CMS

What are the chances that after two+ years of little-to-no posting that anybody will be interested in visiting this site again? I’m guessing pretty slim. In my defense: I’ve been extraordinarily busy. Poor davidgagne.net here was also deluged with about 100 spam comments each day, which is one of the main reasons I finally switched to WordPress. I loved MovableType, but sometimes a man’s gotta bite the bullet. I’ve also learned more than most could hope to care to know about PHP and SQL (and Apache, and Linux, and ASP, and IIS, and …) in the last two+ years, so I’m seriously digging WP.

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded.

Davidgagne.net has gone from a loose collection of random html files to a Blogger-powered site to a Greymatter-powered site to its current MovableType extravaganza-ness.

It only took me about a year to make the jump from MT2.1 to MT2.61. That works out to about two decades in internet time, so I’m a tad behind the times. I’m furius with myself for waiting so long. I’ve missed all the cool shenanigans Ben and Mena have been incorporating and so my blog is sort of an ‘82 Plymouth Laser surrounded by a world full of ‘03 Land Rovers.

I’ve really been completely out of touch with the blogging community for months like a year now. Sure, I’m still Google’s #1 for Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten and good suits, but there’s no TrackBack pinging going on here, no Really Simple Discovery happenin’, and, hell, I don’t even know what the fluck all these creative commons licenses are. I’ve been busy, ok? Gimme a couple of weeks and I’ll try to catch up. (Anyone want to help me get up to speed, feel free to drop me a line.)

I managed to catch both Igby Goes Down and Unfaithful this weekend. They are both excellent and I highly recommend them.

Had a slight meltdown here at the ol’ weblog this afternoon. It seems that Dreamhost decided to rename a computer - specifically the one that hosts all my websites - without telling anyone. That caused a bit of a problem since the MovableType CMS (That’s the engine that drives this page!) needs to know the correct file paths in order to publish. Comments weren’t appearing, posts were lost … it was blog hell.

Everything’s fixed now. You can go about your business.

Holy Macaroni! What a terrific birthday present; and I didn’t even realize it until today. (Today is the day after my birthday.) Movabletype 2.2 has been released! And wow! Look at all the new goodies!

Several people have asked me how I did it, so I wrote a tutorial on how to create a pop-up ‘eMail This Entry’ window in MovableType. Here it is.

PLEASE NOTE:
This tutorial is based on MovableType Version 2.1 only. If you have upgraded to Version 2.2 I advise you to wait until I have had a chance to update the tutorial!

[click to continue...]

I just read on the MovableType site that Ben and Mena are getting ready to release MT version 2.0, and it will include a ’send this entry’ feature similar to the one I’ve implemented on my blogs. So … since they are the experts, I’m not going to do any more development or write a tutorial or anything like that on how I did it here. I’ll just say that it was a lot of mucking around in perl cgi and javascript. Ben gave me all sorts of information and instruction, and I thank him very much.

<Montgomery Burns>
Excellent!
</Montgomery Burns>

I’m about 75% done with my mt-sendentry.cgi development. Youshik has been a tremendous help with some of the trickier Perl bits and Ben is the man for being so cool about answering my eMails. I really hope I can finish working on it tonight so I can have v 0.1 released by this weekend.

I don’t have time right now to really browse the Xanga.com page, but it looks interesting. There is an ad for something called WebCrimson that is apparently another CMS. Man, I really need to sit down and go through some of this stuff. Time … Time … Time …

Here is my MovableType development wishlist. These are the features I really wish my favorite content management system had. Alternately, these are the things I really wish I could do with MovableType, which the current version does in fact support, but I haven’t yet found a way to do. If someone knows how to do any of these items using the current version, I’d sure appreciate a point in the right direction. In no particular order:

