This is The World According to Buchs - Keepin’ it moving since 2003!

I just can’t stop the tinkering. Last night, I finished converting this weblog from MovableType’s conventional “static” publishing model to the newer “dynamic” publishing. It took me a little while to wrap my head around it, but in the end, it wasn’t that big of a deal. Since there aren’t any “pages” anymore, I can make quick edits to the site templates - everything updates in real time. So I’ll probably keep tweaking…

The dynamic publishing system is built on two components - ezSQL and Smarty. Both of which I just happened to have started using on some other projects.

Once I figured that out, things went pretty quickly. I struggled a bit with the “Current Playlist” feature on my home page. I’m using an iTunes plugin, “Now Playing“, that sends currently playing track info… somewhere. The plugin gave me a few options on how to move the data around. I initially had it FTP an XML file to the server, which was easy. The problem was, I had to parse the data. Then I tried having the plugin “ping” my MovableType install, which didn’t work out so well. *Then* I tried having it ping a script I wrote that saved everything in a database. That worked out pretty good, but I was limited to simple track info - song, artist, album. In the end, I went back to the XML file, and wrote a script to parse out the data.

The neat thing about the “Current Playlist” feature is that if you stick around on the homepage for a while, it updates automatically, without a page reload. There’s a “new” technology getting a lot of pub called AJAX. There’s some really fantastic stuff being done with it, and I just haven’t had the time to learn how to do it yet. Most of the examples and tutorials are a litttle advanced for what I wanted to do, but I found a good one over at kottke.org. Essentially, the script that gets and displays the playlist is stored in a file, and the home page goes out and pulls it into the layout - and repeats every 3 minutes. Pretty cool stuff. Now that I understand the basics, I see the potential to do some really neat things.