Archive for September, 2004

More changes. I’ve put in the Word­Count plu­gin to dis­play a word count on the date based archive pages. Upload the plu­gin, use the new tag. That’s it. 

The com­ments got an over­haul as well. Using an updated ver­sion of Sim­pleCom­ments I’m now dis­play­ing the com­ment num­ber for eas­ier ref­er­ence (<MTSimpleCommentNumber>) and put in code to estab­lish whether a com­ment is odd or even (<MTSim­pleCom­men­tOdd> returns 1 or 0 respec­tively) — maybe I’ll need that later when I get to the design part. 

Added live pre­view too; found the lit­tle scripts at Cyn­ics dot Info — I plan on tak­ing a look at cre­ati­ma­tion later in order to get Tex­tile to work in the live preview. 

The look of the blog is slowly get­ting more and more clut­tered with var­i­ous fea­ture place­hold­ers scat­tered all over. Hope to clean up soon. For now, a lot of the fea­tures only get imple­mented on the main blog, leav­ing the side­blog and the cam­blog work­ing — and unclut­tered. Once I get going on the markup and the graphic design, I bet I’ll change stuff anyway. 

But while on the sub­ject on com­ments: I haven’t got­ten around to play­ing with Type­Key yet and I’m not even sure I’ll use it. But MT-Blacklist seems to be a bit on the aggres­sive side; so far Jonas and Jes­per have had to email com­ments get­ting blocked with a “ques­tion­able con­tent” error message…which isn’t that great. I have no prob­lems post­ing com­ments, but if you have a minute, please try and leave a com­ment. I need com­ments and track­backs with and with­out html, links etc. I’ve already looked into the con­fig­u­ra­tion setup but haven’t found the bit mess­ing with my comments. 

As the dufus I am, of course I didn’t really think about what to do if you can’t post com­ments at all… “If your phone doesn’t work, try call­ing the phone com­pany”. Duh. So: If you’re met by some stu­pid error mes­sage keep­ing you from post­ing, please mail me at anders (at) pollas.dk. Your help is greatly appreciated!

Pro­fil­Mail is an email client for your Series 60 device, quite a lot bet­ter than the built in Inbox mail client. Rus­sell Beat­tie has some good com­ments — so far my only com­plaint is that I can’t seem to find a way to not down­load all 2000+ head­ers from my IMAP account and GPRS rates in this coun­try aren’t cheap. The non-Nokia User Inter­face is kind of strange, but it also really works. 

[via 3560 and a 12-inch]

Yet another use­ful plu­gin: Com­pare. It allows you to do those sim­ple lit­tle com­par­isons; did you make the com­ment, is the cat­e­gory ‘Tech’ etc. 

So I’ve pre­pared my Stuff cat­e­gory for some addi­tional styling and the com­ments for dis­play­ing whether I par­tic­i­pated or not. For now I’ve just put in placeholders. 

After upload­ing the sin­gle file, all you need to do is slap the tags around what­ever you want dis­played and putting in the val­ues of your check. 

For instance, to dis­play a sin­gle line of text on top of every com­ment made by you:

<MTIfEqual a="[MTCommentAuthor]" b="yourname">
 <p>This comment was posted by yours truly...</p>
</MTIfEqual>

More fun. I’ve installed the Acronym plu­gin which takes care of under­lin­ing and explain­ing and started list­ing the plu­g­ins I use at the bot­tom of the Colophon page. 

And I’ve merged my side­blog into the main index so the lit­tle link blurps just show up in their own slightly dif­fer­ent design (to be opti­mized shortly) in between the reg­u­lar posts. So it’s really not a side­blog any­more, but think­ing of all the trou­ble I had renam­ing my moblog into cam­blog, I just might leave that bit for now. I guees it could have been done using a cat­e­gory as well, but I already have links in the side­blog and I kind of like it to be seper­ated that way. 

