Blog

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

Small update to RSS feed

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Lately I’ve been reading a ton of sites daily (65 at current count) via NetNewsWire Lite. While this allows me to skim through a huge amount of information in a short time, one of the disadvantages is that none of the RSS feeds that the sites provide give any information on comments to a given post (this isn’t a limitation of NetNewsWire at all, it’s part of how the RSS feed is written). Since I’ve often found some really interesting stuff in the discussion threads after a post, this is a bit of a downside.

So, while I doubt that very many people subscribe to my RSS feed, I figured I’d at least make my feed give me the information I want, and changed my feed template slightly. Where the code used to say…

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$>]]></content:encoded>

…I’ve altered it to say this…

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$>]]><MTEntryIfAllowComments> <![CDATA[ (<$MTEntryCommentCount$> Comments)]]></MTEntryIfAllowComments><MTEntryIfAllowPings><![CDATA[ (<$MTEntryTrackbackCount$> TrackBack Pings)]]></MTEntryIfAllowPings></content:encoded>

…so that in my RSS feed, there’s a short display line that tells whether I’ve gotten any comments or TrackBack pings for an entry.

Maybe if I’m really lucky, someone a little higher up in the blogosphere heirarchy will stumble across this and the idea will start to spread.

Trackback changes and Category links

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Well, for the moment, I’ve had to give up on my goal of staying pop-up free. Grrr. I thought I had it for a while, but as it turns out, TrackBack pings won’t automatically rebuild the page that they reference, so they weren’t showing up at all unless I forced the page to regenerate. So, until I find another way of managing it (apparently displaying TrackBack pings inline can be done using MySQL, but I’ve yet to dive into that), I’ve gone back to the default pop-up method of displaying TrackBack pings. Thanks to Phil for the suggestion he e-mailed me — while it didn’t work, it was a good idea (and, incidentally, congrats also on getting that CSS bug fixed…ain’t debugging fun?!?).

The second change tonight is the addition of Category-based navigation links for the individual entry pages. On the page for each entry, just below the previous entry/next entry links, there are now links that lead to the previous entry and next entry in whichever category the entry belongs to. I’d wanted to do this for a while, but just finally found the code to get it working — much thanks to ScriptyGoddess and Pixels in Time for the assistance with the code in setting this up!

Wired goes CSS

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I’ve occasionally babbled here about my continuing efforts to create a modern, standards-compliant site, using CSS, ensuring that my site validates, and most recently, adopting current accessibility standards. In doing so, I’ve joined an ever-growing group of sites across the ‘net working to follow current web standards.

As is typical for movements like this, it’s the ‘little people’ that start the ball rolling (in this case, primarily weblogs and personal sites), then the ‘big boys’ follow. Today, one of the first major, heavy-traffic sites has unveiled their new standards-compliant design — Wired. They detail their decisions to move to the new format in their article “A site for your eyes“, and web guru Jeffrey Zeldman gives his thoughts (and praise) on his site today. Congrats Wired!

Test post

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Test post to see if regex is working correctly.

(sigh) It’s not. But I’ve asked for help, so hopefully it will soon (incidentally, regex is a plugin for MT that should allow me to get smileys and other search/replace goodies working again without having to hack into MT). Just so’s ya know what I’m babbling about.

MovableType upgrade

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I’ve just upgraded to MovableType 2.5. This will probably break a few of the features (off the top of my head, the smileys will need to be fixed, and possibly the ‘recent comments’ section), but I’ll get those re-enabled as quickly as I can.

Addendum: ‘Recent Comments’ are working again. Most likely, nobody even noticed that they were gone for a couple hours. Ah, well. On the plus side, they now work with the standard MT installation, and don’t need a special hack. Hooray for upgrades!

The hunt is on: MT, MySQL, and PHP

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While I’ve done my best to track any changes I’ve made to Movable Type in my ‘MovableType’ archive category, I’ll freely admit it’s not organized quite as well as it could be.

However, it looks like there’s going to be a lot of good information regarding MT, MySQL, and PHP appearing soon, as Jonathan Delacour and Allan Moult start migrating their MT blogs to new installations. Jonathan will be writing from the perspective of a Windows user, Allan from that of a Mac OS X user. Definitely worth keeping an eye on in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, Shelley Powers sees the migration beginning, and immediately begins her hunt for the wild MT documenters. The game is afoot!

Erk – how did I manage this one?

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Okay, this is interesting. It appears that I’ve managed to mung up the code for my pages somewhere so that someone using Internet Explorer 5.2 under Mac OS X cannot leave a comment. Other browsers can, however. I’ll use the comments for this post as a testing ground to try to narrow things down.

Read more

Thoughts on EspressoBlog

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I’ve mentioned a couple times that I’ve been using EspressoBlog to make posts. In the process, I’ve come up with a few issues and ideas, and figured a post here (and TrackBack ping to Phil, since it works in EB now!) would work…

  • Issue: TrackBack gets turned off.

    I keep the ‘allow pings’ option in Movable Type turned on for every post — it may not get utilized much, but hey, why not? However, posting from EB seems to set the TB flag to ‘off’, requiring me to go back into my post through the usual MT interface and turn it back on.

  • Issue: the ‘HTML Tags & Blog List’ drawer and the ‘TrackBack’ drawer cover each other.

    This had me confused at first — I had the ‘…Blog List’ drawer open after logging into my blog, and then opened the ‘TrackBack’ drawer. Since they both slide out the right hand side of the window, and the ‘TrackBack’ drawer isn’t as wide as the ‘…Blog List’ drawer, at first I didn’t think the ‘TrackBack’ button had done anything. I clicked it again, and then I noticed the extra shadow effect that was appearing underneath the ‘…Blog List’ drawer. Oh! Closed the ‘…Blog List’ drawer, and viola, there was the ‘TrackBack’ drawer. Possible solutions: either put the ‘TrackBack’ drawer on the left side of the window (as that’s the side the button is on anyway), or see if there’s some way for one drawer to toggle the other — if one is open, then opening the other will close the first.

  • Issue: ‘Post (Don’t Publish!)’ seems to be broken.

    At least, it didn’t work for this entry! I’m assuming it’s supposed to act as a ‘save as draft’ option, but after posting this entry and hitting my site, there was the entry, definitely not in draft status. Not a biggie in this instance, but possibly could be in other instances.

  • Idea: could EB automatically log into a specific blog (or at least a server)?

    If I leave EB running this isn’t an issue, but if I quit and then re-launch it (for instance, due to logging out of my account on my ‘puter), then before I can post anything, I need to re-connect to my MT installation, then choose a specific blog. Since most people probably only ever need to connect to one server (and many probably only need to connect to one blog), could there be a ‘default server/default blog’ option(s) setting so that EB would automatically set up the connection upon startup?

I think that’s it for now…more as I think of them. Now, to post this, then hit the web-based log in to turn on TrackBack! ;)