Prometheus 6   

The new place

Well, how do you like it?

I'm rather pleased with things. New domain name, which ought to get me more respect from the search engines. The site can be searched, so I can really use it as an extra brain lobe. Integral commenting system, trackbacks, all the Moveable Type goodness you've come to expect, in a new flavor.

I've learned a lot in a little time, and there's more I will learn about this software. Moveable Type has a lot of possibilities, but few will need me to explain that. I've got some non-default goodies under the hood here that I want to tell you about that you may fawn obsequiously over them.

Of course, since I did the conversion myself there's a few avoidable weirdnesses.

First, the good stuff. I'm keeping three days worth of posts on the main page. That's the three most recently posted days, not the three most recent calendar days. If I need to skip a week you don't ever see a blank page or less than three days of postings. But if a conversation in the comments lasts longer than that, it's all good because there's a Live Discussion Threads link box that will show the 10 most recently commented posts.

Extended entries expand in place. I'm sure you've seen that around. It's so popular MT should consider making it a configuration option. Comment entry in IE, both in the popup and the individual entry archive, have hot links at the top of the editor that will bold, italicize or wrap a hyperlink around highlighted text. These two Javascript functionalities were stolen from ScriptyGoddess without so much as a "by your leave." I need to be less lazy and get something going for Netscape before I have so many posts that rebuilding would be ridiculous…it approaches that point already.

Thanks to the generousity (and, perhaps, marketing instincts) of Kalsey Computing, the MTSimpleComments plugin gives me a single listing of comments and trackbacks.

Now the weirdnesses.

The most obvious weirdness is the two comment link/posting credit lines. This is the result of an almost ideal combination of greed, laziness and lack of time. I only decided at the last minute I wanted to import all the posts from the old Blogger site. And though my comments aren't as active as an A-lister's they are a major good thing that I don't want to lose. So in the conversion I added links to the existing Haloscan comments. That's the greed. The laziness is in the plan to create a template specific to the imported comments so only the original Blogger credit line shows, with the Trackback popup link appended. The lack of time came about from the intersection of real life and a misunderstanding that caused me to spend some extra time writing a program to manipulate the import file in ways that turned out to me not only unnecessary, but non-productive.

This is fixable, but I've done a cost/benefits analysis and decided that what I've done is a better alternative than delaying the cutover/tweaking the templates.

Another weirdness is the lack of titles. Blogger didn't have them in the free accounts for most of P6-Blogger's existance, so the 1300+posts don't have them. And when importing, if you don't specify a title, MT makes one up from the first five words of your post. Well, that turned out to be ugly as hell, so I forced blank titles on all the posts.

So there you are. Here you are. And here we go.