Cool tricks with MovableType

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!

Smileys!

I found a fun little hack for MT over on So Very Posh today, and thought I’d give it a shot. So — my site now has smileys! :D I can use them in my posts, and they’ll also show up in comments — read on for instructions.

So here’s the deal. Using the hack has allowed me to set up certain text strings that my server will automatically translate into graphical smileys whenever they’re used — in my posts, in people’s comments, wherever. To use each smiley, just type the code for the smiley, and the rest is taken care of automagically!

Addendum: As of August 30, 2002, the available smileys and the codes to use them changed. If you’ve stumbled upon this post, please jump on over to the updated list. Thanks!

Update: Now that I’m on TypePad, I’m not using this hack anymore. ’twas fun while it lasted, though.

MovableType 2.0

I’ve just upgraded the backend for my site to Movable Type 2.0, which was just released today. New toys are always good! :)

Front page changes being the most visible, I’ll address those first.

Of lesser consequence, I’ve taken off the ‘Recently Read’ box for the time being. I’m not reading as much as I was before my ‘puters got down here (something I hope to work on correcting after the hullabloo of moving into my new apartment settles down), and I wanted to open up space for the newest addition.

The newest feature addition is one I’ve been looking forward to being able to do since I started reading that it would be included in the MT 2.0 upgrade. On the right below the archive listings, you’ll now notice a ‘Recently commented on’ section. This lists the ten posts that people have (hrm…let’s work on this….) most recently commented on. Yeah, that was tough to figure out, wasn’t it? ;) Anyway, new comments will pop a post to the top of that list, and if you hover your cursor over the post title, it’ll display a comment telling you how many comments have been made total for that post. Nifty, eh?

The less-visible change I’ve made is to the monthly archive listings, and it’s also a change implemented in MT 2.0 that I’ve been waiting for. While I like the standard of having my newest post at the top of the main index page, ensuring that the newest information is always the first to be seen, it seemed kind of silly to me that this forced my monthly archive pages to also display in reverse chronological order. MT 2.0’s stronger sorting features, however, allow me to keep my main page as is, while sorting my monthly archives so that they can be read in chronological order, top to bottom. Makes much more sense to me.

I think those are the only changes I’m going to make for the moment. I’m sure if I stumble across something else that I feel I just have to add, I’ll babble about it. And, of course, suggestions are welcome, if anyone has any.

MT Upgrade

While I’m sure this matters to absolutely nobody except me, I thought I’d post a quick note to track the changes — I’ve just upgraded Movable Type (the scripts that I use to run and manage my blog) to version 1.4. If anyone reading this is tech-geeky enough to care, here’s a list of the changes in this upgrade. I may be playing with some of these new features in the future….

New blog software – MovableType

Okay, I’m finally up and running! This kept me up longer than it should have, as I’m supposed to be packing so that I can head up to Alaska right after work tomorrow, but it’s done now. I switched my weblog software from NewsPro over to Movable Type. Took me a bit to get everything set up and configured right so that it didn’t require re-coding this entire page, but everything seems to be up and working now.

There’s a new comments system to play with, and in general a lot more features for me to experiment with. I’ve still got some cleaning up to do — for instance, the archives aren’t online yet, nor do I know if I can enable the search or e-mail functions the way I had them just yet, but I’m looking into it. I’ll get to that some other time, though — at the moment, it’s time for me to pack, and then get some sleep.

That’s more like it

Okay — finally figured out the tricks to the css code I was working on, so now the site looks like I was aiming for way back when when I started this whole redesign thing. It’s a fairly minor change from what it’s been for a few months, but I like this a bit better. It’s about time I got it figured out…managed to do it without screwing things up this time. :)

Two more projects coming up — the first is going to be changing the .cgi I use to post news to Moveable Type, as it’s got a fair amount of features that my current .cgi (NewsPro) doesn’t have, or if it does, they’re not quite as smoothly integrated. Secondly, finally going through the rest of the site and actually getting all the pages using a consistent look — something that I just haven’t gotten done yet. Ah, well.

But for now — time to head out, get some food, do some shopping, and other fun things along those lines.

Hasta la bye-bye.