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Nifty Movable Type Extensions
internet
January 17, 2004, 09:44 PM
While working on Heimdall, I came across a number of helpful-seeming plugins for Movable Type, so I'm giving them a plug here. Some of these I actually incorporated into the site; others I may incorporate later on but they seemed nifty enough to deserve a mention.
- The comment notifier plugin is what's powering the "Email me responses" option in my comments field, which emails all new comments on a post to anyone who has commented already. An essential feature if you want to encourage discussion on your weblog, since otherwise commenters have to keep coming back to the site and checking your old posts to see whether you (or anyone else) has responded to their words of wisdom. Do note that if you follow Jay's directions for modifying the Comments.pm source, you must have comment emailing enabled in the MT configuration in order for comments to be sent through the notifier. I spent a good couple of hours trying to figure out that one.
- SimpleComments is poorly named, but useful. It lets you intermingle comments and trackbacks, under the theory that they are both forms of commenting on a post. I've had it in use here for awhile now.
- The CAPTCHA anti-spam plugin uses a CAPTCHA to foil spambots from posting junk on your blog. CAPTCHAs are those little images with random words or numbers on them that you have to read and retype into a text box to prove you're a human. You might recognize them from Yahoo or Hotmail or other free email services, which employ them for the same purpose.
- The Bayesian anti-spam plugin was done by the same guy after his CAPTCHA solution was criticized for being inaccessible to the disabled. It takes more work on your part, but it's less of a burden on your users.
The most comprehensive source for plugins is the MT Plugin Directory but there seem to be several that aren't indexed there, so it's worth searching around. O'Reilly has an article on developing MT plugins if you're interested in screwing around with Perl yourself.
I'm still hunting for an MT plugin tag that works like an <MTArchiveList> tag except that its sensitive to its archive context, like <MTEntries> is. In other words, if I'm listing all the weekly archives in a monthy archives context, it should only list the weekly archives for that month, not all the weekly archives in the weblog. If anyone knows of one drop me a line.
Email Rob:
Meet Heimdall
announcements
January 15, 2004, 11:06 PM
As I mentioned earlier, I've been working for the past couple of weeks on a new design for this website. It took longer than I expected (as these sorts of things tend to do) but at long last I can finally say:
Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Heimdall, release 1.
There have been a number of changes but for the most part I'll let you discover them for yourselves. There are also a number of things still to change; my most immediate task is to redo the categorization scheme to be more useful like I promised. Before I even get to that, however, I need to convert the static pages of this site over to the Heimdall look as well. That should happen shortly.
As always, comments, criticisms, and bug reports are welcome. Post them here or send me email.
Posted by Dave on January 16, 2004 at 09:21 AM
Your site isnt validating.
You have 261 errors: Check
Most are simple to fix...
Posted by Rob on January 16, 2004 at 12:18 PM
Yeah I tried validating before I deployed, but the validator is anal. I'm wontfixing that until someone can explain to me why I should care ;).
Posted by Dave on January 19, 2004 at 08:59 PM
I CARE!!!! I mean...uh...your not XML complient. What about that whole "unified document" thingy of yours. Get with it. It's the style of the times. Everyone else is doing it...(Cue after-school-special peer-pressure music)
Email Rob:
So It Begins
life & times
January 13, 2004, 03:51 PM
I've finally started the MHCI capstone project course, in which I'll be responsible, along with a team of my fellow students, for completing a large human-centered design project over the course of eight months. This will constitute the largest design project I have yet attempted.
Yesterday, we went through the sensitive process of selecting project preferences and deciding which students get to be on which team. The way that happens 'round these parts is that everyone rank orders their project choices, then votes for a selection committee of representatives who is responsible for deciding everyone's fate for the next eight months. I was granted the honor of serving on this committee by my fellow students.
The process was interesting, to say the least. It was hard to make decisions that had such a large effect on people's lives in so little time. I think having more information would have helped; perhaps a process of rating projects on a scale of one to five would have been more effective than a rank ordering (so that someone who didn't have a strong preference could have been distinguished from someone who did). Also more information on the skill needs of the projects to match against the skills of the candidates would have been nice. There also wasn't a well-defined, repeatable process in place, so the committee had to develop one ad hoc. Perhaps recording what works and what doesn't from year to year would help such a process emerge.
But we did the best we could, and project assignments have been sent out. I'm working on "a corporate product design project for a major educational technology vendor" (damn NDA requirements). I think it's an exciting opportunity to work on a real design project with real constraints, so I'm looking forward to getting started. More information on the project will crop up from time to time, I'm sure.
Email Rob:
Posted by Mark on July 31, 2005 at 09:37 AM
Hi there. I too have been looking for a way to display context specific archive lists. I don't think there are any plugins to do so, but I ended up using the calendar functionality. It seems to work reasonably well, even if it isn't the first way you'd think of accomplishing the task. In my case, I was looking to generate a list of individual entries within the same contextual month as the individual archive entry you are viewing. This is how I did it:
[MTCalendar month="this" category="Articles"]
[MTEntries]
[a href="[$MTEntryPermalink$>"][$MTEntryTitle$][/a][br /]
[/MTEntries]
[/MTCalendar]
Worked like a charm:) (I had to use brackets to get the code to show up)