Writer's block, an owner's guide: Not about writing (Movable Type / trackback)
I’ve more or less got the new software running the way I want it, but it’s still a good way to waste writing time. The current thing is that incoming trackback pings don’t work. I’m telling you this here because I want you to know that I’m very friendly and social and I didn’t break it on purpose. If anyone wants to ping this site, I wish you would go ahead, and when it fails let me know what you saw at your end. Readers who have no idea what I’m talking about may count themselves lucky.
…. update 4/14/05, this has now been fixed by my hosting people (thanks Hostica!).
Published on April 13, 2005 at 8:08 am. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/not-about-writing-movable-type-trackback.html
Writer's block, an owner's guide: Tech how-to: Firefox Live
If you like this web site but you wish you didn’t have to keep interrupting your writing to click over here and see if I’ve written anything recently:
(1) if you are reading this in Internet Explorer, then (a) please assume that I’ve ranted at you for ten minutes about how it slows down your computer and exposes you to all those annoying pop-up ads and exposes you to spyware that will let strangers watch what you are typing and what you are reading, and then (b) go download Firefox.
(2) if you are still reading this in Internet Explorer, that’s ok, that’s your choice, or your employer’s choice, your mother’s choice, your teenager’s choice, or whatever it was. Unfortunately the rest of this article is not information you can use.
(3) if you are reading this in Firefox, then here’s one of the many fun and useful things you can do. You can add a Firefox Live Bookmark. It looks like a bookmark but is actually a handy little menu of the titles of my recent articles. That means that before you open the bookmark, you can choose what you want to read about or, if there’s nothing new, or nothing about your interests, you needn’t open the page at all. Cool, huh?
Here’s how. Look down at the bottom right, at the little orange square with the white… er, things in it. That’s it, good. That tells you this site is enabled for Live Bookmarks. Click on it, and it will offer you several choices. Click any of them, I don’t care. In the window that pops up, edit the name of this blog to be whatever you want – probably “Today I Write.”
Next you have a choice. (a) if you just hit return, that adds a Live Bookmark to your bookmarks menu. Congratulations! You’re done. But (b) what I would like you to do is choose “Create in” and then “Personal Toolbar Folder.” That puts the Today I Write button in your toolbar where you can hit it whenever you like.
Then whenever you do hit it, you will see a little menu of my recent articles. If the titles don’t appeal, go back to whatever you were doing and the menu disappears, and you have wasted only about a second of your writing day. Reward yourself with something time-consuming.
And that is all there is to it.
Response to this article (1 response)
Published on April 12, 2005 at 8:20 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/tech-how-to-firefox-live.html
Writer's block, an owner's guide: Migrating from Blogger to Movable Type
When I switched from Blogger to Movable Type – and I’m very glad I did – there were a few fun moments. One was after following MT’s directions for copying all my posts. Somehow a couple of them got dropped and I had to add them back by hand.
I just noticed today that there’s another missing post I hadn’t been aware of, and of course it happens to be a key post that sets out one of the central notions about writer’s block that underpin this whole web site. So now I’ve added that back by hand, too, at its correct date.
I don’t know why that happened and I can’t give other bloggers any advice beyond “pay attention.”
But thank goodness for Google’s cache of deleted web pages!
Published on April 3, 2005 at 9:28 am. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/migrating-from-blogger-to-movable-type.html
Writer's block, an owner's guide: Navigation in Movable Type
Updated with my current code 05/17/05
My inner nerd has been quite active lately while I’ve been encouraging him to fine tune Movable Type. He’s entitled, I hope, to write here about one of his little achievements. Here’s his report:
I didn’t like the usual links that appear at the top of a typical weblog page:
Previous Entry | Home | Next Entry. I wanted a hierarchical, path-aware, display that would read something more like
Home page: Parent category: Subcategory: Title of this page.
So I did that, and you can see the result above (I hope). I don’t know if this has been done before but in case it helps anyone, here’s my code.
On category listing pages I use
<a href="<MTBlogURL>index.html"><MTBlogName></a>
->
<MTParentCategories>
<a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>" title="<$MTCategoryDescription$>">
<$MTCategoryLabel$></a>
->
</MTParentCategories>
<$MTEntryTitle$>
and then on my individual archive pages I use
<a href="<MTBlogURL>index.html"><MTBlogName></a>
->
<MTParentCategories exclude_current="1">
<a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>" title="<$MTCategoryDescription$>">
<$MTCategoryLabel$>
</a>
->
</MTParentCategories>
<MTArchiveTitle>
You’ll probably also want to redesign your category archive pages. You might want to do that using conditional code, so that you can have different content on upper-level and bottom-level categories. I used <MTHasNoSubCategories> and <MTHasSubCategories>.
Published on March 31, 2005 at 7:44 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/navigation-in-movable-type.html
Writer's block, an owner's guide: Installing Movable Type
I’ve migrated this blog to the popular Movable Type software. The advantage of this for the Today I Write project is that it allows me to organize my different articles into categories. For a while now, I’ve been trying to edit all the posts so as to create a collection of articles about writer’s block. I wanted to build a traditional website alongside my blog; that was the purpose of the blog (and still is), to be a seedbed for material that would grow and flourish elsewhere.
But it was soon obvious that maintaining a blog and a static web site was inefficient. So now I’m trying a new approach, the sensible approach of running the whole project as one professional-grade blog, which gives me all the editing and publishing power I need.
It’s mandatory to write about the experience of migrating to Movable Type, and goodness knows I’ve had a fun few days installing the software on the server and then playing with templates and so on; but I’ve had enough of that right now and there are plenty of good articles on how to make MT work (for example, start here); and I have work to do on my topic of writer’s block.
One thing I learned the hard way and didn’t find documented anywhere else. For my sins, I’m running Windows here at basecamp (I’d prefer Linux for the usual ideological and practical reasons, but this laptop seems to be optimized for the other thing). So a few weeks ago I’d been editing some files in MSPaint. Now, Paint creates filenames with capitalized extensions, goodness knows why anyone thought THAT was a good idea, and it led to inconsistencies on my web pages. But I outsmarted it, recovering geek that I am: I configured my FTP program to force lower-case filenames.
And weeks later, guess what that did to the Movable Type program files. It took me a couple days to figure that one out.
That’s the main thing I have to share. My experience of installing on the servers at Hostica was (1) I eventually installed MT in the cgi-bin and in a static directory; the other method of installing it all in one MT directory didn’t work for me, and my guess is that once you tell the server that a directory contains cgi files, it executes everything in there just the same as it would in the cgi-bin and (2) I have several web domains under the same account at Hostica but my static path is /mt_static/ not /todayiwrite.com/static/ or any of the other things I tried.
And now, let’s talk about writer’s block.
Published on March 19, 2005 at 10:54 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/installing-movable-type.html
Writer's block, an owner's guide: This is just a test
This is just a test post. I’ve been rearranging my web hosting. If you can see this, that’s great, but it means you’re on the new site and some things might not be set up properly… let me know!
Published on October 25, 2004 at 10:42 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/this-is-just-a-test.html
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