I used Multi­Blog to do it. Really easy to install and set up — and really easy to use. It gives you a replace­ment con­tainer tag for <MTEntries>, <MTMultiBlogEntries>, which lets you spec­ify which addi­tional blogs to include as well as sev­eral extra tags; <MTMultiBlogIfNotLocalBlog>..</MTMultiBlogIfNotLocalBlog> and <MTMultiBlogIfLocalBlog>...</MTMultiBlogIfLocalBlog> allows you to wrap the lay­out markup for the dif­fer­ent blogs. It plugs into MT so all you have to do to make it work, is to spec­ify which blog(s) get­ting posted to should make which other blog(s)‘s index page to rebuild. Easy peasy… I found a nice intro at Mova­log.

I’ve just fin­ished imple­ment­ing nice urls. No more data­base IDs fol­lowed by .php — now it’s date based using yyyy/mm/dd/post_title_based_on_title. 

And it wasn’t that hard. In MT 3.11 you just go to your Weblog Con­fig and untick “Use Old-Style Archive Links” under Pref­er­ences to get your archives into date mode. Under Archive files you can put <$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$> in your indi­vid­ual entry archive file tem­plate (with­out .php) to strip your archive pages for the file exten­sion. Only prob­lem is, that if you rely on your pages to be parsed as php (as I do, I’m includ­ing some side­bar stuff) you need to get .htac­cess to parse your extension-less pages as php…which proved a bit more dif­fi­cult than I’d expected. Dalager helped me out (again), point­ing me to ForceType application/x-httpd-php which — as you might have guessed — sim­ply forces every­thing to be parsed as php. That did the trick; an .htac­cess file with just that line is now dumped into my archives folders. 

Pre­vi­ously I didn’t have archive pages for the cam­blog and the side­blog or rather, they were there but weren’t linked any­where. I’ve now made an archives link at the top lead­ing to a monthly overview of the three blogs. I’ve used Kalsey’s Archive Date Header Plu­gin to sort the months by year. I had some trou­ble get­ting a sin­gle page, resid­ing in my blog direc­tory to dis­play links to all of the blogs but finally came up with — what is pretty hack’ish but works — my new archives page: The dif­fer­ent mas­ter archive tem­plates just con­sist of the code to show the links: 


<MTArchiveList archive_type="Monthly">
<MTArchiveDateHeader>
<p><b><MTArchiveDate format="%Y"></b></p>
</MTArchiveDateHeader>
<a href="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><MTArchiveDate format="%B"></a> 

</MTArchiveList>


An indi­vid­ual tem­plate then includes these three files using php and dis­plays the cat­e­gories of the main blog. Not very ele­gant but it’ll have to to for now. The links to the monthly pages still include the not-needed-anymore index.php so I still need to get rid of that. And despite not being any good at .htac­cess files, I guess I need to do some magic so links to old archive pages don’t break. On the other hand, the world will prob­a­bly still con­tinue to exist if I don’t. 

Oh, and by the way: All pages look like crap. I’m still insist­ing on styling at the very end of this silly project.

Think I man­aged to install the updated MT-Blacklist. I’ve just been through all com­ments to remove some of the spam that slipped through while the plu­gin was down (we have the same host) and a few oth­ers that some­how found their way to the site.

At first I was a bit con­fused, cause while every­thing is much pret­tier now, I missed the de-spam but­ton. The plu­gin auto-updates, cool, but how do I remove spam already in there? Sur­prise, sur­prise: MT-Blacklist plugs directly into Mov­able Type’s com­ments list­ing, so you just tick your spam off and get MT-Blacklist to do the rest. I can think of a few inter­face improve­ments as you need to go through a few extra steps if your com­ments include too many links, and while I’m sure that’s a good idee, I was left won­der­ing whether the many com­ments I had just care­fully marked were actu­ally being deleted or not. Maybe I’m just tired…

I started off by mark­ing every­thing, plan­ning to just remove the few real com­ments from the list, but it turned out, quite a few good, gen­uine dis­cus­sions had been going on in the com­ments, so I had to reverse my plan. Thanks to every­one for com­ment­ing over the years — and to Dalager for sort­ing out an auto-updater for the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of the Blacklist.

