site-related techspeak, computer crap, other technical garble not of interest to the general populace.
Call me egotistical, but according to D. Keith Robinson, I’d like to think that this new blog of mine will be A Successful Blog. Ideally, anyway.
Incidentally, Keith’s website is where I inadvertently stole my anti-tagline from. Just like I (somewhat less inadvertently) appropriated some of Dooce‘s design elements. Imitation is the highest form of flattery… right?
After all, I believe it was Picasso who said, “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” —I’m not sure what that makes me, then.
Now that my page looks kind of like a “real” blog, I find myself torn between writing more and writing better. Ideally, I’d like to do both. Realistically, I know that if I want to put out high-quality entries like The Elite Members Of The Online Blogosphere (and their groupies know who they are), I would need to sit down and spend quality time on each and every entry. I would basically be writing mini-essays for actual publication, while trying to keep my informal style intact.
It’s harder than it seems. For me, anyway.
On the other hand—shit, no one new is reading this thing. My entire audience consists of Aaron, Amy, Sheryl, Eric, Beth, Dan, and sometimes Amanda, Donna, Kristen, Ellie from SomethingNormal, or a random wanderer following a link from my sig or my old Bosstones page (which, remarkably, still gets hits after at least two years of stagnation).
There’s nobody here to impress. Y’all know me too well. *smirk*
So, once I get used to being all loose and laid-back while typing in a new interface, I’m hoping I’ll be back to my normal blogging self—albeit with a narrower column of text, a different color scheme, and a new backend.
Huh-huh, she said, “back end.” Cool.
P.S. – All of my August 2004 LJ entries are now imported into MT. w00t!
Well, this evening was spent messing with MT. And messing, and messing, and messing… until I realized that my problem lay in some simple configuration settings. Once MT knew where to generate my files, my MT tags magically started working; and once I realized how to make templates work, and how to recompile the site to show my changes, everything started coming together.
This is still going to take a lot of work and tweaking—and reformatting of generic templates when the need arises. If you choose to preview your comment, you’ll see what I mean… 😉
This is just me testing Movable Type, and my ability to insert MT tags into my own HTML. Interesting, isn’t it, how I’ve come full-circle: hard-core codehead to reluctant wysiwyg (Claris Homepage) to all-out wysiwyg (Dreamweaver) to reluctant code-head. Heh.
Well, I figured out how to adapt around all the little goobers in my CSS compatibility enough to make something that looks presentable in both browsers. Please look around and let me know what you think. Is the jumpy background too overwhelming? If it is, I can try to tweak it into something that might be smaller, both visually and byte-wise, although I’m not sure how the design would hold together without the large photo element. Might still be OK.
If the general consensus on the design is A-OK, then I’ll make an attempt to figure out these Movable Type templates and plug them into this nifty design I’ve created. Once I figure out the proprietary tags, it doesn’t sound like it’ll be any harder than connecting ClarisWorks to FileMaker back in the day. And, hell, maybe it’ll get me on the road to doing some real database stuff. I have MT running under MySQL, after all.
OK, guys. Let me know what you think. I’m outta here for tonight. Soon. Really.
edit: Might help if I gave you the new link.