Geodog

Phil Ringalda. Nice guy

I check Phil Ringnalda's site daily, because he is always finding cool new blogtech toys, and he is a fount of information about Movable Type. Plus he tends to run into the bugs before I or most other people do. Coward that I am, I never download a new version of MT until I see that Phil has been using it for a few days first. He is also very responsive to questions left in comments on his site. An all around nice guy, at least in his blogging incarnation. (I know nothing about Phil in real life. I thought I was reticent about my personal life, but I am a blabber mouth compared to Phil. For all I know he is the evil CEO of a company that makes its money using third world slave labor to extract scarce resources that are used to make weapons for dictators, polluting the environment and stealing from shareholders as he goes. But I doubt it.)

I was browsing his site last night and noticed that he was linking to an interview with him. I read the interview (a good read, with some blogger history I didn't know), which concludes:

Recorder: Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say about your blog at the Pearly Gates?

Phil: That's a really scary thought, Judgment Day based on your blog. How about "sometimes, you really were capable of being a nice guy"?

In my experience, Phil is an incredibly nice guy, and his blog is very useful. I thought I'd use the two minutes it would take to tell him so, since my efforts at stopping Bush's War on Iraq and bringing World Peace to the Earth don't seem to be working. So I wrote a gushing fan mail comment, and appended to it an idle question about pMachine. I occasionally toy with the idea burning up still more formerly billable hours by switching over to a PHP based weblogging tool, since I am totally intimidated by Ben's Perl code, but I can hack around a bit in PHP.

In response, I got 2 pages of reviews of PHP based weblogging tools, with detailed pros and cons, from Phil and from another visitor to his site, Michael, posted on Phil's site. If that isn't being a nice guy, I don't know what is. Thank you, Phil.