Not much in the way of posting tonight. Instead, I concentrated on converting the ‘Destinations’ section of my sidebar so that all items now have comment and TrackBack ability, and there are archives for items that have scrolled off the page.

Doing this was fairly easy, if a little time consuming. All I had to do was create a new weblog to hold all the links, instead of using a TypeList (since TypeLists don’t support archives, comments, or TrackBack). For the weblog itself, I just copied all my templates from Eclecticism so that the visual design matches this one, and then tweaked them a bit so that they linked directly back to Eclecticism’s main page rather than the new blog’s main page, as it’s intended to be a subset of this blog.

I then added a new Index Template that mimics the output of the TypeList. Since TypeLists are simply unordered lists, this was fairly easy to do — here’s my ‘destinations.inc’ template (extra linebreaks added for readability):

<h2>Destinations</h2>
<ul>
<MTEntries lastn="10">
<li><a href="<$MTEntryBody$>" title="<$MTEntryTitle$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a>
<MTEntryIfExtended>
<br /><$MTEntryMore$>
</MTEntryIfExtended>
<MTEntryIfAllowComments> | <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#comments" title="Read comments for '<$MTEntryTitle$>'">c:<$MTEntryCommentCount$></a></MTEntryIfAllowComments>
<MTEntryIfAllowPings> | <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#trackback" title="See TrackBack pings for '<$MTEntryTitle$>'">tb:<$MTEntryTrackbackCount$></a></MTEntryIfAllowPings>
</li>
</MTEntries>
<li><a href="http://djwudi.typepad.com/destinations/archives.html" title="Destinations archives">Archives…</a> | <a href="http://djwudi.typepad.com/destinations/index.rdf" title="Subscribe to Destinations">RSS Feed</a></li>
</ul>

Then I altered the code in the ‘sidebar1.inc’ template for Eclecticism so that rather than inserting the Destinations TypeList, it inserted the ‘destinations.inc’ file I had just created.

After that, it was just a matter of copying all the old TypeList entries into posts in the new Destinations weblog. Each post gets a normal title, the URL of the link goes in the main post body, and any descriptive text goes in the extended entry — very similar to the TypeList method of entry, just in a standard post form.

End result, the same basic functionality of the TypeList I was using before, only now with comments, TrackBack, and archives. Not bad for an evening’s work.

[See also: Atom feed now available | RSS Templates for TypePad Pro/MovableType | Importing MT archives: month by month | Speeding things up | More TrackBack mumbo-jumbo ]

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