I have yet to fly it, but based on the buzz and the promo material, Virgin America may just be my airline of choice. Everything a geek could love, but no other airtline in the States provides:

• Virgin America is the first U.S. airline with mood lighting.
• There are 3000 MP3s onboard every flight.
• You can plug in to 110v power at every seat.
• You can order fresh food when you want it, from the screen at your seat.
• Red, our in-flight entertainment system, has over 25 pay-per-view Hollywood movies on demand.
• Virgin America is a cashless airline. Place your order, swipe your card, and you’re done.

Notably, a flight from Dulles to San Francisco round trip is coming in at $278 – 50% cheaper than a similar flight on United.

Kevin Burton has more.

Movable Type 4 has been out for several weeks now and I’ve been waiting for my opportunity to get it installed and a blog moved over. Initially, as demonstrated by the video I posted demonstrating the installation of the software, I planned on moving my sports podcast, Suicide Fan over, but I quickly realized that that would be hard to do without a patch to MT’s core. PodPress is the plugin I use for podcasting and it stores all the relevant details, including the link to the MP3 file, in custom fields. While custom fields (or post meta, as it is called) is included in WXR, Movable Type 4 makes no effort to retain this data. Shame, shame.

So, instead, I’ve moved AaronBrazell.com, which was previously hosted on WordPress.com, over to Movable Type 4 instead.

I have quite a lot of feedback for the Movable Type 4 team based on this experience. I hope they hear my recommendations, take them seriously and address the issues as they make sense for the MT community. I will also include recommendations for the WordPress community as I feel that MT4 really does handle quite a lot very, very well.

Handle Post Meta Better

As I indicated above, I ran into tremendous frustration with porting my blog from WordPress to Movable Type when the blog relied on custom fields/post meta. I realize that Movable Type does not yet support any kind of post meta outside of “Keywords”, “Tags” (how are these different semantically?) and Categories. WordPress is the clear winner here recognizing that none of these are “metadata” really and are in fact staples of entries. With that in mind, MT4 supports no metadata. Which of course hinders the ability to reclaim WordPress users. Change this, SixApart.

Setup Fixes

I’m still disgruntled about Movable Type setup routine. It’s easier than it used to be but it is far from easy and frustrated me as a technologically competent guy. For instance, why can’t the setup wizard trim whitespace from around database login info. I don’t know how it is done in Perl, but in PHP it’s as simple as

.

Useful Error Messages

I ran into an issue when dealing with imports of WXR files generated by an older version of WordPress. It seems WordPress did not do a great job of ensuring their export files were truly UTF-8 encoded, a necessity for XML files. MT4 recognized this and killed the import with a cryptic Perl error. Not being a Perl guy, I had no idea what was going on. Fortunately, I realized that I could open the WXR file in Textmate and re-save it as UTF-8. This can be done with other text editors as well. After saving as UTF-8, the import ran smoothly.

Which reminds me, MT4 devs, don’t duplicate entries on import. If the import goes halfway through and fails, then when I re-import, don’t duplicate my entries, pleasethankyouverymuch!.

Instead of displaying Perl error messages (which in theory and a different context, could give away useful system info for hackers), point me to why the error occurred in the first place and maybe provide me with some useful pointers for fixing it. So I don’t waste my precious time. Pleasethankyouverymuch.

Registration and Comments

I don’t really know where to start with this but it certainly pissed me off. In order for the comment form to be visible to visitors, I had to specifically set Anonymous commenters. Why? Make me go out of my way to NOT have anonymous commenters.

Secondly, even if I have anonymous commenters, the moment I choose other authentication methods (Movable Type native, OpenID, Vox, LiveJournal or TypeKey), the comment form disappears and is replaced with a login link.

I repeat… this happens even if I have specifically checked “Anonymous Comments”. This should not be.

Permalink Obfuscation

Fortunately I only have a handful of entries on my blog, because none of the permalinks included in the WXR file (

) are respected by MT. Everything is mashed together killing any hope of retaining SEO benefits from the blog. This MUST be fixed. It is completely unacceptable!

Sucky Themes

The MT4 team has bragged about the number of themes included with MT4. While there are certainly a number of themes, there really are only 3 – “Cityscapes” which includes a dozen or so of an identical theme with different cartoony city skylines that mostly look the same, “Minimalist” which is an old MT standby theme that has been slapped a half dozen times with different color schemes – but the same layout! – and the Unity themes which are a handful of other boring similar structure themes.

Also, where is the community contributed themes? Why has no one in the MT community released MT4 themes? Was MT4 that much of a surprise? Was MT4 not available as a beta software weeks before it went final? Where is the community? Where are the designers?

Now of course, I have some recommendations for WordPress as MT4 is doing some killer things that WordPress is simply ignoring.

