Recently in Movable Type Category

Sometimes, it is really necessary to display a complex formula; such as this:

I use MathTran to achieve this, rather than doing a complex server-side install of Latex. Then I can use a URL like the one below to dynamically display the equation above:

That reminds me, there is a Google API for doing charts on the fly. The simple example they give is:

Although much more complex graphs¹ are possible:

¹ Thanks to http://www.felipebarone.com/plot-function-google.php [now defunct] for this example.

Having spent a lot of the weekend sorting out the styles and templates for the blog, I think it's about time to get back to work; i.e., the PhD.

However. before I abandon this 'diversion' I thought I'd make a few notes about what still might need to be done on the site:

• The main page of the blog just lists the ten, or so, most recent posts. At the bottom of the page there is a link to the site's archives. I wonder if I need something upfront, such as a search box, to allow people to find old material more easily.

• I've done away entirely with the sidebar. That gives the page a cleaner look, but it doesn't invite people to explore more of the site.

• Finally, I've started using the hierarchical categories. I had planned to do this earlier. But, having now installed the latest version of the software, it's been so easy to do. Now I'm wondering if I should use tags as well as categories.

I'm amazed at my capacity to get distracted by something. Such as fixing these templates and styles. I could easily spend much more time doing this. But at the end of the day, I wouldn't be moving forwards on what is really important; my teaching and my research.

Actually, it has taken me less time than I expected to do the changes I needed wanted to make. That's all down to Google's new web browser Chrome. It's a slick and tidy piece of software. I would make it my main browser except that it doesn't (yet) support ad blocking, and two essential Firefox add-ins ( Zotero and libx) aren't available for it (Oh, and it isn't yet available for FreeBSD).

Anyway, Chrome has this really neat feature that allows you to inspect elements of a web page to see which parts of your stylesheet are 'active'. Without this, I would have spent a lot more time tweaking the site's CSS.

And now, back to the salt mine.

Update
Andrew pointed me towards CSSViewer. This neat add-on for Firefox shows what the CSS is for a particular element on the screen. Google's Chrome inspector shows which parts of the style sheet is being used (or overridden) so it is easier to tweak one's style sheet.

Well it seems that my upgrade of Movable Type didn't go as smoothly as I thought.

Having moved to version 4.1, I rapidly, and too hastily moved to 4.2.

Unfortunately, I didn't test things properly and I only realised a few days ago that all my old templates and style sheets were broken. The "solution" I found on the web, of 'refreshing' the templates, actually installed new templates over the top of the old ones. Not quite what I had in mind.

So, I'm now redesigning/rebuilding new templates ... so the site may not be too pretty for a while.

It's been a long time coming, but I finally got around to upgrading the version of MovableType that I use on this site.

It was as painless and problem free process that one could hope for. Just install the new files, copy over the configuration file, install the few plugins I use and voilá -- it was done. It probably took less than ten minutes (including reading the documentation).

I orginally started to use Django because I wanted to write some on-line survey instruments. However, I seemed to have become sidetracked with porting my old site to Django.

Well no more.

There is nothing wrong with the existing MovableType platform. So, it is back to business as usual.

I've mentioned elsewhere that I've been moving over to Django as my "platform" for blogging, and so on.

We'll I've now started the process of importing the entries in my old blog to this new one. At first I thought I would do it by hand, but with more that 200+ entries, I thought I would try an automate it. So, a couple of python scripts later the data was pretty much transfred across.

Alas, I've choosen to use a different (reduced) system of tags now. So, I didn't automate the transfer of tags. I have, nevertheless, gone through all the old entries and amend the tags. All I need to do now is port the images to the new system and check all the links are working.

I'll do a final sweep to make sure that the Textile formating is working okay, and then I'll make the new system visible to all.

Over the years I've used a number of approaches to managing my content.

• Hand crafted static HTML files
• static HTML using Frontpage and NetObjects
• PHP driven content
• Zope
• Movable Type

And now I'm using Django. And so far I'm pretty pleased, although I would like to get WikiText (or something like it) working.

I don't know about everyone else, but I prefer to use a markup scheme when writing rather than a WYSIWYG editor. It's just that I prefer to see the layers behind the presentation. So, I've abandoned the WYSIWYG editor I had been using and gone back to Textile.

Alas, I've also been using WikiText and I've found I prefer that system to Textile. All I have to do now is to find a way to get WikiText working here.

I've spent a happy few hours merging two weblogs together. At first I thought it would be as easy as changing a few SQL tables.

Alas, that is only half the job. There are also the categories that also need to be redone. Not a straight forward job. Perhaps I should have done some research first - but much of the fun is in finding out.

Anyway, it's done now, and everything seems to be working okay. If there are any problems particularly with entries from before 2004, please let me know.

Sometime the interface to MovableType can be a little hard to work with; especially for that simple task of creating a journal entry. I find a lot of spelling mistakes slip through. So, at the moment, I am trying out Zempt. Zempt allows me to create the entry on my computer, check the spelling and then upload the entry to my blog. I'll be interested to see how it works out.

Of course, a program like Zempt can't fix all the other problems, such as: grammar, coherence, flow, etc. (but maybe one day).

I'm also trying out a program called w.bloggar. I'm not sure which is better yet - I'm still weighing up the pros and cons of each.

What I will say is that the spell check on each system is rather idiosyncratic. Zempt seems to work best; but it doesn't remember new words¹ (i.e. the dictionary add function doesn't seem to work). W.bloggar, on the other hand, doesn't handle URLs well and doesn't have a British dictionary (and the US dictionary throws British up as an error).

Also, Zempt, being targeted solely at Moveable Type, does seem to handle the features of the underlying blogging system better (e.g. formatting, categories, etc.).

¹ It seems that the dictionary problem is known to the folks at Zempt, and they are working on it.