Month: October 2004

Someone once said “Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.”

Categories on my blog are a way to:

1. Categories intentionally group the posts for convenient retrieval at a later date. The retrieval could also be done by using the Search function, which is more flexible, but which also requires key words be the same across the posts one is looking for. Still, I tend to Search first, and fall back on Categories later.
2. Very secondarily, categories can cue a reader as to what to expect (especially when put at the top of a post).

When this blog first started, it didn’t have categories, largely because Blogger didn’t support it at the time. Even after I changed over to MT, it took a while before I did a mass categorization. Since then I’ve occasionally gone in and added categories, shifted things around, etc., but the organization is not as strong (or as thorough) as I’d like. There is no easy and quick way to categorize everything.

I’ve come up with a taxonomy of 84 category/subcategories that I could push all my content into. That number is subject to revision (probably upwards). That’s up from the 35 categories I currently have. It will make it easier to zero in on posts on a certain topic. And it will also let me have full-text category archives (instead of excerpt archives).

The question is — should I do all that work? And it will be a lot of work. Even with the faster rebuilds, it will take time.

So … what do you think? Is it too much effort? Are excerpted category archives okay? Does anyone here actually use the category archives here? Is Search a better, more complete option? Does anybody know what time it is? Does anyone really care?

Inquiring minds want to know!

So I noticed something the other day: about half my archives won’t load. Presumably (since it’s the larger ones, starting at around 210 entries) they are timing out as they are built dynamically.

Well. That sucks.

I could (indeed, it’s recommended, for performance reasons) change them back to static pages. Except that robs me of the truly impressive rebuild times I now have.

Worse, it occurs to me that, lacking those archives, my Google links through the site are now frelled until I get it fixed.

For the category archives, I could break them up by doing subcategories. That’s been on my list to do with MT3. Indeed, I started building a new elaborate cat/subcat architecture that would solve a number of current organizational problems. And, frankly, having the archives be dynamic at this point helps that tremendously, since it makes the rebuild times trivial.

Except, it occurs to me, the current tool I use as a client to MT, SharpMT, doesn’t yet support subcategories, since it hasn’t been updated for MT3.

Well.

Hmmm. Actually, now that I test it, it does — just as a flat extra category in the list (note to self – must name things with the appropriate master category prefix in the sub-category’s name). Actually, it appears that MT will treat all subcategories as flat categories (when using the <MTCategories> tag) or will present them hierarchically (when using the <MTSubCategories> tag). Which is both convenient and annoying.

So I could do that. Or, even if that hadn’t worked, I could have just created a flat set of extra categories, named appropriately. And it desperately needs to be done to break things into manageable chunks, since right now I have two categories with over 600 entries (Media and Blogging) and another one over 500 (Geopolitical Brouhaha), and several with 400+.

For the monthly archives, it’s a bit trickier. Two alternatives come to mind:

1. Do just extracts instead of entire posts. Relatively simple to do.
2. Change from monthly to weekly. Retains the whole text. But I hate weekly archives.

I’m probably going to do #1. (Which, actually, I could do with categories if I wanted. And may yet, in order to sift things out into smaller subcats.)

So … since this is going to be a relatively long process, expect some dust in the archives for a while.

Okay, so not having a link button or italics buttons or stuff like that in the comments was driving me nuts. Time to re-insert the old code.

But … wait. Movable Type’s rich text formatting buttons under 3.x seem to work just fine in the normal edit window in Firefox (huzzah!), so no fancy-schmancy rewriting of the code is needed for cross-platform editing — thus, easy beans, right?

Well … it would help if I understood Java better, but, yeah, ultimately it’s pretty straightforward to adopt the internal MT formatting buttons to the comments in your blog …

Step 1: Extract the appropriate display code from the edit_entry.tmpl file and put it into your template (e.g., the individual archives) comment area around the comment text box, as in this code.

Notes on that code block::

• I’ve left out some formatting niceties, which would be driven by your own blog design.
• The “/blog/mt/” statements should be replaced with the path to your MT directory (above the images directory).
• The “comments_form” text should be replaced with whatever the form name is (e.g., <form name=”comments_form”>). This was the part that threw me the longest.

Those functions aren’t yet defined, of course, at least not in the template. But they are part of the base MT Javascript library (mt.js). And since the code is fairly universal, we can just refer to that file, rather than having to tweak things. So …

Step 2: Inside the <head></head> area at the top of the template, include the following statement:

<script type="text/javascript" src=&quot/blog/mt/mt.js&quot></script>

Again, substituting the path to your MT directory for “/blog/mt/”

And that, as they say, is that.

I probably won’t add any buttons beyond the basic four, but it’s straightforward enough to do so.

As far as I can tell, this should work not just in IE and Mozilla/Gecko-based browsers, but also in Safari.

One of the keen things about dynamic publishing is that I don’t have to rebuild the whole blog archive when I make a change. To wit, I’ve installed Chad Everett’s Notifier plugin (which, as far as I can tell, is compatible with MT-Blacklist, despite some obsolete info in the documentation).

That means that at the bottom of each post, around the comment form, is a little checkbox you can tick off to subscribe to that post, i.e., to get an e-mail notification if further comments are made. You can also subscribe without leaving a comment (the entry field at the bottom of the page). The notification e-mails include the comment, a link back to the post, and a link to delete your subscription(s). Shiny.

Notifier, in theory, lets me set up a subscription to the blog as a whole, too, as well as to individual categories. I’m not going to go that far at the moment here (I’ve put a blog subscription form on Margie’s Kitchen), but if there’s interest, let me know.

UPDATE: Chad informs me that the only incompatibilities are on the “check here to subscribe” stuff for the comment forms. On the other hand, I’ve tested that here this morning, and it seems to work, so I’m not sure what’s up. If you subscribe to something and don’t get notifications, please let me know.