• Entry Lists by Comment Counts: This was one of my favorite features in GreyMatter and I hope to see it available in an upcoming MT release. I want to be able to display a list of the most-commented-on entries. The ability to specify that an entry has to have at least n comments to appear in the list would be marvelous as well.
• Support Links: I’d like to see a link to the support board, and not just the documentation, in the MT editing screens. Currently the menu shows, “Blog Name”, “UserName”, “Help”, “LogOut”, and the date. I think a link to the support board could fit in there quite nicely. Heaven knows I go there enough.
• True Hyper-Text Documentation: I think the MT user manuals are terrific and well-written. My only gripe is that the main manual is humongous. If I’m not on my home computer and I have to access the on-line manual, it takes forever to load and navigate. I would love it if the developers would split it into separate files, perhaps by chapter. I think it would make reading and researching much quicker.
• Copy / Move: This is probably not a very useful feature to most users, but I’d like the ability to copy and / or move entries between blogs. One of the things I’ve been doing is moving all of my older football and sports posts from my main blog to my (somewhat newer) sports blog. A quick way to do that would be handy.
• An MT Link: I wish there was a link directly to the main MT homepage somewhere on all the editing screens. For the life of me I can’t understand why Ben and Mena haven’t added one. If I created any kind of web application - and, obviously, I haven’t so I should probably keep my mouth shut - I would have a link to my own page all over it.
• Blogs Sorted on Main Screen: A minor request, I think, is the ability to sort the display of the blogs on the main screen. Right now they’re simply listed (as far as I can tell) in creation order. My most-used blog is at the bottom of the list and I have to scroll down to get to it. I know it’s a silly little thing to want, but that’s why I called this a wishlist. My Amazon.com wishlist is chock-full of silly little things I want.
• Entry List Nesting: I’d like to list, for example, the five most recent entries from each category, but I don’t want to hard code the category names. Something like this: <MTArchiveList archive_type=”Category”><MTEntries lastn=”5″ category=”<$MTArchiveTitle$>”></MTEntries></MTArchiveList> I’ve mentioned this one to Ben and he said he’s thinking about it.
• Stay at Top: Another GreyMatter feature I miss is the ability to tag an entry as “topmost”. That way you can add new entries, but the “topmost” one would stil show as the first in line. I don’t know if that’s ever going to be possible because of the way the <EntryList> tag is designed, but again … that’s why they call it a “wishlist”.
• AutoNotify: I would like to be able to set a blog to automatically send notification eMails to everyone on the notify list every time a new entry is made without having to specifically “force” the eMail to be sent.

I suppose that’s all I can remember now. I’ll update this list if I think of new ones, or if some kind soul is nice enough to tell me how to do something that I thought I couldn’t.
Thanks, Ben and Mena! You’ve created a wonderful product.

The journaling script is a cms you can use to keep a blog. It is one of the original blogging systems and is still popular. It’s not as easy to use as Blogger, of course, but it’s worth a look if you know a little about the guts of the ‘net and are thinking about starting an on-line diary.

If you’re using MovableType to maintain your blog, you can add the following bit of code to allow readers to automatically add themselves to your Update / Notify list:

<form method=”post” action=”<$MTCGIPath$>mt-add-notify.cgi”>
<b>Get updates via email:</b><br />
<input type=”hidden” name=”blog_id” value=”<$MTBlogID$>” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”_redirect” value=”<$MTBlogURL$>” />
<input name=”email” size=”18″ />
<input type=”submit” value=”Sign Up!” />
</form>

If you visit http://www.davidgagne.net/ you’ll see a period - . - before each link to an entry’s comments. That period is a link to the editing window for that particular entry. As long as I am logged in to MovableType, I can click on that link and immediately begin editing the post. Here’s the link to add to your main index template:

<a target=”_blank” title=”admin” onmouseover=”window.status=’edit this entry’; return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘; return true;” href=”<$MTCGIPath$>mt.cgi?__mode=view &_type=entry&id=<$MTEntryID$> &blog_id=<$MTBlogID$>”>.</a>

Note that you should use &amp; instead of & to make sure your page is (x)html compliant.

Oof! It took a lot of work, but I finally converted all of my main blog to MovableType. All the comments were imported, too, so I’m pretty happy about that. Now every little piece of this domain is converted. I can finally get to blogging again. And finding a job.

It took a few hours, but I finally converted almost all of my Hemingway site into The Hemingway Blog. It’s in MovableType now and I’m very pleased with the result. I still have to get the dozens (multiple dozens!) of essays on the author into some sort of bloggable format, but that’s just a bunch of find and replacing with good ol’ EditPad.

I’m trying to decide if I want to convert bling (my main page) to MT yet. Ben and Mena say that they will soon add the ability to import GreyMatter comments into an MT blog. But I know I can hack it myself a bit to do this. I just know that if I do it, though, it probably won’t be as pretty as if I wait until they’ve got an “official” way to do it.