MT

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!

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.

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 …

A few people have asked me how I got that little “eMail this entry” link on my posts. I wrote a little tutorial on my projects blog describing how I did it. Enjoy.

Yowza! MovableType 2.0 was released today. Let’s see how long it takes to upgrade / backup / install / rediscover / redesign / implement / play with my new toy!

Here is the fix for the MovableType “unitialized value at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 999” error.

And here’s a special link from Microsoft that should be very useful to many people.

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.

The extended text of this entry contains my Individual Archive template. Cool if you want to know how I got those buttons in there. Is it obvious that the icons are the permalinks? I wonder if I need to make it more clear …
Look here for the Main Index template. My css directory is open to all, by the way. There is a link to it in the drop-down combo box in the sidebar.
Your comments are always appreciated.
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