Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Cool tricks with MovableType

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I wanted to toss this up really quickly before I crashed out tonight — over the course of the evening, I’ve tossed in a few very cool tweaks to my blog setup.

First off, the month-by-month archive listings (listed beneath the calendar on the right under the heading ‘Monthly Archives’) now display as a full calendar, with links to the individual posts displayed on the day they were posted. Just a nicer visual presentation than one long page for each month, as I had before. (Suggestion from andersja, code from Dive into Mark.)

The second tweak I’m all sorts of impressed by. There was a great little script posted on ScriptyGoddess that allowed me to implement live comment previewing. Basically, this creates a preview area where you can see what your comment will look like as you type it. It renders HTML as it’s typed too, so if you like to use any code in your comments, that will show in the preview too! Really, really nifty — and easier to see for yourself than for me to try to describe. I’m sure you’ll figure it out easily enough once you see it in action.

That’s about it for tonight…bedime for Bonzo now, tomorrow’s my really late night at work. Woohoo!

WudiVisions

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One upside of having to redo everything from the ground up is that it’s allowing me to play with some ideas that I’d had floating around in my head for a while, and just hadn’t tried yet — and other ideas that have just appeared during this project.

The latter category is responsible for the newest addition to my site — WudiVisions, a ‘PhotoBlog’. While I certainly make no claims of being a professional photographer of any sort, I do occasionally come up with something that I like, and so I figured I’d toss this together as a way to keep something of a ‘best of’ archive of my photos.

The design isn’t final (nor is the name, actually — anyone care to suggest a better title than ‘WudiVisions’?), but as with the rest of the site, it’s at least up and running. I’ve also dropped a small preview icon into the sidebar here on The Long Letter — anytime I put a new image up in WudiVisions, that preview image will update.

See? More goodies!

Progress

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It’s a long, long way from where we want to be…

— O.M.D., ‘Pandora’s Box (It’s a Long, Long Way)’

A long, long way it is, but progress is being made. I’ve managed to get all the template files that MT uses to build the pages recreated, so my site is back to the look I’d settled on just before the crash.

There’s still a long road ahead of me — everything from reconstructing the rest of the site outside of the Long Letter to re-entering all of the old Long Letter posts (yup — all 500-some have to be put back in). Still, I’m started. That’s something, right?

Rebuilding from scratch

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Okay…so here’s the scoop.

In brief — everything died.

Last Thursday, I grabbed a moment during work to check my site, and found out that it was down. This wasn’t immediately a concern — computers do occasionally freeze (though it’s wonderfully rare with OS X), my router has a tendency to lock up on occasion, and I’ve got the occasional tendency to forget about some of the more important of my bills — so I just didn’t worry about it right off.

Unfortunately, when I got home, it quickly became obvious that this was no minor problem. The iMac that I’ve been using for my webserver, was dead — “D – E – D, ded”. No response to any keypresses…no response to the ‘panic button’ reset switch…not even any response after I unplugged it, let it sit for a minute, and plugged it back in. Not a good situation.

Especially when I noticed the faint smell of something burnt lingering in the air.

So, my webserver is no more, and I’m in the process of rebuilding things from scratch. My first priority was to get my blog back up — but to do that, I’m starting with just the default Movable Type template. The rest will fall into place…though it’s likely to be a long, slow process.

On the bright side, I’d done a backup of my website just three weeks ago, towards the beginning of August, so I’ve only really lost about three weeks of posts. On the down side — just copying that backup into the webserver directory of the machine I’m using now, didn’t work, so I still have to rebuild everything. Still, it’ll go a lot faster than if I’d entirely lost all that information, so that’s a good thing.

In the meantime…well, things are likely to be a bit odd around here for a while as I get things going again. Caveat emptor.

Music, music, music

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I found a fun little toy to play with today — a little program called Kung-Tunes that ties into iTunes (my .mp3 player), grabs whatever song I’m listening to at the moment, and writes a small text file to my website. That file is then integrated into the page whenever someone hits my site, giving them an instant readout of whatever I’m listening to if I happen to have any music playing when they visit.

Useful? Not in the least. Just cool.

Redesign in progress

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Well, I did a bunch of coding tonight, and have v1 of my site redesign up and ready to beta-test.

More details on the redesign are in the rest of this post. Unfortunately, as all I’ve re-coded so far is the main Long Letter page, they’ll revert to the current design. Still, at least I’m started, right?

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It just works

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Nathan Torkington, one of the staff over at O’Reilly is documenting his experiences as he moves from a Windows-based PC to an Apple iBook. Gotta love articles that state:

I plugged in the digital video camera (editing be damned!) and it Just Worked. I built wget and it Just Worked. I downloaded VM and it Just Worked. I plugged in a three-button mouse and it Just Worked. I came to realize something: I’d been with Microsoft for so long, who are complacent and hoard their customers, that I’d forgotten what it’s like to use an operating system built by people who want it to cooperate with the rest of the world. It’s good.

(via Daypop)