MovableType

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.

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!

Jason @ JPlay has written a great tutorial on how to add a user comment to the pop-up send-link hack. I’ve gotten multiple requests for this, so I’m sure it will interest many readers. Thanks, Jason!

Philringnalda.com has a great tip on how to ping both weblogs.com and blo.gs when you publish from Movable Type. Read it.

The Additional Entry Text of this entry contains the complete contents of my MovableType Main Index Template for this blog. It might be interesting to you if you’re trying to learn how to do something I’ve done here. (Note that it is my ugliest template; I tend to do lots of testing and futzing with this blog, so it gets the most code bloat. The templates for the other six or ten blogs I’m running are much cleaner.) Click “read more” to see.
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Are you using MovableType to manage your blog? If so, you might be interested in the tutorial I just added to my Works in Progress blog - How to Add a “BlogData” Footer to Each Post. It’s nifty (I hope!) because I explained how to take advantage of several aspects of the MovableType framework that most users probably never use.
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Well that was fun. Way back in March I implemented the PowerLinks MT hack from scottandrew.com. When I upgraded to MT2.11 I lost the hack, of course. So I re-hacked it. I played with it a bit and added a few more features.

• One thing I have wanted to do since day one was add the same PowerLinks to my bookmarklet, since that’s how I post 3/4 of the time anyway. So I did that by editing bm_entry.tmpl a bit.
• I hacked around with the end of edit_entry.tmpl so that I could use the PowerLinks in the “Additional Entry” section as well as the “Main Entry Text” box.
• I changed some of the formatting (width=”whatever” to width=”50%”) so that the buttons wouldn’t be aligned too far to the right of the textboxes.
• And finally I added a new PowerLink button to automatically link to a specific item at Amazon.com instead of just a search for the item.

Amazing, I know, but it all works perfectly. If anyone is interested I’ll see if Scott minds if I write a quick and dirty tutorial about how I did it. Mr. Andrew certainly deserves all the credit for it, though.

So … this is a test of my modified edit_entry.tmpl file …

Currently To Do:

• add a custom field to entries
• write a tutorial about adding a custom field to entries
• write a tutorial about the blogdata module
• change Media Obsessions to a generic review blog
• create a running media blog
• figure out a way to get updated Red Sox scores on my page
• redesign sidebar(s)
• do something with the OceanBlog
• Answer these questions:
   Why does bleach work so well? How the hell does it work?
   Does anyone watch “Ed”?

nf0 has written an article that describes How to Add the current Temperature to a Movable Type Blog Entry. (I cannot imagine why you would want to post the temperature which corresponds to a blog entry. But I’ve worked with databases and users long enough to know that no niche should ever go unfilled. Someone, somewhere is just dying to have this feature. I think that it is really much more interesting as a tutorial on how to add your own custom tags to MT.)

Scriptygoddess is another site dedicated to showing / teaching tips and tricks about MovableType. There are some really good ones there. Check ‘em out!

I’m honored to see that this little page and its MovableType category section have been included in the MovableBlog Resources area. The MovableBlog is a blog all about cool tips and tricks for maintaining your MovableType blog. Great idea!

Two Tricks from the MT Support Forum:

• How to Randomly Generate Entries
• How to Create a Printer-Friendly Template

Of course if you are using CSS to its fullest, you can create printer-friendly pages by simply changing stylesheets. There is a tutorial at Evolt that explains how.

[The girlie matters] has a cool collection of MovableType tips and tricks.

Sadly, she is another blogger that for some reason doesn’t ping weblogs.com when she updates. I wish *everyone* with a blog would ping … it would make using blogTracker so much simpler …