MT experiments on a Sunday afternoon

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This afternoon, I was going to sit down to do some leisurely modification of
my new blog. It was supposed to be a low-stress activity -- but as I got into
it, I got sucked into an obsessive-must-figure-it-all-out-right-away-or-else-I'll-go-crazy
frenzy. That's when a nice walk helped me to break free from the infinite loop.
Now I feel free to move on to other matters more conducive to restful contemplation
on a Sunday afternoon. However, I also decided that I wante to write up what
I've looked at instead of just leaving my thoughts in a disorganized jumble.

The overall goal I had set for myself was to get a good overview of the Movable
Type (MT) system. It's funny that I looked around for various personal writeups
on MT (e.g., [1, 2]
) before settling in on reading the official
documentation.

Mark Pilgrim has also been a great source
of instruction and inspiration for MT-related matters I'll come back to
some specific work he has done.The following are some specific things that I
learned:

For some basic modification of the look and feel of a MT blog can be had through
copying and pasting pre-defined
CSS based styles.

Templates

I'm content to leave the basic style for my blog in place -- it's classy enough
for me at this point and the other sample ones didn't inspire me. However, I
did want to figure out how to list my blog entries by categories. To do that,
I had to figure out to modify
and add new templates to MT. In this matter, I learned a lot from Mark
Pilgrim's write-up on templates, particularly his
own set of templates. With those examples, I was able to generate a
page listing categories generated via a new index template for categories.
Here specifically is my index template:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

  <head>

  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=<$MTPublishCharset$>" 
  />

  <title>Categoris [<$MTBlogName$>]</title>


<link rel="stylesheet" href="<$MTBlogURL$>styles-site.css" 
  type="text/css" />

  <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" 
  href="<$MTBlogURL$>index.rdf" />


<body>

  <h2>Posts by Category</h2>

  <ul>

  <MTCategories>

  <li><a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$> 
  (<$MTCategoryCount$>)</a></li></MTCategories>

  </ul>

  </body>

  </html>

In playing around with templates, I came across two sources that may be useful
for future reference: a
list of the MT Template tags and Ben Hammersley's "Making
Feature-Rich, Movable Type RSS Files".

Plugins

I'm certainly not going to be satisfied with MT out of the box -- one of the
things that most attracted me to MT was the active active community of users
and developers around MT -- which usually means a lot of plugins. Just a quick
glance through a MT plugin directory (especially,
the most popular) was tantalizing.

One of the first that I will want to install is MTMacro.
I will want to be able to abstract my references -- for example, the book links
I'm generating point to my own service. But there's reason to believe that someone
else will have a better ISBN->book mapping than I. If I generate the references
to these books through a macro, redoing all the links will be a snap.

Some others caught my attention are: MTAmazon,
the AllConsuming
plugin, and SimpleComments.
Finally, there is a tutorial
on how to write a MT plugin-- which I will likely want to do at some point.

Integrating RSS aggregation and MT blogging

I'm still struggling to find a good way to integrate a number of things: my
blogroll(s), keeping up with a lot of different sources, aggregating feeds,
and then integrating some aggregated items right into the writing of my own
blog entries. (I wrote about this
issue in February.)

The frustrating part of today's explorations was that the miraculous solution
that I was hoping to find in MT didn't manifest itself! My tentative conclusion
is that I'm going to have to roll my own solution (much as I don't want to do
so.) The solution might be a combination of one of the open source aggregators
(Peerkat?
AmphetaDesk?) combined with
the Blogger-API -- so
that I can gather RSS feeds and then use post my edited versions to my blog.
Maybe newszcrawler (which I'd have
to pay for) already does what I'm wanting to do. (Jon
Udell's review of RSS aggregators came in handy today.)