pault

links page dilemma

I’ve been thinking about what do with my links page. My existing links page has been a bit dormant of late while I’ve been doing the MT stuff. I’ve added a few links to the left column, but I’m afraid the length will get unwieldy very quickly. So what to do?

One of the rss feeds I subscribe to is LaughingMeme—whose byline i have measured out my life in coffee cups made me smile. I like this blog, though a lot of the techie stuff is over my head. Fiddling about with the site yesterday I ended up at MLP. MLP is described as: mindless link propagation, with the occasional witty and very short commentary, bringing blogging back to its root. I really like the way that kellan’s done this.

So the plan is: try and see if I can work out how to set up a separate link blog [with its own rss feed] and have a short essential list on the main page, or a most recently added links list [analogous to the most recent posts list].

tea at Claire’s

On Friday evening, went to Claire’s for tea. Happened to have a digital camera in my bag. So what follows is a little gallery of shots from the evening. Just me mucking about really.

We had a lovely evening sat out in the sun and warm at the end of one of the hottest days of the summer. Good strong coffee, a lovely warm bottle of rioja, rocket and water cress salad and loads of veg roasted in olive oil. All accompanied with chatting and laughing and star gazing. Summer in the city at its best. Claire’s got an interesting garden with some funky plants and other stuff in it. I hope this apparent from the photos—if it’s not it’s the photographer’s fault.

For another good looking garden in Burngreave [just down the road in fact], visit markmedic’s garden.

This little exercise also gave me the chance to have a look at MT’s file upload capabilities. [This particular blog entry will therefore get updated a few times while I get to grips with it—apologies in advance to those who subscribe to the rss feed for this site].

To make full use MT’s facilities, we were missing the Perl module Image::Magick—which gives the option of creating thumbnails on the fly—very handy. This gave me the opportunity to go through the installation of the module with aland.

So here’s the gallery [click on thumbnail to see bigger version [in a popup window]]:

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template changes

Implemented smarty_pants options on following tags:

MTEntryTitle
MTEntryBody
MTEntryMore

on the following templates:

Master Index
Master Archive Index
Date-Based Archive
Individual Entry Archive

Also mucked around with the date and time formats in MTEntryDate tags to make times 24 hour clock and dates in my preferred format.

SmartyPants 1.4

As part of getting to grips with MT and its templates, I’ve started amending the templates for this site. If you pay close attention, you see the site start to incrementally change.

The first change I’m making is installing the SmartyPants 1.4 plugin, from John Gruber [who authors the excellent Daring Fireball site].

Anyone who knows me will know that I take pride in my typesetting [and am constantly frustrated by the low quality of website [and other] typography generally]. A piece of software which advertises itself as: smart punctuation for web sites has got to be a good idea.

I’m impressed by this plugin and it gave me the opportunity to get a feel for the way templates work in MT.

first [known] referral

Got my first [known] refer from another blog. Anarchogeek, in the person of rabble. The link is to my burngreave.net piece you don’t have to be a black blocker….

new burngreave.net blog

Inspired by my Drupal experiences and also by my recent playing around with rss/xml feeds I’ve decided to have a go at converting my existing rising7 website into a combination of static and weblog pages.

My motivations are multiple:

We’ve talked about expanding what burngreave.net can do and here’s another option for potential users to utilize.

I want to expand my own knowledge in this area, as I’m very excited by it.

I’m feeling inspired to be creative at the moment. I’m in the fortunate position of being involved in some great stuff and would like to record it.

Please feel free to comment either here or there.

I apologise in advance for the initial high percentage of test and rubbish postings, but these will be weeded out eventually.

Originally posted on burngreave.net.

what’s going on here?

I suppose it would make some kind of sense to have some kind of introductory statement about what this is all about. It’s my intention to use this pault blog as a testbed, while I get to grips with MT, blogging in general and all the associated stuff.

So I’ll be using the mt and webdev categories for recording the learning process. Please feel free to comment my blog entries if your level of knowledge is greater than mine.

This blog will also serve I hope for my more general Macintosh, computing and miscellaneous technology musings. As I learn more of mt’s primary and secondary categories, I’ll be adding and widening.

You’ll probably read [quite a lot] about politics and activism.

I’ll probably be writing about living, working and being an activist in Burngreave [an area of Sheffield, UK] and beyond.

You may even get some thoughts about baseball and music and books and films and coffee [and whatever else occurs to me] if you’re lucky.

I’ve also outlined some of my motivations in a post to my burngreave.net blog.

mt 2.64 download and installation

Downloaded Movable Type [MT].

Trouble free installation with well-written, comprehensive and accurate installation instructions. Thanks to aland for mysql [and other general] help.