Ebay bought Skype
Telewest and NTL finally merge – took them long enough, I wonder what will happen to my cable account. If past experience is anything to go by (when Telewest bought Cable London) I will not see any change for some years. I seriously hope this is not the case!
Boots merge with Alliance Unichem – well Boots were going to have to do something, they havent really been going anywhere for years, I wonder if much will change out of this? Maybe this will help them compete with the supermarkets?
Office 12 was announced and they finally added pdf support – I can only think of one major reason why they did this – Open Office. They have known this was a feature in huge demand for years and have not added it to previous versions – I cannot remember a time when Microsoft added support for a third party’s technology when they were the dominant player in the market (They always do in the reverse scenario). Anyhow, it is good news for the consumer 🙂 Now, if we can enforce a standard on one document format spec the market would truly be competitive. Not that I would move to Open Office just yet, and Office 12 is sounding like a much more worthwhile upgrade than Office 2003 ever did. Lets hope its not vapourware!
Onto other things.. having got net access at my new flat set up and a decent computer at home for the first time in ages, I figured I could now host my own blog rather than living with the restrictions of MSN Spaces. I have used pretty much all the free blogging services in the last 18 months so maybe I should write up what I thought of them.
Anyhow, I initially thought of Movable Type and was all set to go with that when I heard of WordPress. I was swayed by a lot of the writeup in the blogs that this was a better way to go – amazingly I felt WordPress was the better one over the medium term than Movable Type. Why amazingly? Well WordPress is open source and I am always a little nervous about how often and how well open source products are updated – sometimes this is well founded sometimes not – depends on how popular the software is. Anyhow, I felt WordPress was definitely well supported and what with it being blogging software it is probably ideal as an open source product because not only will it stay free, but as the community grows it will be able to add whatever the latest gimmick is quickly – and we all like a gimmick 😉
MovableType obviously has a thriving plugin community right now but I wonder if that will always be the case – I think more and more of those guys will move to WordPress over time – plugin developers will use some of the most complex features available and if the platforms are equal and one is freely available to them they will move to that. If MovableType continue to restrict their product features some will start to switch. That’s where I am standing now.. I hope I am not wrong if only because I do not want to have to up roots and move!
Installation was a breeze, my php is poor at best and its difficult to accept that the web that I knew years ago is completely different – layout using CSS, it was only an experimental idea the last time I played with designing websites! Seems to work well enough, though some parts are still confusing. I am definitely going to miss the MSN Spaces photo album 🙁
Anyhow, I started moving across all my blog entries about a month ago and my photos are almost there. The design is still a long way from being complete but then I am never happy with my designs so I’ll probably make it public in the next few weeks barring anythign else coming up. It’ll be live on www.razorshine.com when it does but I’ll blog here again before that happens.
