eclecticism

So…

…if, while moving over to my new digs, I were to take advantage of the one-click WordPress installation offered by Dreamhost and finally dip my toes in waters other than those of Movable Type, are there any pieces of advice I should know about? Plugins I should pay particular attention to? Tips or tricks I should know or avoid?

So far, I’ve managed to track down PHP Markdown and PHP Smartypants, and have activated Akismet, but that’s it (and all this is on a non-public test installation). I’m particularly interested in seeing if there’s a good (easy to implement) ‘tagging’ solution, such as I’m using here in lieu of categories. Googling for ‘wordpress tags’ tends to bring up lots of information on the formatting tags used in WP templates, which isn’t what I’m aiming for.

Anything else?

“What Is Life” by Mullins, Shawn from the album Big Daddy (1999, 4:09).

I’ve been seeing rumblings about coComment for a few weeks now, but finally decided to take a closer look when I noticed it up and running on a post at The Republic of T. coComment is a service that lets you track the comments you’ve made on other weblogs, keep track of when people have responded to them, and so on…basically, trying to make sure that those comments you leave don’t just disappear into the great bit bucket of the ‘net.

So, I’ve signed up, and have enabled coComment integration on this site (for all future entries, at least…all entries on the main page have been rebuilt, the rest of the 3801 entries will be rebuilt eventually) — Movable Type integration was a snap with their included instructions. I don’t figure a huge percentage of my readers will be using it, but it’s there for those who want to.

“Bring on the Dancing Horses” by Echo and the Bunnymen from the album Pretty In Pink (1985, 4:00).

Never having quite gotten the hang of .htaccess redirect requests, I’m hoping someone out there might be able to give me a hand with this.

I would like this…

http://www.michaelhanscom.com/eclecticism/tags/pickatag

…to map to this (though not wrapped onto multiple lines, obviously)…

http://www.michaelhanscom.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tags.cgi?
blog_id=1&tags=pickatag

Similarly, for multiple tags, this…

http://www.michaelhanscom.com/eclecticism/tags/pickatag+anytag

…should map to this (and so on, as more tags are added)…

http://www.michaelhanscom.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tags.cgi?
blog_id=1&tags=pickatag+anytag

Any ideas? Thanks much in advance!

“Mexican Women” by Throwing Muses from the album Just Say Yo (1988, 2:49).

I’m not sure how I’ve managed to do this, but while disabling the OpenID Comment plugin (which was apparently causing issues with submitting comments, and wasn’t really being used anyway), I’ve managed to break the ability to log in via TypeKey for authentication. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what’s going wrong — all of my code looks like it should be doing what it’s supposed to — but for whatever reason, the link to log in to TypeKey isn’t showing up.

So no TypeKey until I figure out what I broke. Meh.

“Sweet Dreams” by Marilyn Manson from the album Smells Like Children (1995, 4:53).

One of the things I’ve wanted to add to my site for quite a while now has finally been added: tagging, along the lines of del.icio.us or Flickr. Admittedly, I still have a ways to go in getting all my old entries correctly tagged, but that will come with time. For now, they’re showing up in a few places.

1. On the main page of the site, the tag listings below each post that previously pointed to Technorati search pages for the individual tag now do tag searches internal to this website.

2. Also on the main page of the site, there is now a ‘This Week’s Tags’ box just below the Table of Contents. This is a quick list of just those tags that have been used on posts within the past seven days…a handy overview of what I’ve been babbling about over the past week.

3. On individual entry pages, the tag line below the post now searches internally (just as on the front page). There are also now quick links to search on individual tags on del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr.

4. The main archives page now features a tag cloud listing tags used within the past month (31 days, actually). The tag cloud is also size-weighted by the frequency of each tag’s use.

5. Lastly, I tweaked the tag search results to be a little more useable — rather than a simple listing of links to each result, I’ve added the entry excerpt for each result to give a little more context than just the headline.

All this is thanks to the excellent Movable Type plugin Tags.app.

As with everything I fiddle with around here, questions, comments and words of wisdom are always appreciated (whether or not they’re heeded is another thing entirely, of course…).

This is actually fairly simple, but you never know.

For ecto users who want to post LiveJournal-style links to LJ user accounts (such as djwudi) into a weblog entry on a non-LJ system:

1. Open Window > HTML Tags.

2. Click the + button to create a new tag set.

3. Paste the following code into the ‘opening tag’ box (as a single line):

   <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=%*">
   <img src="http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif" alt="[%*'s info]" width="17" height="17" /></a>
   <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/%*/"><b>
   

4. Paste the following code into the ‘closing tag’ box:

   </b></a>
   

5. Assign a command key sequence (optional, of course — I used option-command-J).

Viola! You’re done. Now, just type someone’s LJ username into a weblog post, select it, and choose the new tag set (or type the command key sequence you set), and the LJ-style link is created.