And: If I some­how got you black­listed, please let me know. Apolo­gies in advance! I’ll take a look at Type­key etc. soon — every­thing can happen.

Yet another ‘episode’. I’ve renamed the moblog to ‘cam­blog’ (thoughts on that here), changed tem­plates accord­ingly and put a redi­rect line in my .htac­cess file which will hope­fully keep the thou­sands of sub­scribers to my very impor­tant image feed. 

Redirect /mblog http://pollas.dk/camblog

So far, my aggre­ga­tor of choice (Shrook) has updated my feed with no com­plaints. Again, let me know if some­thing doesn’t work for you. 

As far as “remov­ing design” goes, I’ve had to real­ize that when you don’t really have a design but more of a ‘lay­out with a bit of styling’, that’s kind of hard, so for now that part of the process is put aside. How­ever, I did remove some stuff from the side­bar; var­i­ous links not updated for ages, my blogroll (weblogs from my old Bloglines-account) and searches and ref­er­ers (sic!) which pri­mar­ily were spam and porn bots. 

Update: I’m hav­ing prob­lems with image paths, espe­cially as I for some rea­son don’t have the same paths across all my posts. So for now I’ve for­got about redi­rect­ing image fold­ers and will do a proper cleanup later. Feeds should still be fine. Expect the worst.

If you can see this, I’ve suc­cess­fully upgraded to Mov­able Type 3.11. Upgrad­ing was easy as always, although I — as always — for­got to run the upgrade scripts so the sys­tem wouldn’t rec­og­nize my user, I quickly went through the dif­fer­ent “some­things wrong with my upgrade” stages; hor­ror, think­ing, relief, feel­ing stu­pid — everything’s back to normal.

So now I’ll just play with my new install, check and see what can be done, how cat­e­gories work, exper­i­ment with the dynamic php stuff etc. After that, I’ll see if I can remove some design stuff so I can start imple­ment­ing and rearranging.

If you find any­thing bro­ken, please let me know.

As expected this took some time, but here we go; a blog redesign wish list / to do list. Listed in no par­tic­u­lar order, here are some of the things I miss and some of the things I would just really like to do better…and var­i­uos tech-ish stuff I just wanna play with. 

• Under­lined acronyms
• Valid XHTML served as XML, mean­ing run­ning a live validator
• UTF-8
• Nice urls
• Rebuild at ping (com­ments on the indi­vid­ual archive page cur­rently means no auto-rebuild)
• Search terms highlight
• Cus­tom fields; cat­e­gory based layouts
• “Sim­ple shar­ing”; side­blog / del.icio.us bet­ter integrated
• Comment-layout (live pre­view / com­ment count)
• More feeds (all con­tent, blogs, com­ments etc.)
• Colophon (list plu­g­ins etc.)
• Bet­ter archive pages (includ­ing moblog / sideblog)
• Change front­page layout

And a lot more… But this is a start. I think I’ll start by upgrad­ing to MT 3.11 and see how that works, then I’ll strip the site for most of the design, only keep­ing lay­out styles and start imple­ment­ing fea­tures, repo­si­tion­ing con­tent etc., post­ing as I go along. Hope­fully at the end I will have a fin­ished design to slap onto the pretty markup. 

Any feature/layout sug­ges­tions are more than welcome.

The Daily Stan­dards on Build­ing a com­mu­nity site:

Quick sum­mary of this entry for those in a hurry: ALL WIKI SOFTWARE PACKAGES SUCK! 

And while a bit bold, the state­ment pretty much sums up my expe­ri­ence with the few wikis I’ve had a look at. 

Instiki isn’t that bad, though. I’ve suc­ces­fully installed it on my Power­book in just two steps and besides being easy to install and use, it looks fine. 

That said, a small group of us, talk­ing at the Blo­gra­dio end-of-season-party about wikis, all had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences; most wiki pack­ages are pretty hor­ri­ble design-wise and as the pur­pose of wikis really are to just get going a lit­tle pret­ty­fi­ca­tion defi­nately wouldn’t hurt. So we thought about pick­ing one of them and do a lit­tle design work on it. Not a bad idea, really…