April 12, 2005
Zoinger RSS Feeds to Change Soon
08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Movable Type
Well, I’ve been reading up in detail on WordPress, and it looks like I’m going to have to change the URL for the Zoinger RSS feeds. Sorry in advance for any inconvienience this is going to cause.
I’ll probably be changing over in the next day or so, but will let you know what the new feed URL is/are when I do the change over. I’m planning on keeping the entire MT site live so old URLs to the posts won’t break.
April 11, 2005
More on Moving to WordPress
04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Movable Type
As I’ve written about previously, I’m in the (slow) process of moving my blogging application from MovableType over the WordPress. WordPress has got momentum behind it, so I think it’s going to be more future-proof than MT.
Anyway, a sneak preview of my WordPress blog is available here. I’m obviously still working on the sidebar links and such.
I installed a new theme over the weekend, which was a piece of cake. I also did some quick edits to the main CSS file to change the look and feel a bit. I’m a little unsure about how I’m going to do the transition… I’ll thinking that I might move the pointer for Zoinger.com to my WordPress directory, or I might create a jump page for Zoinger.com which will have links to the blog. WordPress also allows you to create a manage static pages.
So far, I’m really impressed by the easy-of-use and great documentation of WordPress.
March 28, 2005
WordPress Alexa Chart
10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Movable Type
Alexa is an Amazon-owned site which among other things attempts to measure the reach of web sites.
WordPress, an open-source content management system (blogging software), has been gaining popularity, especially since SixApart changed how it licenses it’s MovableType application — and from the ensuing controversy. WordPress’ recent gain in popularity seems to correlate to it’s growth in reach as measure by Alexa.
March 23, 2005
WordPress — Initial Impressions
10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Movable Type
Wow! I kind of like it… WordPress that is. Like they say the world-famous five minute install is spot on. I might have even beaten that mark.
So far, I have noticed that it’s really fast when compared to MovableType. Sometimes MT just seems to hang for a bit when saving posts.
It took me a while, but I finally found (it took a long time to find one that actually worked) and installed (this was fast) a Textile2 plugin that I then had to debug (this took a long time too). Textile2 is a text-to-HTML interpreter that lets you more simply add HTML to your posts (test it out here). Anyway, the plugin for WordPress is called Text Control. On MT I’ve been using Brad Choate’s great Textile2 plugin.
The “bug” with Text Control has to do with the zip download file text-control.zip. This zip file didn’t automatically create a text-control sub-directory. This sub-directory is where all the files in the zip download should be placed with the exception of the main text-control.php file (i.e., into wordpress/wp-content/plugins/text-control/). By moving the files into this new sub-directory, I “fixed” the bug. It took a while to figure out what was going on, since the plugin kind of works without the text-control sub-directory — you can set up Text Control in the options menu, but it will not actually function and gives errors when publishing.
Aside from the minor plugin WOT, I’m really liking WordPress. I’m probably going to move my blog over to it, once I get more familiar with the interface and tweak the templates a bit.
Update: 2005_03_26
Jeremy Zawodny posts his thoughts on the future of WordPress and MovableType here. The comments section of the posts is worth reading if you are considering WP or MT.
WordPress Blogging Software — Now Over 100K Served
10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Movable Type
errh, that’d be over 100K downloaded.
I’m looking at installing a copy of WordPress to try it out. It has some significant advantages over Movable Type such as: password-protected posts, multiple authors and instant publishing with no rebuilding. In addition, there is a very robust plug-in community. And with Six Apart now concentrating on Typepad (instead of just Movable Type), WordPress’ advantages vs. MT will probably grow in the future.
Here’s a handy how-to on migrating from MT to WordPress, and here’s a thread on WordPress’ site on MT vs. WordPress.
February 26, 2005
w.bloggar — Client Blog-Posting Tool
05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Movable Type
I just downloaded w.bloggar a client-side posting tool that is compatible with Movable Type. I’m pretty impressed with w.bloggar’s feature set… it supports a lot of MT’s advanced posting features like extended entries, posting to multiple categories, etc. It has a spell checker, a preview window (which renders your post in HTML), HTML tag buttons (bold, underline, links, image insertion, etc.) and lots of other stuff. Pretty impressive.
Oh, I got the tip on w.bloggar over at Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.
February 19, 2005
Favicon Generator and Learning CSS
01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Movable Type
I’ve been doing some revamping of the site this morning. I changed my CSS style sheet a bit to eliminate underlining of links. I found that the links were already distinctive enough, since they are a different color than normal text. A good site for learning CSS is W3School’s CSS site.
