Movable Type update

Filed under: Journaling
8 Comments

Okay, the Movable Type version of my journal is almost ready for business.

Stop by, take a look, let me know if there's anything big that needs fixing. I imagine I'll be tweaking the look for the next couple weeks. Note that it's still not official yet; feel free to try posting comments there, but all comments posted there and not here will probably be deleted when I do the final switchover.

Also, I've built a redirection system, but it's not live yet either. If you want to help me test it, do this:

  1. Poke through my archives (by picking a day or a month from the dropdown menus below the entry) and go to some arbitrary past entry. (Don't use this entry you're reading now, 'cause I haven't copied that to MT yet.)
  2. When you're viewing an individual past entry (not a list of entries), go up to the address bar at the top of your browser window. Where it says "show-entry", change that to "redirect-entry". Leave the rest of the URL alone.
  3. Press Return or Enter. You should be taken to the MT version of the same entry.

When I'm satisfied that everything works, and I do the final switchover, I'll replace the show-entry.php file with the redirection code, so that if you follow a link to an old entry, it will automatically take you to the corresponding MT entry.

8 Responses to “Movable Type update”

  1. David Moles

    Something about the index page bugs me, but I’m not sure what. At first I thought maybe it was a widows-and-orphans thing with the excerpts being so short, but now I’m not sure. Some combination of that and the spacing and the colors, though — it’s making the titles (figuratively) disappear for me, and making it hard to see at a glance whether a title goes with the excerpt above it or the excerpt below it. The net effect is not unlike the front page of Mary Anne’s journal, where all the entries say “Good morning, munchkins…” and I can never decide which one to click on…

  2. Jenn Reese

    I think it looks really nice — very clean and easy to read, IMO. If I wasn’t somewhat invested in JournalScape, I’d be inclined to try MT myself. 🙂

  3. Vardibidian

    This isn’t a bug or anything, but clicking on the category archive takes us to the actual entries, rather than a list of entries, which will become unwieldy very quickly if you actually use the categories for each entry. This is similar to the month archives, which now are Teh R0>>

    Also, do you want us to be able to see the categories for an individual entry, either from the permalink page for that entry or from the main page?

    Thanks,
    -V.

  4. Jed

    Thanks much for the feedback!

    David: Good points. I’ve reduced the vertical space within an entry-unit on that front page, and increased the vertical space between entry-units, and indented the pullquote and timestamp. Does that work better? I suspect it’ll also depend a lot on your particular browser, but I’ve now checked several Mac and Windows browsers (plus lynx) and I think it looks okay in all the ones I checked. …Also, let me know if you think I need longer pullquotes; I set MT to automatically excerpt the first 20 words, but I could go to 25 or maybe even 30 if people would prefer that.

    Jenn: Thanks! I should note that various of the things I’m doing (especially with comments popups) were inspired by JournalScape, so thanks to you and Kenny for providing nice designs and letting me copy them.

    Vardibidian: Good points. I’ve just barely started working with categories—I need to add a bunch more categories, figure out a way to display them nicely on the front page (perhaps a dropdown menu?), apply them to entries, and (as you noted) rework the category pages to show pullquotes instead of full entries, and make category labels show up on the individual-entry pages. I’m still not sure it’s a scalable system; I imagine that some categories will end up with dozens upon dozens of entries. But we’ll see.

  5. Vardibidian

    The question, once you start categorizing, is whether you want to even bother with the big broad categories (life, work, SH, home, friends, travel) which will definitely have scores of entries, or whether you just want to have categories for Pet Peeves, Words Easily Confused, Link Lists, maybe Con Reports, perhaps Customer Service Demon, maybe movie reviews, things like that. Those will have a dozen or so, maybe more (we hope), but still be helpful for archiving. If we want to find out everything you’ve written about SH, we can probably just search for the term. Not that we can’t search for the phrase words easily confused, but you know.
    Thanks,
    -V.

  6. David Moles

    Much better. 🙂

  7. Vardibidian

    Hey, is this thing live?

    Thanks,
    -V.

  8. Jed

    This entry gets a disproportionate amount of spam, so I’m closing it to comments. If you want to contact me about this entry, send me email.

Comments are closed.