Trying Movable Type
Out of curiosity, I’m trying out Movable Type. The setup has been remarkably easy, including importing all my blogger.com entries. I’d love to hear about whatever anomalies and errors you find on my site. For example, I know that the link to the November archive leads to a blank page, but I don’t know why.
I’m not finding a lot to dislike here. The administrative UI is nicely organized and even looks swell. The documentation is terrific. (Why is it so rare for products to have usable documentation, hmm? When I was a boy, having great documentation was a point of pride for a product team.)
A question for a MT user: I’m not using any categories. Will I be sorry about that later?
Another question: My RSS feed now begins with the list of archive files. Did I do something wrong?
Another question: My archive files starting with May ’02 and going backwards have double headlines. Yes, I’ve rebuilt the entire site. Why does this only happen through May and how can I fix it?
Another question: I’d rather not have a list of monthly archives on my main page. Instead, I’d like to link to a separate page (call it “archivehome.html”) that has the list. Can I do this?
Thanks in advance!
Categories: Uncategorized dw
comment!
Reply!
third party perspective!
Flame!
Supercilious reply.
Something deep, meaningful, wishy washy and new age as usual.
Reclarification of original comment to defuse situation in a vaguely apologetic tone.
damn! I really wanted to know.
Well-intentioned yet ultimately awkward and soon regretted joke about Gary Turner.
Well, I was thinking some QUESTIONS had been asked. Sheeez, rebel school kids.
JOHO:
“A question for a MT user: I’m not using any
categories. Will I be sorry about that later?”
Thoughtstretcher:
I say yes.
I use Manila’s department feature (believe it to be much like the category feature of mt). This gives me the ability to route, via macro/script certain departments, (such as Business, philosophy, religion, porn) to certain areas.
I can create topic based pages. I can also send specific parts of the categories to specific pages. Makes for more possibilities.
My comment. Hey, am I the first to actually pen a tome here?
Spoilsport!
Oh you can be SO grown up sometimes Jonathon!
I started with categories, but not enough of them. Many of my posts end up filed under “Misc”, which is just as good as no category at all.
I would use categories, but make sure that you create enough of them.
Categories – from a reader’s perspective: I personally appreciate the categories when they’re used. They make it easy for me to go back and revisit a post. But, as Ryan says, just be sure to create enough of them.
I don’t use categories for the reason Ryan mentions: too many would have to be Misc. or whatever catch-all I decided on. Aside from a few quirky obsessions I seem to often return too, the bulk of my posts don’t follow any particular themes, so when I tried to come up with categories it turned out to be rather fruitless.
To replace your monthly archives, you can use the template “Master Archive Index” and “output” a file called archivehome.html or whatever. It will probably be useful to modify this template so that it shows only the list of titles of your posts with link to the main text.
and yes, making up some well-organized categories is useful and pretty.
Gratitude!
Call me grown up again and I will take my blog and go home.
:-)
I have both Radio and MT blogs. I was totally into Radio, but was pleasantly surprised too about ease of use with MT, even in the scary cgi files. I’ve had a hell of a time with FTP on radio.
Radio integrates the aggregator better. If it were just 3-paned!
MT has a good toolbar link. I still gotta upgrade to the newest version.
But it is to categories of which I speak. I’m an intense categories user, and I believe there are issues surrounding the politics of interfaces in how the categories thing is constructed.
Or, when is a category not a category? In my work, I have a lot of fun putting things to uses that they were not intended, using the Amazon databases for research and experimentation, turning a kids’ simple branching computer game from the Eliza generation into an X-rated guestbook for my home, and now, using blog software to play with branching structure creative hyperfictions and nonfictions.
So here is my nickel take on this category thing. You can call something by a name, but it does not make it so. Its function makes it so, and the function can be distorted. Most technology, the kind with greatest social effect, is not put to its originally intended use. TV is just the most famous example.
What I mean to say: In Radio, categories can be powerful, but they are also severely limiting. The Radio interface leads one to treating categories as ways to create new sites as well–altering the look and feel, the location, etc. Fine. But if you make that use of category, say to start a separate branch blog at another URL, then THAT blog can’t have categories, because it already IS a category. That sucks.
Still, Radio does recognize the epistemological reality that items belong in more than one category. I wish I could say the same about MT.
MT allows you to place items in more than one category, but it is a 4-click operation, with windows popping up and multiple saves. Pain in the ass. Category templates, I need more power there too. Probably a way to do it, since MT templates and editing is such a piece of cake, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Check buttons in Radio for categories, vs the pain in the ass in MT.
BUT. MT doesn’t require me to use categories to create new blogs or new blog artifacts. Once I let myself go, I’d made a TON of blog projects with lotsa different parameters in MT, each with custom categories perverted in whatever ways I could think up. And I don’t have to waste categories on them. This gives me more power.
FWIW, I think back entering categories in MT is pretty easy.
My frustrations could just be that I’m already chafing on the limits of other people’s blog software when really I ought to be making my own CMS. Just not ready to jump yet.
Miasma
I have not yet implemented MT-Dynamic but am looking into ways that I might do so
Giddy up
use google!
html