More Blog Rebuilding Progress

Despite the vast suckitude of the Movable Type documentation, I’m slowly starting to figure things out. One of the nice features of the upgrade is that it allows multiple categories, rather than just one, and I’ve finally figured out how to display them. Not only that, but you’ll see that if you click on a category associated with a given post, that you’ll get an archive page of all posts in that category. That will allow those who complain that they come here only for the space stuff, or only for the politics, to customize the blog to their own tastes (assuming that I do a good job of categorizing things).

Unfortunately, it’s a huge page, because it contains literally every post in that category that I’ve ever written. It’s a fast load for me, because I have a good connection, but I may change it so that it only gives you the previous (say) month’s worth of posts, to help those that are more bandwidth challenged. This feature will also allow folks who have me in their blogroll with specific interests to link to that specific interest (e.g., fellow space bloggers might want to just link to the space posts). If I can figure out a way to build a link (and archive page) with a filter for multiple categories, I’ll let folks know, but at least some customization is doable now.

I also have to pretty up the archive pages so they look like this one.

And I still haven’t solved the timing-out problem, so we’ll just have to continue to suffer with it for now, until I can get some help from an MT guru.

2 thoughts on “More Blog Rebuilding Progress”

  1. I also have to pretty up the archive pages so they look like this one.

    If I had a vote (which I don’t, this is a blog not a democracy) I much prefer the archive pages to be unformatted because it fills the browser and is so much easier to read. Your main page formatting serves as a brand identity but the archives don’t need that.

    But I’m just odd. 😉

    Being able to limit the quantity or date range would of course be a nice feature if your software allows such things.

  2. Sorry I can’t help. I’m partial to drupal. Have you tried it out?

    It even has a module for importing from TypePad/MT (http://drupal.org/node/860) though you’d have to import to an older version and then upgrade.

    It also has a ‘theme’ called Gutenburg that will let you use your MT layout styles.

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