Blog

Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).

Still here?

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Been kind of quiet around here lately. No major reasons for that, really, but a few minor ones.

I’ve been wanting to revamp my photoblog for a while now, but it had been one of those “back burner” projects. I finally decided it was time to get started, and — rather than do my coding from scratch, as I normally do — I went out looking for a decent pre-made template to use. Unfortunately, I don’t think that that’s going to work. I started work on setting everything up, but all I’ve succeeded in doing so far is making my photoblog all sorts of screwy. The template I found, while a decent look, is designed for smaller photos than I’ve been posting (so I’d have to resize everything I’ve uploaded so far), uses very different posting conventions (so I’ll have to fix my previously uploaded photos), and — the two most damning issues — will not work for portrait photographs (landscape only), and is a heavily table-based layout (rather than CSS-based). Ick. So, I need to start over with that project.

Another project I’ve got going on is fixing up all my past entries in this weblog to work better with the related entries hack I put in last week. In order for it to calculate which entries are related to a given post, the most important fields are the ‘Excerpt’ and the ‘Keywords’. Well, as I’ve wasn’t using some of MT’s features when I started this weblog, only about half of my posts have excerpts, and I just started using the keywords field. So, I’m working my way backwards through over two years of posts, adding in the missing information. It’ll be good when it’s done, but it’s a long, slow process.

Lastly, when I’ve been taking some time to scan through my newsreader, there just hasn’t been anything much that’s really catching my eye enough to post about. All the political stuff starts to sound the same after a while, the technical weblogs I read have been focusing more on issues that I don’t deal with very much, and the mac world is more or less on hold until WWDC at the end of this month.

So, things are a little slow for the moment. I’m sure they’ll pick back up in a bit — I go through times like this every so often. Just a bit ‘OB’d’ (overblogged), I think. ;)

In the meantime, I’ve started yet another project (because I need another one…), and will be resurrecting my long-dead quotebook by posting a quote a day to the ‘quotes’ category of this weblog. Until any more substantial content shows up, enjoy those!

Related entries

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I’m experimenting with Adam Kalsey’s Related Entried Revisited MovableType modification. It uses a MySQL database query to create a list of entries that should be somewhat similar to each entry, and lists them in the right hand sidebar of each entry’s individual listing page.

Just glancing through what it comes up with, it seems to be grabbing an interesting mix. Some posts I’ve been fairly impressed with what it comes up with, others have seemed fairly random. I’ll leave it in for a bit to see what I think of it.

Don't talk and drive

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Update: This was originally a post ranting about people driving and talking on cell phones at the same time.

Unfortunately, I seem to be running into a problem where, due to a bug either in Safari, in MovableType, or the combination of the two, sometimes when editing a comment (for instance, deleting a duplicate), the text of the comment gets put in the body field of the post being edited. If you don’t see this before saving the post, the post is wiped out, and replaced with the text of the comment.

Grr.

Ah, well. Guess I just need to pay more attention next time. I just wish I knew who to send the bug report to…

Navigation – left or right?

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I breezed through a usability study comparing left- and right-justified site navigation this morning.

I had the standard left-justified navigation for a while, and at one point had a three column layout with sidebars on both sides of the page, but in one of my redesigns I decided to go with the current right-justified navigation, and plan on sticking with it.

My basic reasoning is that this layout emphasizes the content over the navigation. As English speakers read from left to right, the content area has dominance. It also (I think) makes it a little easier to track your position on a page when reading a long post. With left-justified navigation, when you reach the end of a line on a page and move your eyes back left, you need to account for whatever space is taken up by the navigation bar. Using a right-justified navigation scheme, you just let your eyes snap all the way to the left of the page, and no searching is necessary.

Now, these are my opinions only, and I’m not schooled in usability at all, so I could be completely off base with that, so take my reasoning with a grain of salt. It’s just my thinking on an admittedly not very important matter. ;)

(via WebWord)

Getting personal

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An interesting article in the NYT today about the pros and cons of getting personal with weblogs, something I occasionally struggle with. My site tends to be somewhat dry much of the time, but while I occasionally toy with the idea, I’ve never been too sure if I want to “open up” more in such a public medium.

I’m not likely to make a dramatic shift in the tone of this weblog — I’m naturally fairly private and reserved, and not likely to go into any sort of no-holds-barred expose — but there are definitely times I consider broadening the scope of what I write about. Maybe I’ll head that direction at some point, maybe I won’t, I’m not too sure. It bears consideration, however.

Of course, since I just edited this post three times, and almost deleted it, things may stay just as they are. ;)

(via Paulo)

Speeding things up

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If all has gone well, I should have just sped up my site when processing new comments or trackback pings, thanks to Sean Willson’s mt rebuild type modification.

Technical details follow (Kirsten, you’ll want to look at this one…)

(via Phil)

By default, MT rebuilds all index templates whenever an entry is created or edited, or when a comment is added. This is done to keep everything as up to date as possible, and is as it should be.

However, as a site grows, and as more bells and whistles are added to it, the time it takes to rebuild all those templates keeps growing. The usual set of index templates includes the main index page, the RSS feed, the main archives index page, the CSS stylesheet, plus whatever archive pages may be set up — all this has to be rebuilt, along with the page for an individual entry, whenever anything changes on a site.

I’d already done what I could to speed up my rebuild by setting my stylesheets to only rebuild when I specifically tell them to (as they normally don’t change), but I’d also added a few more index templates to the mix (the excerpts for my main table of contents page and a secondary RSS feed). All of this was what has caused my server to run so godawfully slow whenever comments or trackback pings are received.

Sean’s modification changes the way MT’s rebuild system works, though. While by default, MT only allows you to set whether a particular template is an index template (and therefore needs to be rebuilt regularly) or not, with this modification in place, there is much finer control over which templates are rebuilt under what circumstances.

So now, my table of contents excerpts, master archive list, and RSS feeds will only rebuild when I add or edit an entry. The main index file will rebuild whenever entries are added or edited, or when new comments are received. Additionally, individual entry pages should rebuild when trackback pings are received automatically, instead of my having to rebuild them manually (which is what I’ve been doing).

Kirsten — the reason I wanted you to peek in on this one is that as this is a modification to the MT system itself, and not just my weblog, you may need to go into your templates and set the rebuild options for each one. Everything may work normally if you don’t, but I’m not entirely sure how it will work if those fields haven’t been set, and you try to add an entry. The changes should be fairly obvious (you’ll need to go into the edit screen for each template, and choose the right option from the new drop-down menu), but if you need any help, feel free to e-mail me or IM me if it’s late enough. Hopefully this doesn’t leave you grumbling at me! ;)