Destinations

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This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on August 6, 2003). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

Not much in the way of posting tonight. Instead, I concentrated on converting the ‘Destinations’ section of my sidebar so that all items now have comment and TrackBack ability, and there are archives for items that have scrolled off the page.

Doing this was fairly easy, if a little time consuming.

All I had to do was create a new weblog to hold all the links, instead of using a TypeList (since TypeLists don’t support archives, comments, or TrackBack). For the weblog itself, I just copied all my templates from Eclecticism so that the visual design matches this one, and then tweaked them a bit so that they linked directly back to Eclecticism’s main page rather than the new blog’s main page, as it’s intended to be a subset of this blog.

I then added a new Index Template that mimics the output of the TypeList. Since TypeLists are simply unordered lists, this was fairly easy to do — here’s my destinations.inc template:

<h2>Destinations</h2>
<ul>
 <mtentries lastn="10">
 <li><a href="<$MTEntryBody$>" title="<$MTEntryTitle$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a>
  <mtentryIfExtended>
   <br />
   <$MTEntryMore$>
  </mtentryIfExtended>
  <mtentryIfAllowComments> | <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#comments" title="Read comments for '<$MTEntryTitle$>'">c:<$MTEntryCommentCount$></a></mtentryIfAllowComments>
  <mtentryIfAllowPings> | <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#trackback" title="See TrackBack pings for '<$MTEntryTitle$>'">tb:<$MTEntryTrackbackCount$></a></mtentryIfAllowPings>
 </li>
 </mtentries>
 <li><a href="http://djwudi.typepad.com/destinations/archives.html" title="Destinations archives">Archives&hellip;</a> | <a href="http://djwudi.typepad.com/destinations/index.rdf" title="Subscribe to Destinations">RSS Feed</a></li>
</ul>

Then I altered the code in the sidebar1.inc template for Eclecticism so that rather than inserting the Destinations TypeList, it inserted the destinations.inc file I had just created.

After that, it was just a matter of copying all the old TypeList entries into posts in the new Destinations weblog. Each post gets a normal title, the URL of the link goes in the main post body, and any descriptive text goes in the extended entry — very similar to the TypeList method of entry, just in a standard post form.

End result, the same basic functionality of the TypeList I was using before, only now with comments, TrackBack, and archives. Not bad for an evening’s work.

8 thoughts on “Destinations”

  1. very cool. i was wishing i had comments in my sideblog much like kottke does and you’ve gone ahead and done it.

    a tip of the hat to you.

  2. You’re a Smartie! :D

    The only problem I see now is that in the full entry page (with comment addition) your right sidebar is flowing underneath the live comment preview. As usual I’m on IE 6 on PC (joy.)

  4. (Tips his hat back) Thank ye, kindly, sir!

    Grrr. IE needs to die a quick and painful death. Things look fine here on Safari.

    The comments would be a challenge, because they’re on seperate blogs. The closest idea I can come up with would be creating an index template for Destinations that just lists the last n comments, then including it in one of the sidebars on Eclecticism. That, however, would increase the length of the sidebars even more, and it’d be two seperate lists, instead of one integrated list.

    I probably could create a similar ‘sideblog’ effect by using one ‘Destinations’ category and <MTEntries category=”destinations”> tags, like you’ve done on geek*muffin, but I like having seperate archives for the Destinations, and being able to categorize them.

    I think for now, this is the best things will be able to get. Any of the Destinations individual pages will have a list of the last 10 comments for Destinations on their pages, so there’s at least something. :)

Comments are closed.