A few more tweaks and oddments:

• Re-worded the post metadata.
• Added Technorati tags to the metadata.
• Added pseudo-hidden ‘admin only’ links to all posts, comments, and TrackBack pings, allowing for single-click jumps to the edit screen for each item.
• Used SimpleComments to combine comments and TrackBack pings into a single chronological list.
  • Update: Replaced SimpleComments with this version that recognizes MT3.2’s ‘junk’ status. Many thanks to Yukino’s mention of this issue!
• Added small icons (yanked right from the MT interface, actually) to comment and TrackBack listings to more easily visually identify which is which.
• Added a :hover effect border to comment and TrackBack listings.
• Comments I leave will display with a colored background to easily distinguish them from visitors’ comments.
• Lots of templates updated so that all a links have an associated title attribute.

And…that’s all I’m remembering right now.

So much for declaring a “no more tweaks” point. I just can’t resist the urge to fiddle around…

Thanks to Mark Paschal’s OpenId Comments plugin (announced and described here, current release here), visitors can now authenticate themselves when leaving comments using a LiveJournal or OpenID account in addition to TypeKey authentication (or no authentication at all).

I’ve also increased the width of the comment entry field, as it was a bit cramped (thanks to mom for prompting me on this, as it was bugging me too).

Leave a comment, play around, and let me know if anything seems goofy!

(Update: Some goofiness exists. Generic, TypeKey, and LiveJournal options are working fine, OpenID comments are coming through as ‘anonymous’ even though the commenting UI reports that they’re successfully signed in. Something to fiddle with….)

There are a few benefits to being unemployed for a little bit. One of those is having more available hours in the day to spend tinkering around with some of my neverending PROJECTs.

I’ve just (mostly) finished converting all of my pages over to the new template styles provided by Movable Type 3.2. There’s a few tweaks that I didn’t bring over (multiple stylesheets, the live comment preview, gravatar support, and incorporating TrackBack pings and comments into a single list), and I’m still running over in my head which, if any, will be re-incorporated down the line.

For now, though, I’m declaring things done. Feel free to poke around, and as always, suggestions are always appreciated.

Here’s a brief overview of the changes I’ve made to MT’s default templates… Read the rest of this entry »

Along with upgrading the backend of the site to Movable Type 3.2, which I did last week sometime, I’ve decided to upgrade my templates to the new MT3.2 styles. As I’ve had a fair number of customizations that I’ve been using, though, it’s taking a bit of time to incorporate them into the default templates provided by Six Apart.

Expect some oddities for a few days as I get things tweaked and configured. Once I’ve got everything working with a basic startpoint, then I’ll see about customizing the style to something a little more “me”.

For now, though…things might be a bit odd. Bear with me, hopefully this won’t last too long.

Had a pleasant evening after work yesterday, when I headed up the hill to Charlie’s and got together with Melissa, her daughter (whose name I either didn’t catch or, more likely, have forgotten), Christa, and Erin. Quite fun, actually, being as I ended up in a situation I’ve stumbled into quite a few times before in my life and always enjoy when it happens — being the only guy in something of a ‘girl talk’ session. Laughter, rants about current and former lovers and friends, ongoing drama…all that fun stuff.

There are times when I really enjoy not being the “typical male”…or at least far enough removed from that stereotype that I can occasionally be around for such things. I may have worked over the years at decreasing the amount of drama in my life, but I must admit, I do enjoy being a spectator! Quite enjoyable, in any case, and it seems that this may become something of a weekly event.

After coming home and chatting with Prairie for a while until she wandered off to bed, I upgraded my Movable Type beta installation to v3.2b3, which is essentially the final candidate build. Ran into one small oddity during the upgrade process, but after filing a bug report and having Brad Choate pop up in iChat to talk about it, I’m leaning towards it being a caching issue and nothing major with the system.

I’m looking forward to upgrading my main site to v3.2 once it’s finalized and I’ve had a chance to go over the new documentation. This may end up meaning that I do a full redesign — there are a lot of changes in the new templates, and it may take me some time to wrap my head around all of them. I’m not sure yet if I’ll upgrade the backend and keep the current design and then work on a new one in the background, or just go whole-hog and start over with the new basic designs…more to ponder.

I’ve also just finished reading Alan Moore’s ‘V for Vendetta’ graphic novel after the movie trailer peaked my curiosity about the original movie, and am currently working my way through Moore’s ‘The Watchmen’. While Prairie (a confessed ‘book snob’) may giggle at me for reading “comic books”, I’m enjoying both of these, and ‘V for Vendetta’ in many ways seems very topical in todays world — which, given its subject matter, is actually a little disturbing.

And that pretty much sums up life in the world of me at the moment. Not quite sure what my plans for the weekend are, though there’s a lot of Seafair stuff going on around town right now that I may see if I can find a way to check out at one point or another. As is usual for me, though, I’m not planning much of anything more than about 20 minutes in advance…except for running off to work, which (insert overly melodramatic sigh here) I must go do. Off with me, then!

“24 Hour Man” by Lock Up from the album Something Bitchin’ This Way Comes (1990, 4:46).

