When I was designing and building this weblog, one of the things that caught my eye were some small images, or buttons buttons that I saw here and there on other people’s web sites.
Category / weblogs
Movable Type – Technology At Its Finest
A couple of day ago, I wrote about how technology is, more often than not, a pain in the ass. Of course not all technolgy is a pain. Every so often something comes along that just works and people fall in love with it. I think the PalmPilot was a shining example of that. In fact, Palm coined the term The Zen Of Palm to explain their design philosophy and the resulting popularity of the device. Although I agree with the Zen of Palm, the bottom line was that the device just worked – that’s why people bought them.
So there are exception to the “crap that doesn’t work” rule and recently I was reminded of that as I worked with Movable Type. Movable Type (aka MT) is what is called a “Content Management System.” In plain english, Movable Type is a program that manages the content on your website. This weblog is all managed by Movable Type. I installed the program on this web server, customized it to fit my needs and design and use it to post content to the website. Posting my little rants is all quite easy. I have a simple form that I type the days diatribe into, click the “Post” button and ta da, a post appears on the front page. After awhile, a post is then archived so that you can read it later. MT isn’t the only content management system out there, but it’s very popular. Why? Because is just works.
Fiat Lux
A good friend of mine, Rachel Luxemburg, just launched her own weblog.
Weblog Publishing Tools For Movable Type
Recently I did a review on Weblogging With Your Palm, however since I do the bulk of my publishing with programs on my laptop, I thought it might be good to do a quick run down of what’s available for Windows clients. This mini-review is focused on tools that work with Movable Type (MT). The listed apps may, or may not work with your chosen system if you’re not using MT. I’d suggest a Google search to see what other product are out there for your software.
Why Use A 3rd Party Client?
The MT interface is pretty straightforward and easy to use, so why use a 3rd party client? The short answer is spellchecking. 🙂 The long answer is that, depending on the client you’ve chosen, there’s a wealth of tools to help you with your post. For example having a WYSIWYG HTML editor, being able to compose offline, or being able to save your posts locally. You may not need these extra tools, but if you do one of these applications should fit the bill.
Playing With Playlists
In my post yesterday, I talked about how I added Matt Haughey’s Trackback Playlist and that the song titles would link to a Google search. I wasn’t at all happy with how the results were being displayed. I wanted to be able to provide you with a link to the artist, or at least to a page where you could find more information about the artist.
Since I’m a bit anal retentive (who me?) with my mp3 ID tags, I always include a link to the artist’s web site in the URL field. Unfortunately, the Do Something plugin doesn’t support that field. After fighting with it for about an hour, I had decided to give up – this feature just wasn’t meant to be. 🙁
Tweak City
I just can’t seem to leave well enough alone. Every morning, after I post my entry, I have a tendency to tweak the site here and there. There’s always a little something that needs to be added, nipped, or tucked.
A few days ago, I stumbled across a site that is a Movable Type tweakers dream. It’s called empty pages. I can’t tell who the author of the site is. The only thing I’ve found were her initials when she posts a comment, which is BMK, but she is a very knowledgeable person, both in php and MT.
So this is a great site to find some cool tips, tricks, or scripts to add stuff to your weblog. Google brought me to the site after I did a search for adding page views to MT. I had tried various PERL and PHP scripts, but never quite found the right script. When I came across BML’s “Page Views” script, it was just what the doctor ordered! It was easy to install and after including the script on the navigation sidebar, it now provides a pageview count for each page on the weblog. I went back and tallied the page views from the server stats log for the major pages and I was done.
Once down the rabbit hole, you find more and more interesting little tweaks that you can do. Thanks to a helpful nammer in the MT Support Forums, I found another handy little script. Scriptygoddess wrote a script called “Show recent comments WITH total comments from that comment author” It’s a mouthful of a title, but a very simple script. What it does is show the total number of comments made by an author whenever they make a post. It’s a little thing, but I like it. 😀
Weblogging With Your Palm
As everyone who reads this weblog must know by now, I love Palm OS handhelds. So, it was only natural that I would try and find a way to manage my weblog via my ever present pa1mOne Tungsten C, or one of the other Palm OS based devices that I carry with me. For managing my weblog, I use Movable Type, so most of my focus was on finding a solution for my specific weblog, but alone the way I found a couple other cool programs that can help you make your weblog mobile.
Web Browsers Weblogs are web based, so my first thought was to try using one of the many web browsers for Palm OS. I tried Blazer, Eudora Web, and the built in browsers for the Kyocera 7135 and the Tungsten C and none of them worked well enough for me to use them for my weblog. The biggest hurdle is that Movable Type makes use of pop up windows which no browser seems to support. Not only that, but it’s rather cumbersome trying to navigate the MT interface via such a small screen. The text entry is a dialog box, so it doesn’t really lend itself to entering a weblog post. In fact, while trying to edit a post, one of the browsers ended up deleting it entirely! :O Continue Reading
Speak! Good Weblog, Good Weblog
Thanks to a handy little guide on Dane Carlson’s Weblog, I’ve added speech capability to my weblog. Simply click on the button at the end of each post and the first 45 words of the post will be spoken. Given my gift for gab in both verbal and text mediums, I don’t think you’ll ever have a chance to hear an entire post. Also, I’d recommend that only broadband users choose this option because the resulting file size can reach in excess of 500k.
How does this work? Well, AT&T has a product called “Natural Voices” that allows developers to add voice capability to their applications. The provide an online demo and so via a web form I’m can submit a post to the demo and have the results streamed back to you. Pretty cool huh? There’s a variety of voices and languages that can be used and Chris Pirillio has taken it to the limit by randomizing both the language and the voice, so you never know what you’re going to hear when you click his “Speak” button. 😀
Photo Web Logging
There’s a new trend that’s appeared in the last six months that seems to be catching on big time and that’s having a camera in portable devices.