Wingnut Da Capo

Spanner Wingnut’s Muddleware Lab is a sort-of-companion to Professor von Clueless in the Blunder Dome.

von Clueless is about geeky things and especially approaches to development, tutorials, and other topics mainly around software development and information technologies.

The Muddleware Lab serves as a laboratory for monkeying around with blog setups, experimental themes, even new hostings, before disrupting what I think of as the production blogs in Orcmid’s Orbit.  It is narrowly applied whereas von Clueless is more generalized.

This reboot of the Muddleware Lab is for the continuation of that arrangement for blogs, new or rebooted, now on blogspot.com.

A little History

“Professor von Clueless in the Blunder Dome” was inspired by “Baron von Tollbooth and the Chromium Nun.”  Really.  “Spanner Wingnut” was inspired by “Bunsen Honeydew,” also confused with “Omar Hampstercheeks.”  I couldn’t help myself.

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Wingnut began as a companion of my original Blogger blogs.  I used it to work out theme changes before propagation to other blogs.  There is a consistency of layout with a variation in the color schemes.

Restoring nfoCentrale Blog Hosting

I decided to migrate from Blogger blogs when I could no longer host and archive their web pages on my own web site.  I began with a Movable Type flavor of Wingnut, practicing before any migration to all the other blogs.  There was a new companion blog,  nfoCentrale Status, dealing with over-all activity on what I think of as the nfoCentrale suite. 

Self-hosting of Movable Type and migration of other blogs stalled.  The site-server model that I favored for authoring was complicated by blog posts showing up on the web sites first, and then having to be backed up on private repositories.  The Web Development Pillars were daunting and depend on some obsolete technology such as Microsoft FrontPage, Visual SourceSafe, and locally running Internet Information Server.

Firtations

While fatigued by my web development model, I also operated Orcmid’s Live HideOut, originally on Microsoft’s Windows Live blog service and migrated to a free Wordpress account when Microsoft’s attention span took what is by now an all-too-predictable course.  I began using Live HideOut to account for conception and effort for my career capstone Miser Project.  That felt awkward.

Meanwhile, I was intrigued by Hexo as a way of authoring and maintaining a blog on my own computers, publishing from there to my various blogs hosted inside the nfoCentrale.com server.  This would provide backup at the source.  Comments were to be handled by Discus. My effort to accomplish that on Wingnut first stalled on an interoperability problem.  We have parted friends.  I am done with that and the inscrutable dependencies and the challenges of maintaining forks of GitHub chunks.

Going Forward

For now, Wingnut is back on Blogger, hosted on Blogspot.  There may be yet-another migration of a blog or two, and we’ll see how Wingnut figures into that, or not.