…where jack sometimes does stuff, but mostly not

So, I went and switched my section of the site (everything under /jack/) to Movable Type, as I threatened to do in a previous post. If I’ve done everything right, you will barely be able to tell anything is different.

Ok, I guess there are a few differences. Entries now go to individual archives, with the comments at the end of the page, so there aren’t any comment popups. There are ‘back’ and ‘next’ links at the bottom of each page that should be context sensitive… e.g., if you’re looking at a daily archive page, they should take you to the next or previous day’s archive; likewise for individual and monthly archives. Yearly archives are broken for the moment, but don’t expect that to last.

I expect I’ll eventually get around to doing things like category archives, rss feeds, and so on. And, of course, I’ll need to do the same shuffle with Holly’s and Daphne’s pages. Woo-hoo!

Predictably enough, after spending a bunch of time customizing the blog layout, site organization, etc., I’ve decided that I hate the whole thing and want to start over. Thankfully, I only got around to changing my page and Holly’s page.

So, at some point, I’m going to move to individual-entry based archives with embedded comments (no comment popup window) with slightly more semantically-oriented URIs, along with the full complement of date-based archives in place now. To facilitate this, I’ll probably switch the back-end blog engine from b2/CafeLog to Movable Type.

I’m not entirely happy with that idea, frankly… MT generates static pages, as in actual files on disk. I build database-driven web apps at work, so generating static files over and over, and having to regenerate them if you change something, seems foreign and incomprehensible to me. I suppose I could look at it as being isomorphic to a file-based output caching system like that in PEAR, but it really isn’t. The decision to move to MT is motivated by the great community support for MT – for example, there are plenty of quite nice non-web interfaces for creating and editing MT entries.

I’ll have to console myself by working at concealing how the site works. It bothers me that people might look at my site and think, “ah, he’s using Movable Type.” I don’t know why that’s so, but it is. If you’re looking at my section of the site (or Holly’s), it is hopefully not readily obvious that I’m using b2 or, indeed, PHP. I expect I’ll continue that effort by eschewing file extensions (no .php for me) and maybe by hiding MT’s comments.cgi and search.cgi, and so on. I’ll still give attribution, of course – I’m not a total jerk – but hopefully it’ll be enough to keep my poor little blog from looking exactly like everyone else’s. I particularly like rentzsch.com for the non-standard feel (and lovely semantic URIs)… and, indeed, it seems he rolled his own blogging software, in WebObjects, no less!

So I’ve got a new(er) scheme for handling image URIs. Instead of clicking on an image and going to, say, www.pinette.org/image.php?imgsrc=dg1ut0, you’ll go to www.pinette.org/image/dg1ut0. This makes it more likely that things will be indexed by search engines like Google, which look on URIs containing things like “?” with some disdain. I’ve converted the image links in the recent Daphne vs. Daddy post as an example.

Hopefully this is the first step in a gradual de-cruftification of this site. I slapped this thing together really fast, and it’s not very pretty or well thought-out. I really need to add alt tags to the images, make the templates put out valid XHTML, get rid of tables, and, you know, maybe make it less thoroughly ugly to look at, as well as de-cruft the rest of the non-image URIs. Of course, if you are not a geek, you surely couldn’t care less how crufty the URIs are, and you probably recognize none of the terms “cruft”, “URI”, “XHTML”, and “alt tag”. Given that I have better ways to spend my time than diddling with the website, I can’t guarantee any of that stuff will happen anyway. :)

There aren’t a lot of pictures of me; those that do exist are mostly in the context of the new baby.