Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).
I’m experimenting with different colorschemes for the site. On the bright side, this is very easy to do — just a few changes in the CSS for the site and the whole thing changes.
On the downside, colors outside of black and white just aren’t my strong suit. ;) So this may go on for the next few days until I find something I settle on. Bear with me…
After struggling with things for a few hours tonight, I’ve managed to succesfully convert the database backend for MovableType to MySQL.
What does this mean? Well…good question. For you, the end-user, not much, though as MySQL is supposed to be a bit faster, posting comments might be a bit more responsive than it was before. For me as the author/administrator, it should mean a bit more speed when creating/editing entries, and a lot more options as far as what I can do on a design/implementation level.
At least, that’s the theory. If nothing else, according to one of the moderators of the MovableType Support Forums, “If you have the choice, pick mysql. :) A little faster, more stable, easy to browse the database….” Good enough for me!
Here’s an interesting idea — BlogFodder, a daily e-mail with a short snippet of text intended to (hopefully) inspire musings, thoughts, and possibly future weblog posts. Meg’s likening it to the old school exercises where a class was given a single topic or title and ended up creating umpteen different stories seems right on target. Worth keeping an eye on, at least.
While searching around for pointers on getting MovableType moved over to a MySQL backend rather than the DBD backend I’m currently using, I ran across a few good general resources for OS X MovableType installations.
There’s probably more out there, but these are a good start.
Hooray for people smarter than me! Or, at the very least, more knowledgable of all sorts of javascripty goodness and magic.
A couple days ago, Phillip found my ‘Live Comment Preview‘ and incorporated it into his blog. However, not satisfied with what I had, he improved the code so that it recognizes and inserts linebreaks correctly!
So, I’ve gone and snagged the improvement, and tossed it into the script on my site. Better and better all the time…thanks Phillip!
I’m using a fairly heavily adapted version of the Hide/Show Comments hack from Scriptygoddess to hide and show the clickable smileys I’ve added to my site. I simplified the javascript a lot, but in doing so, the ‘hide/show smileys’ links on any post in my blog only work under Internet Explorer, and fail in various ways in any other browser (Netscape/Mozilla/Chimera don’t seem to be recognizing the javascript, and just reload the page, and Safari (and therefore probably also Konqueror, since they both use the kHTML rendering engine) doesn’t even display the links!).
Could anyone possibly give me some help on getting these to at least work under both IE and Netscape/Mozilla/Chimera, if not Safari also? I don’t know enough about javascript to know how to fix this!
(This plea has also been posted on the MovableType support forum.)
The category (or, in many cases, categories) that each post on my blog is assigned to is (are) now listed in each individual post, just underneath the time/datestamp at the end of the post. Might make finding older and/or related posts a bit easier than it was before. I’ve also added a lot of categories in order to even further (over-)organize my posts — new posts will get these added at creation, older posts will just have to live without until I get them all assigned.
Being silly here. ;) Feel like harassing me about what I listen to? Here’s the place to do it….
The last ten tracks I’ve listened to in iTunes are:
This feature is no longer active, as a consequence of the move to TypePad. Sorry!
Feel free to use the comment form to praise or condemn me — or if you’re feeling rich and/or adventuresome, use the links to Amazon and pick up something new to listen to!
(This is inspired by the playlist comment feature on Phil Ringnalda’s site.)
I’ve made some revamps to my archive listing pages, in an attempt to address some of the issues raised by Dave and Kirsten.
Monthly archives I’ve kept the same — I really like the calendar-style display that they use.
Clicking through to the main archive page should be much nicer now. Rather than the huge (and rapidly growing) table listing the title for every post I’ve ever made, you’ll now see a simple list of each category I use, with a short description of the category and the titles of the last ten posts within that category.
Heading into each category’s archive page (for instance, my Humor archive), I wanted to get away from listing the entirety of each post, as that lead to huge pages, but still include more info than just the title of each post. Nicely enough, MT includes an ‘excerpt’ field for each post, and if an exerpt isn’t written by hand, MT will auto-generate one using a snippet of the beginning of each post. So, the category archive pages list the title for each post, then the excerpt. I’m going to start trying to remember to create excerpts for any new posts from here on out, but the auto-generated excerpts will have to suffice for all the old posts — at least until I get really bored. ;)
Hopefully this makes things far easier to deal with. As always, questions, comments, and words of wisdom are always appreciated!
[Addendum: the main archive listing and all category listings validate as valid XHTML. Individual entry pages should, but may or may not, on a case-by-case basis. However, there’s lots of those, and I need to go to bed.]{.underline}