I recently wrote of some experiments to improved Feed2JS (see the updates fed to the site, bottom of the main page). Specifically, based on the request from a user in Germany, I attempted to change the output to encode content as UTF-8 using the new features on Magpie RSS 0.7. However, I have gotten an […]
Yes, what is with the weather? Even here in Arizona, the last two weeks have brought tremendous rain to the desert, doubling are average, flooding the dry washes. Up north, the mountain tops are getting snow by the foot. And this week, the projects here habe been coming down in torrential buckets (as opposed to […]
Getting back to our series on better blogging, on this one I make the bold contention (ducking tomatoes) that all (well most) weblog software packages create archives the wrong way. It is not that they cannot do it better, but for the most part, the out of the blox templates build archives the lazy way– just tossing old blog entries into one large, never ending scrolling sack.
What am I blabbing about?
Just about every blog software I have seen has nicely built systems for creating archives by date of previous writings. They organize them into links by month, day, etc. Some, like MovableType, allow user defined categories, so old entries can be grouped by any hierarchy.
But what happens, and what is wrong (in this dog’s opinion) is that the definition of an “archive” is just one long entry appended after another. If you write a lot, or create more than 40 articles in a category, it becomes almost a useless overweight to find old content that takes long to download (all pictures come with it too). It ends up being one of those big anvils that always skirts the Roadrunner and plops the Coyote (I was always more of a Wile E. Coyote fan myself, but that is another story).
But here is where it gets interesting blog heads- you do not have to accept it that way, you can roll up your sleeves, and modify your archive templates to do what makes more sense to me- publish a list of previous posts by title and abstract, with links to the full shebang.
In this edition, I aim to show you not only how to weave this magic in MovableType, but also in Blogger where I recently managed to achieve the same feat. I have to give credit to the Tweezer’s Edge, a blog where I noticed this first– if you can build a better archive, I think it makes you stand out from the crowd that is still limited to the default templates.
For those the care to feed, I have been doing more minor tweaks to Feed2JS, and inside you will find I use the very same to display the latest updates to that site, since it now has its own feed.
The main thing to look for (beyond coverups for my typos) was Seb Paquet’s suggestion to populate the hypertext links attached tp the feed item titles with the title= attribute set to a part of the item’s description. This is done, see the example below, so feeds could be generated with title only displays, but mouse overs on the links will reveal the first 150 chars of the item description (if your browser does that for title attributes on href links).
I do need some help as I have a request from someone who is asking that the output be able to support UTF-8 character encoding. My first attempt was merely to update this server as well as the default php.ini to use utf-8 as the default character set. I am CharSetIgnorarant– will that have adverse affects on other people? Also, it did not seem to help his site, which is all utf-8 encoded. So now I am thinking this is something in Magpie.. the 0.71 update is supposed to support different character encodings.
I’ll be diving in later.
Last week it was Tags on Speed. That was then, this is now… Richard S writes “More on Social tags” pointing to “taggregator” an experiment with allows you to provide one “tag” and it generates a side by side view of del.icoi.us and flickr results: Someone built a thing I wanted to but didn’t — […]
Yup, flickr is the land of maybe more than the land of 10,000 memes, maybe it is the long tail for photographic odd-topics. Today, I got an invite to join the “spread that love” flickr group (which explains why I had to fish it out of the junk mail folder!). So here is the meme […]
Help! I am in search of someone, some benevolent group, maybe a web design/development class project, willing to do an overhaul of a writing site that very much needs an update. Is this a lot to ask for? I just lack the time and resources to do it myself, and despite some flakiness, some 20,000 […]
Who reads the fine print any more? From the Stamp Out And Abolish Redundancy Department (apologies to Mad Magazine) comes the fine print on the back on an audio CD: Like the famous multiblade razors, the first warning (1) gets your attention. FBI Anti Piracy Warning: unauthorized copying is punishable under federal law. Then, in […]
Here is a CDB “web good dog” nod to “Home of the Underdogs” a site devoted to preserving “underrated” computer games many, but not all of the being “ambandonware” or titles no longer available: Home of the Underdogs is a non-profit site dedicated to the preservation and promotion of underrated PC games (and a few […]
I had planned this afternoon to be a good quiet time to do a clean install on our office’s in house server. I cannot complain about the sorts of problems Brian wrote about as mine seem a bit, well self inflicted. The server in question is a G4 OS X server that is mainly for […]
