Back in January, I ran the upgrade to Movable Type 4.1. The developers made a number of moves to make MT more attractive to personal users including changes to let personal users migrate from Word Press and to port Word Press Styles to MT. The management of pictures and content has become easier with the ability to upload and manage "assets" and then use the assets in the blog.
I haven't used it much. I have been busy at work, and spent more my personal time reading and pursuing other things.
Art & Letters Daily has one of my favourites for as long as I have been writing A Sea of Flowers, largely for the reasons mentioned by Robert Fulford in his columns in the National Post January 22, 2002 and June 27, 2007.
On any given day, it is the gateway to well-written, reasoned commentary about things that matter in the life of the mind - language, literature, and thought. Over the course of few days, the editors added links to stories and essays about the decimation of book reviews from American newspapers by Steve Wasserman, the decline of literary journalism by Morris Dickstein, and James Wood's move to the New Yorker.
The Wikipedia Entry spends some time on the question of whether AL Daily is conservative, as that term is understood in America, or libertarian. I think the editors like to report on the ideological or culture wars but are detached from the passions that drive the debate. I wouldn't say that they are independent, but I am not sure what constitutes bias in the study of facts and events. They are loyal to keen observation and sound argument.
Another half a year, another upgrade.
The installation instructions suggest untarring on the server and installing the files on the server. I know how to install by FTP, and that's what I did.
MT says it has the best documentation of any blogging software. I suppose it does, given how sparse the documentation on Open Source software can be. They still take things for granted. Thousands of users may know how to untar on in the server, and where to unpack the files, and how to move them to the mt-static and cgi-bin/mt folders. Thousands must know how to effect a fresh install on the server. It's still all geek to me.I have started to use the new features, and started to change several templates and then to apply a new layout and style. A few hours later, I think it's working decently. The style (at this moment) is called Portland.
After some reading and experimenting, I found an acceptable way of creating thumbnail links to the photos in my Gallery site. I loaded the photos that I had used in this blog into the Gallery, and then edited the articles, replacing the photos with links to the Gallery versions. This works better. The blog loads faster, the pictures are visible in the blog, and then scale up to 2 viewable sizes. The Gallery program is nicely supported collaborative freeware. I upload the full image file to Gallery, and let Gallery create thumbnails and two prints. Gallery can process several images on one upload, and then I just past the links into a block of text. I have a couple of old stories left, but the process is largely done. I have started to shoot more pictures and to load them to my Gallery.
Over the couple weeks, I have had three web projects: fixing the email contact function in the sidebar, getting a cycling log, and finding a better way of getting digital photos published. The latter two ideas were vaguely connected.
It's time to shake up the category list. Social Practice becomes Zombies. In the next few weeks Culture will be folded into Zombies. Politics is Liege & Lief, which is obscure but accurate, with an arcane folk music reference. The old names were too formal, and I had too many subcategories. I will phase out some subcategories, add MT tags to my entries and let the tags lay the trail.
Why Zombies?
I have not been posting regularly since the end of 2005, but I have kept up with Movable Type upgrades. The upgrade to 3.33 or 3.34 involved new features that had previously been implemented by the BigPAPI plugin, and made BigPAPI and plugins that depended on it stop working. I had been using CCode and TCode. I had not installed the new versions of CCode properly. It has to do with adding a script to the head of a template and adding a tag into two or three templates. Registered commenters were getting an error message, as I found out yesterday.
Once I turned off CCode, my junk comment folder began to fill up. That's not a problem - it doesn't get published and I just delete it. It looks like CCode plugin was working and doing its job, which is hiding the blog from spam comment bots. Giving the bots a false return must put a load on my bandwidth, but saves me from having to clean out the junk folder.
Another new release of MT, another upgrade. The FTP chugs along, the upgrade is easy. Once again, some little surprizes. The new online manual is clear enough, but the installation documents were not. There was a plugin for MT 3.2 called BigPAPI, which has been superceded by functions in MT 3.3. One of the instructions missing from the installation Doc was to turn off BigPAPI and plugins that used it. So I had some interesting error messages when I tested the new installation.
The original registration of sea of flowers as a domain name was effected through Domain Direct, which is affiliated with Tucows. I had signed up for a year. I didn't buy a particularly expensive package, and I think their pricing was competitive, but I bought a bigger package than I needed. I thought I was going to host my web site and blog there, but they didn't support server side scripts at that time. All I really needed was registration and DNS settings. Blogomania, where I host my sites, is not a registrar. Domain Direct extended my initial one year account to two years,, which put off the need to make any changes until early April. They started sending me renewal notices months ago. The renewal messages had links to pages on their site which gave me the option to renew my existing service or to upgrade. While Domain Direct offered simpler and cheaper services, there was no way to order them except by ordering a new account. Meanwhile, there are lots of services advertising domain registration service, with domain transfers priced at $10.00 or $15.00, with a year of service. I have a .ca domain and I need a CIRA Registrar, which narrowed the field.
Another change, after some reading and experimentation. I installed partial dynamic publishing for archive posts this weekend. I had to run at it twice. It involves creating an .htaccess file and installing it on the server, and customizing some lines in it, creating a new directory on the server and changing some settings MT. The first time I omitted some slashes in some path names in the .htaccess. Once again, the MT documentation was right - just not clear.
The article about the benefits and drawbacks of dynamic publishing at Learning Movable Type may be out of date. It warn that plugins often involve Perlscripts (and I still can't use the word Perl.) which may not run in the dynamic environment. One plugin generated a Smarty error - so I removed it. The important ones, like Spamlookup, are written for php and run under Dynamic publishing. I didn't have a lot of plugins and the one that didn't work has been superceded by newer MT tags, so I am not worried about it.
It makes rebuilding of the blog so much faster, which is convenient when I get into design changes, changing category names and all the other changes that show up on the published page. Rebuilding all the individual entries took a couple of minutes, and it was just annoying.
