postings by us. I’m more likely to post a sentence or two on Google+, whereas a full article would more likely find its way onto the blog.

Well, today I thought, ‘Bugger it, let’s do it, anyway and see how badly things turn out,’ so I installed WordPress 3.2 and quickly decided to switch over to the rather nice Twenty Eleven theme, which you’re now looking at.

I needed a photo to replace the default and the one you now see of our fireplace was the first to come into view, so for no other reason than this, it now graces the pages of our blog. You could have done a lot worse, I can tell you.

There are a few reasons behind this decision.

Firstly, the feed has only seven subscribers, and two of those are Sarah and me.

Secondly, and most significantly, the feed has an unacceptable lag. Feedburner sends out daily digests, which are configured to go out between 21:00 and 23:00 CET. This effectively means that a new blog entry posted at 23:01 won’t be sent to e-mail subscribers until it is a day old, by which time it is often largely irrelevant. This is one of the primary reasons that newspapers’ are seeing their circulation figures plummet. On-line news is not only bang up-to-date, but gratis to boot. Add the ability to comment, and it becomes interactive, too.

To summarise the previous paragraph, daily e-mail digests are out of step with today’s information age, in which almost everyone has a laptop, a tablet or a smart-phone with them at any time. In a world accustomed to the reality of instantaneous updates, a day is an eterniy.

Thirdly, e-mail digests present a read-only medium for blog consumption. One of the great things about blogs is their readers’ ability to comment on postings, which increases the participation and thereby also the sense of involvement of the reader. For the author of the original posting and other readers, comments provide useful feedback on the article at hand, as well as an enrichment of the subject matter. Reading by e-mail detracts from this and encourages passive consumption. By abandoning the e-mail feed, I hope to encourage participation.

Fourthly, the plain text (i.e. non-HTML) form of Feedburner e-mail strips almost all punctuation from the posting, rendering it unpleasant to read. It also strips out the URLs, reducing the usefulness of the posting (which, OK, is arguably non-existent to start with).

Finally, there are many better forms of notification and blog consumption these days than there used to be.

Firstly, there’s the blog’s RSS feed, which can be plugged into any reader, local or Web-based, such as Google’s excellent Reader.

Secondly, there are services like Twitter, which exist to aggregate brief messages of interest, posted in real time by people across the world, and present them to the reader in a unified feed. Twitter’s dubious social value notwithstanding, its short message medium is useful as a real-time notification service and Twitter clients exist for all modern computing platforms, including iOS (iPhone) and Android. As such, notifications of each new posting will now also be sent to Twitter, where they can be found in my feed. You can think of Twitter as a kind of on-line SMS aggregator.

In the case of postings made by Sarah, these receive the additional distribution of automatic crossposting to the accursed Facebook, introduced as a compromise on my part to get her to post here instead of there, thereby assuring continued public access to her words.

In short, the retirement of the e-mail notification service shouldn’t see you return to the bad old days of hitting Refresh on the blog site. If you’re one of those people who permanently have the same dozen Web sites loaded in as many tabs and regularly hit Refresh to check for updates, you’re doing it wrong. It’s no longer 2005. You should find yourself heading to the actual blog only to either post a comment or when redirected by Twitter.

Anyway, now to test whether the automatic Twitter update actually works. Today’s e-mail digest will still be sent this evening, but the service will be switched off afterwards.

I’m continuing to get to know WordPress, delving into the guts of the system to understand how widgets, themes and plug-ins work. The more I see, the more I’m impressed.

Sarah wasn’t wild about the new look. I liked it, but she’s probably more representative of the public at large, so I’ve heeded her advice and moved to something that’s less of a departure from the look of the old Movable Type site.

The link to allow subscriptions by e-mail, courtesy of FeedBurner, disappeared with the move to the new theme, so I’ve had to add some code to put it back. In any case, I don’t recommend you use it. FeedBurner updates are but daily, so you could be up to 24 hours behind a posting, if you’re unlucky. You should really be using the RSS feed instead. If you don’t know what that is, go to Google Reader and find out what a news aggregator can do for your browsing experience. I set up Sarah today on Google Reader and she’s quite impressed.

I’d been using Movable Type for many years; more than five, at least.

When I first started using it, it seemed flexible and powerful, but quite complex. For one thing, making changes to a MT-managed site required laborious and error-prone editing of intricate templates. Once one’s templates were edited in this way, upgrades of MT itself became an even more unattractive proposition, as one now had to port one’s changes to a new, probably incompatible set of templates.

This has effectively kept this site running the same version of Movable Type for many years. MT has moved on to version 5.0, but this site was stuck at 3.34, because I couldn’t steel myself to do the upgrade. Everything worked well enough and you know the old adage, right? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The trouble is that technology moves on. Not only was running an old version of Movable Type an ever greater security risk as new vulnerabilities were discovered, the Web itself had moved on and left this old version of MT for dead. Whereas everything these days works with AJAX, my Movable Type installation was still doing everything with CGI scripts, fifteen year old technology. That’s a lifetime in Internet years.

Another problem was with the Movable Type code itself. Occasionally, it proved necessary to delve into this, but it’s a mass of very complex Perl. I’m proficient in Perl, but it’s not the most legible of languages at the best of times. Where it goes really awry is when the programmer makes heavy use of Perl’s abortive attempt at OO (object orientation). Movable Type understandably, yet ultimately also lamentably, makes great use of this feature.

Aged technology isn’t necessarily bad per se, but in this case, it was bad. MT was designed to use CGI scripts to generate static pages. That worked well in an earlier, more innocent age, but on today’s Web, that approach generates high server load as comment spammers all over the world attempt to add their links for Viagra and Russian dating sites to your pages.

