Category: MovableType stuff

Ok, so I’ve been blogging for a few years now, and reading a bunch of them in the meantime. This is something I’ve always wondered about: Why do people always sort their blog archives in reverse chronological order (newest to oldest)? For the main blog page it makes perfect sense to have the most recent post at the top. You don’t want to make readers have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to find the most recent entry. But for archives, IMO it makes very little sense. Think about it…sorting in reverse chronological order means the reader has to read through your blogging history from the bottom of the browser and scroll upwards. If an entry is longer than a screen length, then the reader has to scroll down to read the full entry, then scroll back up to find the next one.

Makes for lots of senseless scrolling. A much more logical way of reading blog archives would be sorted in chronological order (oldest to newest).

So why do people leave their blog archives like this? Just something they’ve never thought about? Because that’s the way it’s always been done? Something they can’t change? I can’t imagine any blogging software worth the bits it’s made from not giving the user at least that capability.

Bloggers, think about what you’re doing to your fellow readers!

Finally got around to upgrading to MT 3.2. Rather than upgrading the existing installation, I opted to make a copy of the database and a parallel installation of MT. That way, if something went wrong, reverting back to 3.17 would be simple. Fortunately nothing went wrong.

There are a number style sheet changes that will take me a while to integrate into this blog (if ever), but the RunningBlog is using the new templates. I gotta say, StyleCatcher is pretty sweet for grabbing new blog styles (themes in 3.2 now). I’m really liking some of the default styles available. The new interface is nice to work in too. Rebuilds seem to go faster in 3.2 also.

I think once I figure out how the styles are organized, changing the look of the blog is going to be easier to do.

Update: Rats…individual archives are broken. looks like a problem with SCode. Nope, turned out I needed to fix the mtview.php template and rebuild it. Duh.

Just an entry to remind myself of the new MT Style Generator to use for whenever I get around to upgrading to MT 3.2.

The MT folks are teasing us with snippets about the latest features in MT 3.2. Tantalizing stuff starting with a new admin interface, feedback ratings a la SpamAssassin (for dealing with crap and spam) and a junk folder for holding said crap and spam (like in Eudora).

With 29 more to go in their Favourite 32 list, I can’t wait to see what else is in store for this newest release.

Fresh off 6A’s software mill is MT 3.16 boasting lots of fixes and code improvements.

Not a lot of changes or fixes that affect me significantly, although there are a few things that should keep newbies out of trouble.

• Authors can no longer delete their own accounts, which could result in disabled installations. (Seen more than a few people get nailed by this on the forums)
• Improved the application’s ability to guess the desired weblog URL and filesystem path in new weblog setup screen. (Should be very helpful for newbies and non-techies)
• On setup of dynamic rendering, Movable Type tries to create most of the pieces it needs (.htaccess, compiled-templates directory) on its own. Better error messages help the user create these pieces when Movable Type doesn’t have sufficient rights.
• Fixed a bug in which, given a large number of entries, rebuilds may time out when using dynamic templates (under dynamic publishing the FileInfo table is rebuilt, instead of pages on the filesystem). We are now doing these “rebuilds” in stages to prevent timeouts in the browser. (Always wondered what there was to rebuild for dynamic archives)
• Improved subcategory hierarchy display in the interface. Subcategories are displayed hierarchically in the following places: the Primary Category dropdown on the New Entry, Edit Entry and Quickpost screens, the category filter dropdown on the List Entries screen, the category filter and assignment dropdowns on the Power Edit screen and the popup category creation window.

Complete list of changes in the Changelog