website

Any posts more directly connected to the upkeep, maintenance, and backend fiddling around of my website/blog and whatever platforms it’s running on at any particular moment.

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!

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!

Shameless greed

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Seeing as how Christmas is slightly less than three months away, I figured I’d indulge my lust for new-‘n’-shiny-things and add a link to my Amazon Wishlist to my site (it’s towards the bottom of the sidebar, just above the shameless plea for money — gotta keep my greed centralized!).

There’s a mix of stuff on there, from music to ‘puter hardware and software. Pointless? Possibly. But I figure it’s worth a shot. ;)

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.

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Linkage

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I just noticed that both Falling Awake and db link to me. Nice to know someone else out there finds me worth checking in on for one reason or another — much appreciated!

Rearranging a bit

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I’ve done a bit of reorganizing to the sidebar, in an effort to group things together a bit more logically, and move sections that are more likely to be used closer to the top (above the ‘fold’, ‘Above the fold’ is a carryover from newspaper publishing. In print terms, it just means that the most important items should be on the top half of the page, so that they are seen when the paper is folded and lying face up. It’s the same concept on the web, only the ‘fold’ in this case is considered to be the bottom border of the visible area when the page first loads at a standard resolution (usually 800px by 600px).so to speak).

I decided to start off with the more ‘interactive’ elements — ‘Music of the moment’ and the most recent comments. While ‘MotM’ isn’t really interactive, the voyeuristic aspect to it has some of the same feel (at least, that’s my justification for keeping it towards the top).

After that we have the search form and the archives list, as they’re both related to finding older information, or information elsewhere on the site. The search form is one of those things that’s commonly ‘supposed to be’ above the fold, anyway, so this helps. Also, I’ve taken the calendar display off of the archive list. I’d debated its usefullness before, but finally made up my mind to remove it after reading Jonathan’s reasons for removing the calendar on his site (which I stumbled onto thanks to Burningbird).

Next come all the various links to other places to go, the Amazon voluntary paybox (which would be just as useful if I put it on an entirely seperate page with some horridly dry, academic-sounding title not likely to interest anyone, named the file something else entirely [and misspelled it to boot], and then didn’t post any links to it anywhere — but that’s another matter alltogether), the syndication link (almost as useless as the Amazon box, except that I occasionally use it for testing purposes), and the linkback to MovableType.

And, that’s about it for now. Woohoo?

Reviewed!

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Last week I stumbled across Bloggy Opinions a blog review website. It seemed fairly entertaining, and the reviewers seemed to do a good even job of reviewing the sites they visited, so I went ahead and submitted ‘The Long Letter’ to them.

Bloggy OpinionsI got my review back today — and whaddaya know, not only was it good, it was really good! The review is posted on their site, but as there currently seems to be a slight HTML glitch that’s rendering my review invisible, I’m taking the liberty of copying it here.

DJWUDI — The Long Letter

Now here’s a blog I loved. It was excellent! It’s filled with multiple daily entries to keep you entertained, as well as a plethora of archived entries, features, and links that kept this reviewer busy for many hours. It generally amusing too, and though I’m sure a lot of work goes into the site, it appears effortless.

It’s the little things that make this site a gem in the drudge that can be the Internet. In the top right of your screen is an embedded applet that displays the mp3 that the author is currently listening too. It gets updated in real time and is the coolest thing I’ve even seen on a personal website! Unfortunately the version he uses is for the Macintosh operating system, so I won’t get to test it out on my blog. Another interesting feature is that he has implemented a help box on some of the more technical terms. Move your mouse over ‘Mbps’ and up pops a box displaying the full name ‘Megabytes per second’.

The layout is minimalistically beautiful. You’re not bombarded with a messy design; he takes a more newspaper, monochrome type layout. The text is the right size to read, and the font is easy on the eyes.

I can’t say enough about this blog. The author definitely deserves kudos. The only complaint I have is that he doesn’t seem to get that many readers, so the comment section is mostly empty.

Many thanks for such a glowing review!

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