September 2007 Archives

When I take my breakfast in the mornings, I usually sit ion front of a window looking out to the entrance of a school. Some days ago I looked at some teenagers and noticed that all of them were listening to a MP3 player, but none of them had an iPod.

As the iPod is certainly the hippest and easiest to use MP3 player on the market, I assumed that at least some teenagers would have one, while others would settle for a cheaper model. The iPods is indeed more expensive than other players, but usually pricing is not that big problem for teenagers if the device is cool enough.

I decided to ask a teacher who also owns an iPod about his view on the subject, and he gave me a very simple explanation.

When I started using the default templates coming with Movable Type 4, I missed the Recent Comments widget. Below I explain how you can add create this widget and ass it to your sidebar in true MT4 style.

In the Movable Type administrative interface, go to Design > Templates > Template Modules and open either the 'Sidebar - 2 Column Layout' or the 'Sidebar - 3 Column Layout' template module, depending on which one you are using. Scroll down until you find a line with <MTIf name="module_recent_comments"> and paste the following code just above that line (you can of course also choose another position for the recent comments widget):

<MTIf name="module_recent_comments">
<div class="widget-archives widget">
<h3 class="widget-header">Recent Comments</h3>
<div class="widget-content">
<ul class="widget-list">
<MTComments lastn="5" sort_order="descend">
<MTCommentEntry>
<li class="widget-list-item"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#comment-<$MTCommentID$>"><$MTCommentAuthor$></a> on <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></li>
</MTCommentEntry>
</MTComments>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</MTIf>

Now in any template where you want to show the recent comments (e.g. the main index template or the individual archive template) you add the following line:

<MTSetVar name="module_recent_comments" value="1">

Rebuild your weblog, and it should show you the five latest comments in the sidebar, just as you can see on this blog.

You can't do knowledge management until you accept that you can't manage knowledge.

- Luke Naismith

Widgets are the fastest and easiest way to configure your sidebar. Just open up the widget administrator and drag and drop widgets on the sidebar. A great feature for novice bloggers, who don't have the technical knowledge to tweak sidebar templates.

Unfortunately, the default Movable Type templates don't use widgets, which means that to enable widgets on your site you will have to tweak the sidebar template... ouch!

I know, the default sidebar template offers a far more advanced features then the widget engine can offer, with viarables and MTIf constructions. The default sidebar template is a lot cooler without widgets, but also very hard to tweak.

In my opinion, the default sidebar template should include a check on the number of widgets configured. If no widgets have been configured, it should show the fancy sidebar, but as soon as I configure widgets, it should hide the normal sidebar and show the widgets. This is also what many templates in WordPress do and gives you the both of two sides: a fancy sidebar for starters which is easily adaptable by weblog owners.

Spain is a country of bureaucracy and civil servants. Many people I speak to have only one dream: becoming a civil servant. Unlike most other modern countries, in Spain civil servants earn way more that people working in companies. Add to that some very good secondary labour conditions and a contract for life without performance objectives, and you can understand why most people working for companies envy those others.

Just an example: most teachers earn about 25% more than I do (and my wage is higher than the average company worker). For that money, they work 18-22 hours a week at the school, plus some hours at home for preparation and revision of exams, while I work 8,5 hours a day, five days a week. Furthermore, while I have four weeks of holidays, they get two whole months in summer, two weeks at christmas and another week at eastern!

Other civil servants might not have such a long holidays as the teachers, but they do enjoy other benefits. Knowing all this, I am still surprised whenever I see the huge economical growth Spain is making with such a big and inefficient civil overhead.

As of today, Brain Tags is not a stand alone blog anymore, but uses my central Movable Type installation at Ai-No. Hopefully you haven't noticed anything of the changes, as I have been able to limit the downtime to only two minutes (the time necessary to delete an account from the web server and configure an add-on domain.

As Ai-No has its own blog which I will use for meta-blogging, there will obviously be less meta-blogging going on over here. So this blog will concentrate more on technology, web development and my life in Spain.

Thanks for your patience, and stay tuned for more....

The past days two posts have been published on other blogs, based on my experience and knowledge available on El Canasto.

Last Saturday, I wrote an entry on What's The Next Action called On-line GTD with Nozbe and Google Calendar, in which I explain how two on-line services can be used together as a complete productivity tool.

And yesterday my second guest post (which I wrote some weeks ago) was published on GTD Experiences. The post is called Getting GTD Done, and gives nine tips that in my experience help when implementing the GTD method. This last post is also available in Spanish on El Canasto.

Now it is time again to write on my own blogs...

Behind the screens, various big changes are happening on my blogging environment. As you see in the sidebar, I currently maintain have four weblogs. The oldest of the four is Brain Tags, running since ages on Movable Type. Then I have a weblog called The Wizard of POS, until today running on the same MT installation as Brain Tags and available at pos.braintags.com. There is also an old blog about my web hosting adventures, which I haven't updated in ages, called Brytenet weblog and just as the rest of the Brytenet site managed with eZ Publish. And finally I have my successful Spanish productivity blog El Canasto maganed with WordPress.

Quite a mess, isn't it? Add to that the fact that I have been experimenting a lot with non-public weblogs, and you'll get an idea of what things look like.

So I decided to clean things up, and do it well. You'll notice from the links in the side bar that I have presented my blogs as The Brain Network, a name I never have been satisfied with. Anyway, I acquired a new short and flashy domain name (of course hosted by Brytenet) and made a fresh MT4 installation. This will be the home of Brain Tags, The Wizard of POS, El Canasto and a new network blog (I still have to decide whether I want to continue with the Brytenet Weblog). Until now I have re-created The Wizard of POS, imported all existing entries, comments and trackbacks, and tweaked the default template. And by the way, I gave it its own domain name, pos-wizard.com.

There is still a lot of work to be done (and I have little time), but I already feel good about the new home for my weblogs and am looking forward to being able to manage all my blogs from a single screen.