Wednesday, August 3, 2005
Assorted bookmarks and braindumps
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Taking a chance on love
I'm awfully fond of
Movable Type, the weblogging software that powers parts of this site, so against my ordinarily cautious nature in these matters, I just upgraded to the latest beta release. It's niiiiiice—it looks gorgeous and feels zippier all around.
The upgrade process was, as promised,
simpler than ever: just download the tarball, uncompress and upload the new files. Rather than having to run an upgrade script, the necessary upgrades happen automagically the first time I ran the software. It's the closest thing to a desktop-level "double-click to install" process I've seen yet for a web app.
One minor glitch: After the upgrade, I found I wasn't able to access my
MT-Blacklist (a utility for dealing with comment spam) settings in the Plug-In control panel. It turns out to be
an easily remedied problem, even for my meager skills:
For those running any version of MT-Blacklist 2.x, you can also do a search and replace within Blacklist.pl instead of uploading that file. Look for this line of code:
return 1 unless $MT::VERSION =~ m(^3.1);
And replace it with this:
return 1 unless MT->version_number >= 3.1;
It's also necessary to move the files
mt-blacklist-styles.css and
mt-blacklist.js from the root MT directory into the new
mt-static directory so the MT-blacklist pages render correctly.
Wow. I think this is one of the geekiest things I've written in recent memory, and I even understood most of it.
Sunday, July 20, 2003
Further thoughts on Movable Type
More MT thoughts: A few people have asked why I'm not regularly enabling comments on posts here, even though
Movable Type makes it simple to do.
Essentially, I'm not interested in running a bulletin board or online community around
Must See HTTP. Too many of my friends have had their spare time and karma sucked away by becoming de facto moderators of their own websites and I simply have no inclination to follow them. Further, very little of what I post here really invites discussion and, if you have something you simply must say to me, there's always good, old fashioned e-mail to accomplish that.
I will be turning on comments for posts, mainly calls for information, for which I
do wish to actively solicit feedback. As I've often said, readers of The BradLands are among the smartest, most creative and best looking folks on the web. Seldom have I posed a question that wasn't answered shortly and completely by The BradLands Braintrust.
Also,
some folks have noted that my switch to Movable Type represents my abandonment of hand-coding this website. In point of fact, although the entire site was originally done by hand, I've had stints with
Blogger,
Userland Frontier, and
Radio Userland and, although Movable Type now drives this weblog and
The Daily Brad, vast tracts of the site continue to rely on those applications, as well as ol' reliable BBEdit and my meager knowledge of HTML.
Meanwhile, a few thoughtful folks have recently published their experiences in using Movable Type to publish types of content outside the traditional weblog model. While these shoehorn approaches aren't suited for most of the sites I administer (of which this personal toss-off is only one), I do have one or two little projects that will benefit from this accumulated wisdom.
Clearing the Cache
theatre |
icons |
Battlestar Galactica |
movabletype |
kitties |
quarkxpress |
rent
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Brad L. Graham is a writer, editor, riverboat gambler, fashion consultant, softshoe dancer, professional assassin, freelance factotum and singer of sentimental ballads.The BradLands is his home on the web. 
Find Brad elsewhere on the web.