I’ve also been playing around with adding a favicon for the site. I thought that Photoshop would support .ico files, but no luck. Alternatively, I felt like this feels like a web ‘service’ — upload an image file, and get it back in .ico format. Indeed, such a service does exist here — very trick.
BTW, I found the favicon site using Yahoo! Search. For some reason, I was having no luck on Google/A9 (which is not to say that you couldn’t find it on Google, just that my query style was more efficient on Yahoo!). Lesson = using multiple search sites pays off.
Update: 2005_20_02
I changed the format for blockquote tags in my CSS file to:
.content blockquote {
line-height: 150%;
border: 0.5px solid #666666;
padding: 5px 15px 5px 15px;
background-color: #FFFFFF
}
This adds a box around the blockquoted text. I found this style here. I’m going to try this out for a while.
Update: 2005_20_02
I changed the css file for the sidebar background color to a light shade of gray to separate it from the main content window.
.sidebar {
padding: 15px;
background-color: #F3F3F3;
}
I changed the banner id’s: 1) background color in the css to C0C0C0, 2) reduced the banner height to 22px and 3) changed the padding to 5px.
And I removed the ‘blog description’ (i.e., <h2><$MTBlogDescription$></h2>) from the Main templates.
February 08, 2005
Fixed the Calendar Links in Movable Type
03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Movable Type
I hated that the calendar (currently in the top right corner of my blog) links just linked to the first post written on that day. It should link to a page with all the posts for that day. I fixed this by creating a daily archive in Movable Type, and replacing this code in the calendar section of the sidebar template:
<MTCalendarIfEntries>
<MTEntries lastn="1"><a href="<$MTEntryLink$>">
<$MTCalendarDay$>
with
<MTCalendarIfEntries>
<MTEntries lastn="1"><a href="<$MTEntryLink archive_type="Daily"$>">
<$MTCalendarDay$>
The nugget — archive_type="Daily" — creates a link to the daily archive. One issue with this implementation, is that Movable Type has to create individual and daily archives if you want your site nice and neat. Just more storage and CPU overhead (noticeable when rebuilding — regenerating — your site).
February 07, 2005
Fixing up the Domain Name and URLs
10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Movable Type
I really hated what my Trackback URL used to look like. I mean… it looked like an old Compuserve email address. Something like su1298432.online.us.com. Fugly.
I fixed this by creating a new sub-domain on my host’s control panel for domains and made…
trackback.zoinger.com=su1298432.online.ugly.url
and changed the pointer to the GIPath in the MT.cfg file to trackback.zoinger.com.
However, before I came up with this solution, I had thought I had read that 1and1 didn’t support sub-domains (obviously, I was wrong). In trying to come up with a work around, I ran into this gem of a post by Már Örlygsson. The how-to on future-proofing your URLs in Movable Type. His post is filed under a really trick URL (mouse over the link to check out a future-proofed URL). I’ve implemented a bunch of the URL future-proofing discussed in this post to my site. I like it.
Contained within Már’ post, is a reference to the most excellent Brad Choate and his Regex plugin. You have to download the file and read the readme.txt file if you want to know what Regex does (here’s a link to a local copy of the readme.txt file for version 1.61). I’ll paraphrase a bit from the readme.txt too:
<paraphrase>
Here’s an example (place at the top of your template):
<MTRegexDefine>s|:+D|<img src="/images/smiley.gif">|g</MTRegexDefine>
The above will replace all occurrences of :+D with an IMG tag that displays a smiley.gif instead.
</paraphrase>
So, I guess you might be wondering what the previous post, test was about? I was testing out this Regex substitution. I made an entry that said nothing but :+D in the body, and it rendered as the smiley image. Cool… not the smiley… the fact that you can define your own substitution elements. Gotta work on some of these.
And I obviously got my domain transfered from Yahoo! to 1and1 to fix what I was bitching about here .
test
08:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) ~ Movable Type
February 05, 2005
MovableType — Customizing My Templates
06:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Movable Type
I’ve been playing around with the files that control the look-and-feel of this site. That is, MovableType’s template and CSS files. I found some easy-to-understand and implement instructions over at a blog called Learning Movable Type of all things. I added a footer at the bottom of all my pages, made the sidebar more modular and added the sidebar and footer to my archive templates. All pretty easy stuff, that didn’t take too long. I’ll be tweaking this site’s look-and-feel more in the future.