Maverick Philosopher Moves to Typepad
For a number of technical reasons, Maverick Philosopher has moved here. There will be no further posting to this Powerblogs site, though I will respond to some of the latest comments either here or at the new blog. The Powerblogs site will remain online indefinitely, but no new comments should be left at it. We will find a way to continue our ongoing discussions at the new site.
Posted by William F. Vallicella on
Friday October 31, 2008 at 6:46pm
Bill, please, do keep the Powerblogs site indefinitely (or make an archive somewhere available). It's a treasure, as I've commented already.
Thank you for your very kind words. The PowerBlogs site should remain online for some time to come, but this in not entirely in my control. So if there are any comments of yours that you wish to keep you should make copies.
I will be re-doing some of the old posts for inclusion on the new.
The problem with PowerBlogs is that the young man who started the company soon lost interest and moved on to other things. There is no technical support, no development, and several features don't work properly. But it was a tremendous improvement over Blogspot.
"I like the Powerblogs version much more (so rich, temperate, and well-arranged)"
But how can you compare a site with almost no content with one that is filled to the brim with content? The set-up of Categories on the old site is defective and so I don't think the arrangement of content is optimal either.
I am still trying to decide how to handle comments in a manner to thwart spammers and other undesirables. Typepad allows the site administrator to view comments before they appear. The trouble with that is that commenters want to see their comment appear immediately.
I don't know much about TypePad, but the Word Press software I use has a feature whereby comments from unknown users aheld for moderation, but once a commenter has had his first comment approved, he can post directly thereafter.
I also use a "Captcha" plugin for WordPress (WP has hundreds of open-source plugins avaliable, TP probably does too) that makes unregistered users enter some numbers when they post a comment. (I've been lucky with spam and comments generally; I don't seem to have a lot of jerks and dimwits hanging around my place.)
You might want to bite the bullet and register maverickphilosopher.com as your own domain (about ten bucks a year) and get an account with a good hosting service. Mine is <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.bluehost.com">BlueHost</a>: they are excellent, provide outstanding support, and for $7 a month I get email accounts, backups, plenty of storage and bandwidth, and free installations of all manner of software, including all of the major blogging platforms.
Do you know if Typepad provides you with a way to import content into its database? If it does, then you may be able to export what you have here at Powerblogs, tweak the formatting a bit, and then upload it all into Typepad.
It does provide a way to import content from the major platforms, but I doubt from PowerBlogs. In any case, there is a lot of rubbish here (and I am referring to my posts and not the comments to them, though there is rubbish in them as well) that I wouldn't want to drag over to the new site. I prefer the slow method of importing the better posts and at the same time revising them.
1. Does Typepad offer an equivalent of the 'Related Posts' index? This is jolly useful for following how an argument has developed over several posts.
2. Posts and comments are formatted to a fixed measure, so if I narrow my browser window from the right I lose the right hand edge of the text (I know you like maximised windows, so you may not have noticed this) Can we have variable measure back, please?
As for (1), I don't know yet. I hope they do. I'll look into (2), but my technical skills are very limited. I've just wasted a couple of hours on some other technical glitches.
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.