BarCampAustinMarchI am sitting here at BarCampAustin, the precursor to the SXSW 2007…Goodbye, Subtext

They say: “all good things must come to an end”. What a load of crap! It’s like saying: “only bad things last forever”. Perhaps a more accurate statement would be: “some good things occasionally come to an end”. But that’s a heckuva lot less dramatic and you know us, humans — we love drama. But I digress…

One of these “some good things” is my membership in the Subtext, the open-source project masterminded by hacker extraordinaire Phil back in 2005. The “little grey submarine that could” grew nicely since then into a complete blogging platform with a rowdy gang of devout followers.

I was one of the original members of the project and even somewhat contributed to it early in the game. For the last year or so, I’ve been a bit more of a wall flower, kind of like one of ’em famous folks in on a board of directors who never show up and when they do, they desperately try to evade death of boredom by picking on their teeth or playing wastebasketball. Except, y’all know I am not famous. Especially not for the stuff that would get me a seat on a board of directors. That’s because Phil was too kind to strike me out of the roster. You are too kind, Phil. You are too kind.

Antarctica.uab.edu or why cobbler’s kids go barefoot2004But where it gets really exciting is the technical side. This is…Luckily, over this weekend I had made the final step that gives Phil and the Subtext team a superb reason for giving me the eviction notice: I am no longer running this site on Subtext. Not even a pre-beta 1.0 Nautilus. Yessiree-bob, this site is now powered by the Estrada Engine, the latest and greatest product offering of the company at which yours truly works. I was talking about converting three years ago (that’s before Subtext!), but only now got a chance to catch up and do the move.

Client-side Performance Tip59 days afterI wanted to mention this for a while, but only now found…Don’t take me wrong. I love Subtext. I think this blogging engine, rooted in Scott Watermasysk’s creation is a great choice for individual or small-group blogging on a great platform. But the boy’s gotta eat his own dogfood. If you write the code, you have to enjoy (or suffer) using it. So here I am, sitting on unpacked boxes in a new empty virtual house, walls unpainted and all. It’ll be good. Just needs a little lovin’.