So I took the month of March off from blogging. And most of April. No particular reason, I just felt like not blogging. Before I knocked off, I sort of wiped the slate clean on my design. Again, for no particular reason - I grew slightly tired of it. So I had grand plans for a re-design. It was going to be so much more than just a re-design... I was going to add some neat features, and really push the envelope a bit. I still plan on adding some of those features, but I haven't had the time at all.Anyways, for those of you who use MovableType for your weblog, you may have noticed a news posting about ...
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 ...
I woke up this morning (bright and early at 8:20 AM) and checked my e-mail. I found that I had received almost 30 new comments on my weblog! Boy was I excited - I thought that I had finally hit the big time. Alas, I had been targeted by a spamBot, and all of the comments were psuedo-ads for online poker sites. Not that I don't have an interest in the subject, but they were spam nonetheless. Luckily for me, MT-Blacklist picked up each and every one of the submissions, and put them into a holding tank until I could check it out. From there, it was a couple of clicks, and they were gone forever - poof! Dan wrote about ...
I'm re-writing this code as part of my upcoming re-launch. I'll post more on it then. As I mentioned in a recent post, I updated my category list pages. They're now live PHP pages, allowing the user to sort the list by the column headings. Just in case someone might find it useful, I'm posting the code here. Please keep in mind that PHP is not my native tongue - I just found a way to do what I needed to do. I'm sure it could be optimized and cleaned up beyond what I've done. View the code or an example.
So this whole website thing is a work in progress. As I have the time, I try to add features or tweak things. The latest update I'm trying to make is the addition of sortable archive list pages. I'd like to have my category list pages be sorted by a user-defined variable. Put simply, a table that you can sort by clicking a column header - title, date, number of comments, etc. The problem MovableType generates static HTML code. There's no interaction with the database as the page is written. Solutions? My first attempt was to use a plugin that allowed me to pass a SQL query to the database - MTSql. I quickly realized that, although I was able to define ...
I've had this new design idea kicking around for several weeks. I've been trying to find the time here and there to work it out, but time is pretty scarce these days. So, last week, I decided to just throw it out there, and keep working on it as I get the chance. So, the whole site has a new look to it. In the next few days/weeks, I'll add some new features. In the meantime, pardon the dust. If you see anything glaringly wrong, let me know.
I was poking around this morning looking for a way to do a calendar display within MovableType with an offset - allowing users to move forward and backward through months. One of the first results I found on Google was a full-screen calendar output template. It took me about 20 minutes to drop it inside of my own site template, and another half hour to update the style sheets, but it's done. I've still got to work on the main Archives page, but everything is coming together...