Craig's Musings

When got done moving my boy's blog and this technology blog over to the officially supported Yahoo! Movable Type solution, I noticed that my main blog pages weren't rebuilding when I changed an entry or posted a new entry. Turns out there is a problem with editing templates - the "rebuild_me" flag gets turned off as soon as you save any changes to the template. In the standard version of MT 3.2, there is a checkbox when editing your template that says "Rebuild this template automatically when rebuilding index templates". This checkbox is missing in the Yahoo! implementation, and the form is defaulting to setting that flag to 0 whenever you save a template.

This manifests itself as a pretty bad bug - the main blog page is not automatically republishing when a blog entry is added. A bug that was super easy to find if any testing of modifying templates had been done. Makes one wonder. Anyway, after reporting this bug to Yahoo! Small Business support, they helpfully responded with instructions on how to set up a blog with Movable Type. When I pointed out that I already knew how to set up a blog and furthermore hadn't asked for help setting up a blog but rather had reported a bug, they responded with "oh, in that case, we'll look into it" and I haven't heard anything since last Saturday.

So while I was (am still) waiting for them, I figured out a work-around.

Edit /blog-mt/lib/MT/WeblogPublisher.pm. At line 596 (at least in the version I have now), there is this statement:

if (!$tmpl->build_dynamic && !$param{Force}) {
next if (defined $tmpl->rebuild_me && !$tmpl->rebuild_me);
}

Comment out the "next if" statement with '##', and volia! all the index templates rebuild with each post. Suboptimal solution, as the site javascript and stylesheet don't need to rebuild with each post, but they are small and quick to rebuild, and at the main blog page rebuilds, which is critical.

Now let's see when Yahoo! fixes it.

Posted by Craig at 10:27 AM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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I've spent the past couple of weeks moving my boy's blog over from Blogger to Movable Type. The big hold out for me was two things - easy blogging with a photo, and mobile blogging

The last time I checked for a good photo blogging tool (aside from Picasa, which is fantastic but only posts to Blogger), I couldn't find anything that worked. Finally, though, I stumbled on Anconia Rocketpost (which I am writing this blog in). You can create a resized image with a thumbnail, and drag and drop just works. So whaaa-hooo, blogging a photo problem solved. I of course once again forgot that Movable Type has a different password for using the API than logging in, so wasted a ton of time trying to figure out why I couldn't publish using the tool. Six Apart say this for security, I say it is asinine and non-intuitive - if my password can be hacked, my API password can be hacked. Give me a break.

The other issue was moblogging - Blogger supports it, Movable Type does but you have to be able to set stuff up on the host, which Yahoo doesn't support. Yahoo is now supporting Movable Type as part of its small business hosting, but they didn't add mobile blogging (after all, who would want to do that???). I found a solution with Flcker, which supports mobile blogging to any blog and ironically is owned by Yahoo. The downside is that you can't choose the sizes, they force them on you - either 240 wide or 500 wide, but not 320 or 400, the sizes I like to use in my blog. 500 resized to 320 looks like crap, so I am using 240 and then updating the photo once I get home. Less than ideal, but it gives me moblogging.

I used the same blog transfer template that I used to move this blog into Movable Type, and aside from forgetting about the fact that you have to use a tool that doesn't save both CR and LF characters after each line (what a stupid requirement of Movable Type importing, by the way), I had no hiccups. I should read all my instructions, I suppose.

So the cutover is now complete - My Boy's Blog is now running on Movable Type. It is way cool now - I have all the pages as PHP, which allowed me to do a user-select color scheme, a dynamic blog calendar, a photo strip, and real-time latest photo & blog links. I'll blog some of that PHP code later. Also there is a lot more flexibility with the kinds of archives I can have - daily, monthly, total. And search is supported out of the box. I totally dig it.

The other excitement was cutting over to the Yahoo! Movable Type implementation - but that is for a later blog, I have to go for P.T. for my torn biceps tendon...

Posted by Craig at 11:11 AM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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I was just sitting here reading Engadget and I thought to myself "hey, has anyone shipped a 160gb laptop drive yet?" I figured someone MUST have, since I just bought a 120gb one last month.

And sure enough, 20 seconds later, I found out I bought a dinosaur. Fujitsu announced these things back in August – I am soooooo out of the loop.

And then, while trying to find out where to buy one, I found out that Seagate announced theirs back in June.The first one will be 5400 rpm Momentus 5400.3 (vs 4200rpm from Fujitsu). And Seagate says they will 7200 rpm versions & versions up to 240gb by 2007. Whoo ha!

They are all taking advantage of perpendicular recording technology. To quote Seagate: a technology that stands data bits on end on the disc platter, rather than flat to the surface as with existing longitudinal recording, to achieve new levels of hard drive data density and storage capacity. Standing bits on end also improves the reliability of read-write performance in demanding environments.

The good news I suppose is that I couldn’t find any to buy as no one is shipping until Q1 2006 it would seem - so I don’t have to feel quite as bad about buying my 120gb drive.

I couldn’t find detailed specs on the Momentus other than basics, but the specs for Fujitsu’s drive are in the extended entry.

MHV2160BT

Posted by Craig at 8:09 AM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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