Admin Interface

Movable Type’s admin interface is just plain sexy. I’m telling you it kills WordPress up and down and into next week. We have waited far too long for decent changes to the WordPress admin. Yes, I am aware of Happy Cog recommendations and changes that are coming but the reality is that we should not have waited this long. WordPress’admin interface is amateur, shoddy and hacked together code. Code is Poetry my foot. Too many inline styles, hacked together HTML and does not have developer guidelines for “where plugin pages should go”, for instance.

Integrated Theme Management

WordPress’theme management is not “bad” – it’s just that MT4′s is so much better. Now as mentioned, MT4′s theme selection sucks, but why can’t WordPress implement a nice AJAX theme loader/viewer/column option selection routine for themes not necessarily present on the server. Granted I may not know what I’m talking about as all the themes currently available for MT4 are actually on the server, but it seems like this should be a nice feature – with proper security/sanitization in mind.

Shut Your Trap!

Too many WordPress kool-aid drinkers have come out slamming MT4 and defending WordPress. Yes, WordPress is a better platform. You know that and I know that. But MT4 is a significant improvement and if you’re not careful, your arrogance will drive people back to MT. MT certainly does things better than WordPress so you have nothing to shout about. What is good for the GPL/Open Source community is good for WordPress. I recommend you install Movable Type, keep an open mind about what they are doing and see if we can get some ideas (including code slurping!) from them.

Overall, I think WordPress is better. I think the software and community have some growing up to do. SixApart has quietly snuck up and drawn about even in the race for a better software and if WordPress is not careful, public opinion could swing the other way.

As a traveller, one of the biggest peeves I have is waiting in line to clear security – especially if I’m running late! Personally, I think the TSA is a bit overboard with their tactics, but I do think they’ve gotten better. On several recent trips, I had bad experiences waiting for security. Flying to Toronto in May, I experienced the longest line I had ever seen at Baltimore Washington International Airport. Coming home from San Francisco for WordCamp, Terminal 3 that houses United Airlines was a madhouse as the line extended out the door. In Seattle last week, the TSA employee was listening to hip hop music on his speaker phone while checking people’s boarding passes. And don’t get me started on the boarding pass checker driolling passengers on their age and destinations. Check the boarding pass and ID and pass them through, man!

San Francisco International Airport just announced biometric “speed passes” (press release) where for $100 you can register at Flyclear and bypass the long lines. That is, after the TSA has presecreened and approved the applicant and fingerprints and retina scans are taken.

I need one.

Clear technologies are in place or will be in place at a bunch of other airports: Albany, Cincinatti, Indianapolis, LaGuardia, Little Rock, New York JFK, Newark, Orlando, Reno, San Jose, and Westchester.

My only question is about the law of diminishing returns. What happens when most people have these speed passes? Do we then get speedier passes?

Scoble shocked us (a bit) earlier in the week when he wrote that he was quitting blogging (again). It wasn’t that he was quitting blogging that was so startling. It was the reason for it that shook me a bit:

Tonight I looked over my Twitters and blogs. They are angry. Confrontational. Disturbed. Hurt. Dismayed.

Those are not words to describe someone in a state of mind to improve the world. Part of it is so many people are making stuff up about me and/or my employer without any care as to my feelings or the truth that I’ve got to get some distance. Over the weekend a variety of people said I had quit my job. Then another “A-list” blogger said I had been fired. Neither are true. Much of what I read over on that Silicon Valley gossip site lately isn’t true and they have demonstrated over and over that they really don’t care about the truth. It really depresses me cause I thought blogging would be a tool for humans to get smarter, not stupider. Depression isn’t fun.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly like seeing one of the world’s most notable mouthpieces speak these kinds of words. It’s just not right. Maybe it’s just the last bit of idealism in me that says the world shouldn’t be this way. Take a look now because the idealistic side of me only comes out a few times a year on weekends and holidays. :-)

Really though, the whole incident has cause me to take a step back and look at what I contribute to the blogosphere. It’s about the conversation and dialog, but I think I, along with other bloggers, have taken to flaming people, companies, ideas, concepts because it generates traffic.

I think I’m realizing that, although I haven’t been a flamebait kind of blogger overall, I’ve done my fair share and the trend is a destructive one. How can you expect to encourage the growth of our beloved internet ecosystem when everyone is so polarized. It’s like, how can Bush expect to have a productive government when the politics are so polarizing.

This should not be so.

This morning, Jeff Ascough quit blogging too. In his case, he was too busy. The startling thing is that a bunch of other photography bloggers followed suit within the span of a few hours. (Will post links as I get them – the email is in to my source on this). These bloggers, in most case, simply followed Jeff’s lead because they were not doing anything compelling with their blogs.

This should not be so. It’s about the dialog.

I’ve decided my posts will add value to the blogosphere. In most cases, I do not echo the Techmeme echo chamber. I unsubscribed to Valleywag. I reached out to Jason and Mahalo. I’ve had long conversations with Anil Dash from SixApart and even posted a video of me installing Movable Type – something that I hope helps their community, as well as encourages bloggers to reach across “party lines”.

If we can’t talk civilly, we probably should bow out of blogging altogether because at the end of the day, what makes the competitor better is good for all of us.