My Messy Workbench :: Calendar Archives >> January 2004

movabletype.org : Support Forum

I've already talked about offline editing in a general way in the article Editing your blogs offline -- not ready for primetime.

At this writing, I manage a Movable Type installation (or try to) comprised of 3 full blogs and a pair of sideblogs. Four of these are (or will be) fairly active and in a single writing session I may post to all four. I'm writing this entry on my laptop which, as is often the case, is presently not connected to the internet.

I write a lot; I write in several blogs; so far, I'm the only author on my blogs; I write away from the web. This set of circumstances presents a number of feature requirements which the currently available MT editing tools generally fulfill poorly, if at all.

I'm going to talk about offline blogging with three popular and generally well-designed desktop editors for Movable Type blogs: Zempt 0.3, SharpMT 2.1 and w.Bloggar 3.03. First, I'll identify some basic requirements for editing mulitiple blogs offline, and how each of the editors fails or succeeds to meet those requirements. Then I'll discuss additional offlining pros and cons for each editor.

The test is in the extended part of this entry.

The test is in the extended part of this entry.

There's a phpBB hack to add Forum-wide email notification to phpBB boards. It's a good hack, except that it generates notification emails for all replies to all forum topics. This is a bit too much notification.

Following is a method for reducing forum-level notification so that they are only sent when a new topic is created.

Continue reading "New Topic notification"

http://www.phpbbhacks.com/viewhack.php?id=540

I've already got this simple but elegant hack working in phpBB. Now it's just a matter of porting it to my MT installation.

[EDIT]

Done! Want to know how to do it yourself? Read on! (Note: This MT add-on assumes you've already installed the fluffyblog Using phpBB as your MovableType comment engine in 23847392 easy steps tutorial to your MovableType installation.

Continue reading "Add Quick Reply phpBB hack to MT."

Have to update the affiliate links on multimedia guerilla 'cause the merchant's no longer selling travel supplies (wish they'd tell us they're doing that!)

While I'm in there, might as well get around to updating the whole page with embedded links to REI and popups.

[EDIT]

Done with the Rand McNally stuff. and made some headway with the general page update. Now just need to complete that.

[EDIT Jan 19, 04]

Done for now with link updates. Won't bother with popups for the timebeing.

So I'll have to update the Fujifilm affiliate links in my bicycle touring packing list outfitting the multimedia traveller and to some new merchant.

[DONE]

Actually, wasn't linked to Wolfe Camera anyway, but this got me motivated to clean up some of the other stuff.

Might be useful for the reunion page...

http://wp.tamushsc.edu/~hsc/archives/000137.html

Something to review...

Scripty Goddess blog entry

Movable Type support forum thread

generate_rss_feeds_by_category

p.

Here's something to research...

Side Blogs

p.

Presently listening to:
A Place for my Head - Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory (03:04)

forum topic. for plugin to mail the full html and/or text of a blog entry.

Presently listening to:
Better Things - Massive Attack - Protection (04:14)

Getting the colour scheme to match the eJournal site.

Probably going to have to do something with the link colours in the right hand sidebar...

Any comments on the current look will be appreciated -- critical observations most welcome.

p.

Presently listening to:
Solsbury Hill - Peter Gabriel - Shaking the Tree: Sixteen Golden Greats (04:20)

Next N :: Previous N from girliematters.com

Once I get formatting for individual archives, I can add this.

p.

Presently listening to:
Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Pts. 1-5 - Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here (13:32)

It's about time: my ISP has finally brought in Majordomo support -- which means I can get out from under that awful MailMan crap!

Presently listening to:
Time Stand Still - Rush - Hold Your Fire (05:08)

This latest interim-release of SharpMT provides some great new features.

Been redecorating over on the eJournal site. Like it?

In the process I also discovered the site's become so large the free site search engine from Master.com was no longer indexing all the pages (max, 30MB, and the site's over that by nearly 10 MB.) Spent a fair bit of time renovating the search facilities. To accommodate all that content, I split the search between photo galleries and text pages, which brings the page count and total size under the minimums, for now. The image gallery alone chews up 29MB -- and that's only counting the text on 1900 pages!)

While I was at the search bit, also added indexing and search for these blogs to the text search (example)

The Master.com engine's a good one -- the advanced search options are pretty powerful (example). Great functionality for a free service -- particularly considering the page/size maximums are a very generous 5000/30MB. Very few sites attain such sizes.

Being on the subject of search engines, I've deployed ht:dig on the Suitable for Framing online gallery. It's open source, meaning not only is it free, you get a copy of the source code to mess around with. On that site, I extended ht:dig to display thumbnails of the images returned by the search (example). Pretty nifty, actually.

It may be time to revisit ht:dig for the eJournal picture gallery search, just to get the thumbnails. I'd have gone with ht:dig the first time around, but my synaptic.bc.ca ISP at the time didn't support the software libraries required. Perhaps my newest ISP does?

p.