Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

_Markl asked me how I created this blog._ A good question, so heres the equivalent of the “About” box:
“Movabletype.org”:http://movabletype.org. This is the blogging software. They actually have a hosted service called typepad which is supposed to be very good. Very elegant stuff written in perl, so it is not a speed demon, but very flexible. Does require you know how to use Linux and mysql. The entries are stored in mysql and then emitted as static web pages.
“Tqhosting”:http://tqhosting.com. This is actually a really nice guy in North Carolina (remember when we were that young!) who has a dedicated server on which he resells space. $5/month for a basic blogging package and $12/month for 300MB, so it is pretty reasonable compared with the big guys. I used to pay $25/month to a FrontPage compatible hoster for 30MBs. Anyway, he presets mysql and you can rsh and telnet into his machine. Also has email as well
“Godaddy”:http://godaddy.com. This is where I get my registrar services. About half the cost of register.com. They are local and the best thing is that they have a very simple user interface to add new domain names, etc. In contrast with verisign and register. (Come to think of it, they use ASP for their stuff, so guess I do use Microsoft stuff).
“Blogrolling”:http://Blogrolling.com. This is a guy who supports keeping lists of other blogs and handles notifications. It is how the list the right gets updated when other folks update themselve. All these blogs ping weblo.gs so that is how they are in sync.
Sitemeter:”http://sitemeter.com”. They have a free site monitoring tool so that you can see who is on.
“The Ludwigs”:http://www.theludwigs.com. I mainly follow the format and improvement that John Ludwig makes. He is MovableType as well, although he is using it on top of IIS and Windows NT. But I love his MovableType template ideas.
For editing blogs, here is what I do:
MovableType supports a couple of ways. First there is the standard web interface of course, but what I really use are their javascript buttons you can stick up on the Internet Explorer bar. So you can browse and then if you see something, you can MT it! right into your blog. I mainly use a blog like a personal set of bookmarks so this is very useful. It is also free.
Textile. This is a plug in to MovableType that is kind of like latex or nroff if you remember those utilities so you don’t have to write everything in HTML. For instance, if you type _hello_ it turns it into hello and so forth. Or if you want bullets, you type an asterisk like Word. It is free.
w.Bloggar. This is probably the most used client-side editing tool for blogs. Uses the blog API (really an XML-SOAP protocol that talks with MovableType
Zempt. This is a nice Windows utility for doing off line edits of blogs. I’ve been playing with it, but it really isn’t that much faster or more functional than movabletype.
Reading blogs, here is what I do
Feedreader. This is a .NET application that puts blogs that emit RSS into a three pane view. I like the thing because it also lets you also add entries based on what you read via w.bloggar. You just right click on an item and then it stuffs it into your blog.