Housecleaning
I’ve updated my template and CSS slightly. Text sizes are generally larger.I adopted the 3 column CSS recommended by LawLawLaw (found via Circadian Shift). Please let me know if the new layout pleases you, vexes you, doesn’t work in your browser, or causes you to break out in a rash.
I deleted the RSS .91 feed. http://www.mememachinego.com/index.xml used to be the RSS .91 feed; now it’s an RSS 2.0 feed. The old RSS 2.0 feed link, http://www.mememachinego.com/rsd.xml, continues to exist as a soft link to index.xml. I make no guarantees that’ll continue forever, but I’ll make an effort to see that rsd.xml is updated appropriately in the major feed clearinghouses before I delete it. I’ve added an atom feed.
I installed MT-Textile 2. This means, among other things, that I can place punctuation immediately after URLs in Textile so I won’t have the annoying spaces between URLs and periods or right parentheses which sometimes resulted in widows. (I could have prevented this by hand-coding the HTML, of course, but Textile was easier and I was lazy. But the widows annoyed me enough that if I’m ever feeling really anal and, most likely, procrastinating really hard from doing something else, I’ll go back and fix them all.)
I also upgraded my MT-Blacklist (including the blacklist data) and SmartyPants, but you’re not likely to notice any differences from those (unless maybe you’re a dirty comment spammer.)
I did not upgrade to Movable Type 3.0, as that would leave me with a choice between paying $50 or excluding Jym (the free version allows only one author.) The former is unattractive to me right now and the latter intolerable.
More changes coming later (and no, Dad, there still isn’t anything at the About Zed page.)
Thought I'd mention that in Mozilla (1.6), the sidebars are not sidebars but below-bars -- first there's the main blog, then the masthead links ("About Zed" through the RSS/Atom links), then the blogroll, rings, hosting info, and finally the Free Range Memes.
Not complaining. Just so as you know.
Posted by Dan Percival on May 25 2004 09:47
Ahh, much better. Thanks!
Posted by Dan Percival on May 26 2004 09:41
It looks good! I appreciate the larger typesize. Also, the old template was kind of choppy while scrolling in IE6/Win2K; no longer, and I noticed this right away.
As for using MT--have you checked out the alternatives? I've been looking at WordPress myself.
Posted by CT on May 29 2004 16:48
Actually, I didn't do anything, Dan -- for whatever weird reason, your browser wasn't loading my style sheet.
Thanks, Costas. I've looked at Wordpress, and it seems to have some nifty things, but
1) I'd prefer a Perl solution, being a Perl hacker.
2) They're trying to sell not having to rebuild your site after changes as a feature. I don't believe them. I think generating static html is a feature over dynamically generating every page, every time. As a guest on a friend's server, I consider it good manners to minimize load and static pages do that.
Posted by Zed on May 29 2004 20:02
Backend/techinical stuff, beyond fairly basic HTML, is not my thing, so I don't know much about the static vs. dynamic thing. However, this testimonial impressed me:
Kate has about 3500 entries and many more comments.Very pertinent to me, as I blog frequently (7 days a week).
Are you saying this isn't all it's cracked up to be? Aside from that, alot of the other features seem comparable to MT, with various tweaks.
Posted by CT on May 31 2004 07:12
Storage vs. computational work is one of the eternal trade-offs in programming. MT does all the computational work in advance when you change something and rebuild your site. Then, whenever someone looks at your site, all the webserver has to do is access an ordinary file on disk and deliver it, which is the thing it does best. So, if you have a lot of entries, rebuilding your entire site is slow, and the results take a lot of space.
Wordpress stores your entries as data, and builds every page on the fly when someone accesses it. So the storage involved is close to as little as is possible. But every page access is like a rebuild in MT. The webserver has to access the database and create the HTML.
If your traffic is low, this is fine, but if it's high, you're going to see performance degrade.
My website traffic isn't high, but, like I said, I'm a guest. Disk space is cheap; I feel better about using extra disk space than extra CPU cycles.
Posted by Zed on May 31 2004 11:36
Looks like it's pretty much a pick-your-poison situation... The combination of paying for the space and the new licensing for MT is pretty much pushing me to Wordpress. I can always snoop around for alternatives later. Thanks, this has been enlightening.
Posted by CT on May 31 2004 18:17