This afternoon, I was going to sit down to do some leisurely modification of
\n my new blog. It was supposed to be a low-stress activity -- but as I got into
\n it, I got sucked into an obsessive-must-figure-it-all-out-right-away-or-else-I'll-go-crazy
\n frenzy. That's when a nice walk helped me to break free from the infinite loop.
\n Now I feel free to move on to other matters more conducive to restful contemplation
\n on a Sunday afternoon. However, I also decided that I wante to write up what
\n I've looked at instead of just leaving my thoughts in a disorganized jumble.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The overall goal I had set for myself was to get a good overview of the Movable Mark Pilgrim has also been a great source For some basic modification of the look and feel of a MT blog can be had through I'm content to leave the basic style for my blog in place -- it's classy enough <html xmlns="http:\/\/www.w3.org\/1999\/xhtml"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="<$MTBlogURL$>styles-site.css" \n type="text\/css" \/> <body> In playing around with templates, I came across two sources that may be useful I'm certainly not going to be satisfied with MT out of the box -- one of the One of the first that I will want to install is MTMacro<\/a>. Some others caught my attention are: MTAmazon<\/a>, I'm still struggling to find a good way to integrate a number of things: my The frustrating part of today's explorations was that the miraculous solution 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 … Continue reading
\n Type (MT) system. It's funny that I looked around for various personal writeups
\n on MT (e.g., [1<\/a>, 2<\/a>]
\n ) before settling in on reading the official
\n documentation<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n
\n of instruction and inspiration for MT-related matters<\/a> I'll come back to
\n some specific work he has done.The following are some specific things that I
\n learned:<\/p>\n
\n copying and pasting pre-defined
\n CSS based styles<\/a>.<\/p>\nTemplates<\/h2>\n
\n for me at this point and the other sample ones didn't inspire me. However, I
\n did want to figure out how to list my blog entries by categories. To do that,
\n I had to figure out to modify
\n and add new templates to MT<\/a>. In this matter, I learned a lot from Mark
\n Pilgrim's write-up on templates<\/a>, particularly his
\n own set of templates<\/a>. With those examples, I was able to generate a
\n page listing categories<\/a> generated via a new index template for categories.
\n Here specifically is my index template:<\/p>\n\n
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional\/\/EN" "http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/xhtml1\/DTD\/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">\n
\n <head>
\n <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text\/html; charset=<$MTPublishCharset$>" \n \/>
\n <title>Categoris [<$MTBlogName$>]<\/title><\/p>\n
\n <link rel="alternate" type="application\/rss+xml" title="RSS" \n href="<$MTBlogURL$>index.rdf" \/><\/p>\n
\n <h2>Posts by Category<\/h2>
\n <ul>
\n <MTCategories>
\n <li><a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$> \n (<$MTCategoryCount$>)<\/a><\/li><\/MTCategories>
\n <\/ul>
\n <\/body>
\n <\/html><\/p><\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n for future reference: a
\n list of the MT Template tags<\/a> and Ben Hammersley's "Making
\n Feature-Rich, Movable Type RSS Files<\/a>".<\/p>\nPlugins<\/h2>\n
\n things that most attracted me to MT was the active active community of users
\n and developers around MT -- which usually means a lot of plugins. Just a quick
\n glance through a MT plugin directory<\/a> (especially,
\n the most popular<\/a>) was tantalizing.<\/p>\n
\n I will want to be able to abstract my references -- for example, the book links
\n I'm generating point to my own service. But there's reason to believe that someone
\n else will have a better ISBN->book mapping than I. If I generate the references
\n to these books through a macro, redoing all the links will be a snap. <\/p>\n
\n the AllConsuming
\n plugin<\/a>, and SimpleComments<\/a>.
\n Finally, there is a tutorial
\n on how to write a MT plugin<\/a>-- which I will likely want to do at some point.\n<\/p>\nIntegrating RSS aggregation and MT blogging<\/h2>\n
\n blogroll(s), keeping up with a lot of different sources, aggregating feeds,
\n and then integrating some aggregated items right into the writing of my own
\n blog entries. (I wrote about this
\n issue<\/a> in February.) <\/p>\n
\n that I was hoping to find in MT didn't manifest itself! My tentative conclusion
\n is that I'm going to have to roll my own solution (much as I don't want to do
\n so.) The solution might be a combination of one of the open source aggregators
\n (Peerkat<\/a>?
\n AmphetaDesk<\/a>?) combined with
\n the Blogger-API<\/a> -- so
\n that I can gather RSS feeds and then use post my edited versions to my blog.
\n Maybe newszcrawler<\/a> (which I'd have
\n to pay for) already does what I'm wanting to do. (Jon
\n Udell's review of RSS aggregators<\/a> came in handy today.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"