I’m spending a little bit of time playing with the just-released public beta version of Movable Type 3.2 on a separate weblog. While I was tempted to just jump straight into upgrading this weblog straight away, I figured that it would be best to wait for a bit when I saw the list of already known bugs that still need to be squashed.

Still, I’m quite impressed with what I’ve seen so far, and it’s nice to have something of a ‘test bed’ to play with while work progresses towards the final version. Feel free to stop by and say hi if you’re curious.

“Dream Induction” by Emergency Broadcast Network from the album Telecommunication Breakdown (1995, 3:20).

Okay, sure, to a certain extent, it’s all propaganda. I’ve got to admit, though — Six Apart’s Pronet series “Our 32 Favorite Features in Movable Type 3.2” is doing a bang-up job of getting me looking forward to MT’s next release.

They’re a bit shy of halfway through the series now (12 down, 20 to go), and while I don’t really know, I’m guessing that the new version will debut right about the time the series is done or soon thereafter. If you’re an MT user and haven’t been following the posts as they appear, it’s worth checking them out. Some nice goodies coming our way soon!

Update: The beta is out — all related news is at the beta blog.

Update: I’ve got a (very bare-bones at the moment) beta testing blog set up. Just a playground for the moment.

“Symphony of Destruction (Gristle)” by Megadeth from the album Foreclosure of a Dream (1992, 9:55).

I’ve just installed Greg Knauss’ MT-Upcoming plugin, a handy interface to events that I’ve flagged on my upcoming.org page. In the sidebar to my main page (though not on individual archive pages, if you’re reading this in an RSS reader or on the individual page you’ll need to click back to the main page to see what I’m talking about) you’ll now see a short listing of events I’m either considering or planning on attending.

(Oh, and the documentation for MT-Upcoming seems to be temporarily misplaced…if you want to install the plugin, here’s Google’s cache of the docs. Came in very handy tonight.)

In other words…yes. I’m just that desperate for a stalker following my every move around town. Life just isn’t worth living without a psychotically obsessive fan or two, after all.

“Going Up to the Country, Paint My Mailbox Blue” by Mahal, Taj from the album Folk, Gospel and Blues: Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1968, 3:37).

When I was first investigating John Gruber’s excellent text-formatting system Markdown, one of the things that caught my eye on his demonstration pages was the ability to see the ‘source’ for any of the pages by simply replacing the .html extension with .text. I’d been wondering if it would be possible to pull such a trick for my site for a while, and got it figured out tonight.

You’ll now notice that just after the post date for each entry, there’s the option to go to a ‘text’ version of the entry. The URL is the same as the normal archive, except that it ends with .txt rather than .html. Clicking on the link will send you to the text-only version of the entry, which is simply the entry without any formatting applied to it whatsoever — just what I’ve typed, nothing more, nothing less.

For instance, here’s the text version of this entry.

I’m honestly not sure if there’s a huge use for this, actually, but that’s never stopped me from trying something before. The biggest benefit I can see is that it allows for very easy copy-and-paste operations without having to worry about “smart quotes” fouling things up along the line. It also allows visitors to see the posts as they were written, of course — and thanks to Markdown, the text-only versions are generally just as readable as the formatted HTML versions, without lots of HTML code cluttering things up. Essentially, they look very similar to what a text e-mail might look like, with URLs placed after each paragraph, and references to each link at the appropriate point in the text.

I have noticed some caveats to this technique, however, which may put the usefulness of this entire technique into question.

1. Safari doesn’t seem to display text files as pure text — rather, it treats them as HTML. This has the effect of running all paragraphs together as a single line, and rendering any HTML it might find. This has the rather unfortunate effect of defeating the purpose. If anyone has any suggestions as how to force Safari to actually display the text as text rather than rendering the HTML, I’d love to hear them.

   Update: Well, now Safari’s behaving and displaying the text versions as I’d expect them to display — as pure text, with un-rendered HTML. I have no idea why it didn’t do so the first time. This first caveat may be moot, then (which is a good thing).

   Update: John Gruber was kind enough to fill me in on why Safari will sometimes display the text as text, and other times will render it as HTML:

   > Oh, and the reason that Safari sometimes refuses to show your text pages as plain text is because it tries to be clever. If anything that resembles an HTML tag appears in the first 100 KB or so of your document, Safari treats it as HTML, even if the HTTP headers state that it should be “text/plain”. > > Very frustrating, IMO. Apparently it’s a workaround for misconfigured servers that send HTML as “text/plain”, and it matches a similar workaround in IE/Win.

2. Firefox will not wrap text files at the end of the screen, so each paragraph ends up as a single long line. Admittedly, this is technically correct, but without the word wrap, it’s a bit difficult to find something in the midst of a long paragraph. You could, of course, copy-and-paste the entire thing into a text editor before doing anything else, but that adds another step when working with anything.

3. I have no idea what Internet Explorer will do with this, as I don’t have any version of IE on my computer.

If you’re still interested in implementing this yourself — or just curious — read on for the gory details. This is written for Movable Type users, of course, other systems will have to find their own techniques.

Read the rest of this entry »