Monthly Archives: July 2004

Jul 26

WordPress ‘Easter Egg’ provides for even more customization

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Well, a comment promoting WordPress was left by Carthik to one of my posts – and after looking at his blog I came across a post heralding a WordPress Easter Egg that gives one access to every customizable thing one could want. As I’ve still not yet tried WordPress, I can’t comment on how well this works. Screenshots or descriptions of what all these new options are would help, but it’s nice to know they exist (whatever they are). I’ll definately be checking these out when I start my first WordPress blog. Thanks Carthik!

As stated in his post, to activate the easter egg:

If you use wordpress 1.2, go to http://example.com/wp-admin/options.php?option_group_id=all
(where example.com/wp-admin is the URI of your wordpress wp-admin folder), for all the buttons and levers you’ll ever need.

Be warned, however. One commenter on Carthik’s site tried the easter egg and had the following to say, ‘Great find, please be aware that this can have dire consequences on the functioning of your site. For wahtever reason, when I tried to save anything it deactivated my not defaultly installed plugins giving me errors everywhere. Luckily I worked it out relatively quickly, but the expletives had already come out. doh! ‘

Jul 26

Can a Google search help me figure out which blogging software is most popular?

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I’ve already figured out that I don’t want to use TypePad or Blogger (the two easiest tools to use) for my blogs as they’re not as robust and customizable as other options such as Movable Type, b2evolution, WordPress, and blosxom for example.

The problem is that all of these other tools have a decent sized learning curve, particularly if you are interested in customizing your templates, which I very much am. So if I’m going to invest all this time in creating my perfect blog, which means learning the software which powers it, I want to make sure I don’t waste too much of my time on a platform that doesn’t have as much community support or won’t necessarily keep up with new technologies as they emerge (like the way Blogger doesn’t support TrackBacks, for example)

It occurred to me to just do a google search for each of the tools in question to get an idea of how many pages reference those tools. Now, Movable Type has been around for a LONG time, so it’s likely that that will be the most popular of searches – yet, as mentioned in a previous post, there is concern in the Movable Type community that it’s creators might not put as much effort in keeping it up to date now that they have their new baby, TypePad.

In any case, here are the number of results that turn up when you search for the following terms in Google (the most popular search engine out there):

Movable Type = 1,610,000 results

blosxom = 13,700 results

b2evolution = 104,000 results

WordPress = 1,450,000

While I’m at it, might as well check Google PR (Page Rank) for each of the above mentioned sites to gain another sense of it’s popularity (or, as Google puts it, to gain a measure of the importance of a page):

WordPress has PR 7
b2evolution has PR 6
bloxsom has PR 8
Movable Type has PR 8
TypePad has PR 8
Blogger has PR 10

Hmm. Blogger has PR 10. Man, I wish they would implement the latest technology into Blogger so one can use it, because I really suspect google gives some level of priority in ranking to blogs created using the software THEY own and hosted on their server (blogspot). Anyone else ever wondered about this?

Jul 24

Customizing the Category Template for Movable Type

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Finally! An article that will help me modify my category archives. Right now, the default template for your category archive in Movable Type 3.0 lists the entire entry of EACH article in that category. If you have a lot of articles (esp. long ones), you may prefer (as I do) to have your Category page list the titles of each article (which is linked to the full individual article) as well as maybe a brief excerpt from the articles. Elise’s Movable Type Tutorial pages provide you with just the information on how to do this. Thanks Elise! I can’t wait to implement this in my Online Travelogue blog that is made using Movable Type 3.0. As it is, I only just figured out how to add a list of categories in the sidebar on the main page. Now how could that have been missing from the default main index page? I’ll post the code for that in a bit, but right now I’ve got to grab some dinner!!

Jul 24

Doing your entire site with Movable Type

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I’ve come across a number of amazing articles, which I’ve yet to fully process in my brain, on doing your entire site using Movable Type, including static pages – which means you can use Movable Type as a Content Managment System (CMS) in addition to it being a weblog. This greatly expands the power of Movable Type, and with some plugins, it’s almost unbelievable how versatile and expandable Movable Type is.

Here are the links to articles that will (hopefully) help me (and you) to get MT working in a more robust capacity:

Brad Choate’s Doing your whole site with MT allows you to ‘make use of Movable Type’s search feature to search any page f my site instead of just my weblog content. I can also enable comments, trackback or whatever for any page I’d like.’

Jul 24

Key Values Plugin for Movable Type which allows you to associate other bits of data with your entries which can be extracted conviently in your templates

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Brad Choate has created an amazing plugin for Movable Type that allows you to create and reference additional fields, making it more easy to use Movable Type as a semi-full featured CMS System