Anniversaries & Updates, Merges and Purges
This blog is a strange hybrid (no, not Lycan and Vampire).
It started life on Blogger, then moved to TypePad, then earlier this year I unsubscribed from that account because $200 a year for blogging is a bit much.
It was all saved away on a corner of my hard drive while I started this new, professional Movable Type blog. Recently, I imported all those old posts but set them all to Draft mode as I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with them.
Tonight, I purged nearly a hundred older entries. And it felt good.
Some were destined to die for outdatedness. Some for cringe-inducing writing, Some from the winnowing of redundant categories. Some because, well, they looked at me funny.
Mostly, a lot of the purging was really to help shorten the right-hand sidebar, which keeps overrunning the main content div. Shortening those lists was possible thanks to a useful MTArchiveList reformatting I found online that uses span tags to make paragraphs from lists.
The monthly archives were organized with Adam Kalsey’s MT-ArchiveDateHeader plugin.
Category lists were tamed with Kevin Shay’s Glue plugin, which, combined with the span tag formatting, makes a nice list-paragraph with automatic commas between items.
Kevin Shay’s Compare plugin is now used in the comments to distinguish mine from everyone else’s with alternate CSS.
It’s worth noting that as of today, even at version 3.2, there’s still no yearly archiving in Movable Type, and neither is there a way to change the sort order of MTArchiveLists, even though the “sort_order” attribute applies to pretty much everything else in the system - MTCategories and MTEntries, for instance - otherwise I’d have those months going from January to December and not vice versa.
All this mucking around under the hood reminds me of how InDesign grabbed a chunk of Quark’s business while they were out golfing. Lately, I’ve been pondering the possibilities of pMachine’s ExpressionEngine, because it seems to do everything MT does with a bunch of plugins, out of the box, and more.
First one to get a really good, working e-commerce module out the door wins!
February 6, 2006 12:58 AM
Comments
ExpressionEngine’s supposed to get one soon, it’s in the works. It’s a much more freeform publishing tool anyway; like MT with totally customizable entry fields and lots of dynamic code snippets.
Yeah, MT probably isn’t the best-suited to have e-commerce grafted onto it - if there was a way to integrate with a simple, hosted solution, that might be worth doing.
wrote AJ Kandy on February 6, 2006 8:19 PM
Well, even though we do a lot of different things with MT, it’s still a blogging platform so e-commerce…
Most “real” CMSes do have e-commerce packages I believe. Although I thought pMachine Pro did, I just checked and they don’t so I might be wrong ;)
By the way, I have a fix for the column length thing, ping me on AIM.
wrote Patrick on February 6, 2006 9:23 AM