There are a few benefits to being unemployed for a little bit. One of those is having more available hours in the day to spend tinkering around with some of my neverending PROJECTs.
I’ve just (mostly) finished converting all of my pages over to the new template styles provided by Movable Type 3.2. There’s a few tweaks that I didn’t bring over (multiple stylesheets, the live comment preview, gravatar support, and incorporating TrackBack pings and comments into a single list), and I’m still running over in my head which, if any, will be re-incorporated down the line.
For now, though, I’m declaring things done. Feel free to poke around, and as always, suggestions are always appreciated.
Here’s a brief overview of the changes I’ve made to MT’s default templates…
- Main Index:
- Various tweaks to the
<head>data, including extra metadata and adding my customized RSS feeds. - Completely re-vamped the sidebar.
- Pulled the sidebar into a module so a single file could be incorporated into multiple pages.
- Moved the horizontal rule below the post metadata.
- Added Google ads between the first and second posts on the page.
- Various tweaks to the
- Master Archive Index:
- Switched to a two-column layout and added the sidebar module.
- Replaced the single, long list of every single post with three sections: a hard-coded “greatest hits” list, auto-generated links to monthly archives, and auto-generated links to category archives with the most recent ten entries for each category.
- Monthly and Category Archives:
- Switched to a two-column layout and added the sidebar module.
- Added individual entry links to the post titles.
- Condensed each entry from a full-post display to an excerpt display.
- Changed entry sort order to ascending (older entries at the top).
- Individual Archive Pages:
- Switched to a two-column layout and added a second sidebar module that displays related entries instead of my del.icio.us feed.
- Added Google ads between the entry and the TrackBack/comment listings.
- Moved the horizontal rule below the post metadata.
- Added a second Individual Archive Page:
- Displays a text-only version of each post.
- Updated this template to include TrackBack pings and comments.
- Added four pages not part of the default MT install, all based on the main index template:
- About: Basic ‘about the author’ information.
- Comments: Lists the last twenty comments submitted to the site.
- Netflix: Lists my Netflix queue.
- Feeds: Lists all my syndication feeds.