Now, I don’t know how modern the latest version of MT feels or which of these problems have been addressed in which way by the authors, but I didn’t really care to find out, either. Back when I started using Movable Type, it was very powerful and arguably the best of breed. Budding competitors were still busy playing catch-up.

That was more than half a decade ago and there are now some very mature alternatives available. They are also vastly easier to use; I really can’t emphasise how much easier. Tricky template editing has all but given way to drag-and-drop technology, with widgets like sidebar blogrolls and archived entry listings being a mere mouse gesture away from being added to a your blog and automatically configured. Wow.

As far as I’m concerned, the clear winner of the publishing platform/content management sweepstakes has got to be WordPress. I’m very impressed with the design of the system and the ease of use that stems from that well thought out design.

I’ve spent the day getting the new site ready. 95% of the work was accomplished within minutes. The remainder has been, as always, in the fine tuning: installing plug-ins, minor editing of templates, patching up botched data after importation, etc.

There are almost certainly still broken links, but I’ve taken care of the obvious stuff with some Apache mod_rewrite magic. WordPress actually contains a good deal of its own magic to make all kinds of strange links point to the canonical link for an item, so this wasn’t nearly as hard as it might have been.

The new site is really quite simple, but looks good, I think. I hope you agree.

The old site was too busy. Gone are the AdSense banners. Gone is the Last.fm Flash. I don’t want to see Flash in my daily browsing, so why should I make you?

Gone are all of the widgets with links to Amazon. Gone, too, is the obligatory list of links to other sites. In fact, gone, even, are the links to other areas of caliban.org, most of which were only of dwindling historic interest, anyway. One or two of them will find their way back home in the coming days, but I intend to keep the site free of pointless clutter.

Also consigned to the celestial bit bucket is the old mailing list for notification of new blog postings. Instead, there’s a field at the top right of the front page where you can subscribe to e-mail notifications via FeedBurner. A more modern way to stay abreast of updates is to subscribe to this site’s RSS feed in your favourite news aggregator. If you don’t yet have one, I suggest Google Reader as a place to start.

I hope the new look and feel will encourage me to post more regularly. Maybe Sarah can even be drawn out of the woodwork, although that’s probably hoping for a bit too much. She spends most of her time at the computer on Fa(e)ce(s)book, keeping up to date with subatomically trivial events in the life of people she once bumped into in a supermarket. That stuff makes my rants here seem Shakespearean in prosaic value and universal in relevance.

Well, it wouldn’t be me talking if I didn’t get a dig in somewhere, would it?

I’ve also added an RSS 2.0 feed feed, should anyone prefer or need that.

Update: This site no longer uses Movable Type, so there’s a new URL for the RSS 2.0 feed. An Atom feed is no longer offered.

A couple of years ago, with a few weeks still to go before the birth of Eloïse, I took advantage of the calm before the storm to move my domain to dedicated hosting at managed.com. Unfortunately, and as I’ve documented in the past, that company turned out to be less than dedicated, so after a year, caliban.org ended up back in our cellar, hosted over a domestic DSL line.

With the girls out of the country for a while, the time was ripe to move the domain back out to dedicated hosting. The DSL line has been incredibly reliable, but there’s always the chance that it will go on the blink while we’re travelling. Moving house would also automatically mean downtime, which is out of the question when one is responsible for one’s own domain e-mail. Downtime means lots of bounced e-mail, not to mention an unreachable Web site.

I’d done my homework before the girls left for their trip, so with the new contract signed, the slow process of copying all of our files over the slow upstream DSL link to the new server began. The process wouldn’t be completed until approximately ten days later.

As you read this, all services have been migrated to the new machine (and have been for over a week).

For you, the user, there shouldn’t be much noticeable difference, except that browsing our photo gallery should be considerably faster than before. For me, however, it’s nice to know that the continuity of our e-mail and Web site is no longer tied to our home DSL being up.

Well, in case you do care, I’ve now switched unauthenticated commenting back on and moved to a CAPTCHA-based scheme for distinguishing between human and automated users. If you want to comment on an entry now, you just have to answer a simple question with a one word answer and your comment will be accepted for publication.

Note, however, that if you are a registered TypeKey user, nothing changes. You can continue to post comments as an authenticated user without having to jump through any hoops.

I’m sure I’ll find a few minor residual glitches here and there over the next few days, but the major work is now complete.

The hardest part was getting the three column look that I favour to work properly. Even though Movable Type’s styles-site.css stylesheet contains styles whose name suggest that everything should just fall into place, that’s not the case; or, at least, not for me, as I don’t know how to apply them properly.

In fact, whilst Movable Type’s site is definitely not short on reasons why you should upgrade to the latest version, it falls down on telling you how to actually do so. All of the instructions are aimed at first-time installers. The only upgrade instructions refer to migrating from the standard version to the Enterprise product.

Apart from twiddling with the stylesheet, the biggest debugging headache was trying to figure out why the archives wouldn’t rebuild. Apache kept returning HTTP 500 errors. I debugged this by removing chunks of MT tags from the archive templates until they could successfully be rebuilt.

However, once I’d found what I thought was the culprit, starting afresh with an archive template and removing just that one tag no longer fixed the build problem. It was starting to seem as if the quantity of MT tags, not the type, was the issue.

I suspected some kind of time-out problem, possibly with mod_fcgid, so I turned to Google and eventually came across documentation that mentioned the IPCCommTimeout configuration directive. This controls the time-out when waiting for a response from a fastcgi application. Since the archive build process takes longer than this directive’s default setting of 20 seconds, mod_fcgid abandons the task, causing Apache to return an internal server error.

Simple, once you’ve localised the problem, but it was actually quite a bit of work to turn that up.

The next step will likely be to move the blog’s data from Berkeley DB files to MySQL, which should considerably improve its performance.