Meta: July 2003 Archives

Today I finished entering my photo's (51 in total) to my photo log. You won't find any new photo's there; all these photo's have been available on my site for a long time already.
The benefits of this whole operation are that my photo's can now have more than one category, the navigation is more intuitive and that you now have the ability to leave comments on photo's (I implemented the photo log in MT). Besides that, it will be easier to maintain the whole thing, since I control my whole site with a single tool.

Now that this is ready, I have only two things left to do: remove the old Image Gallery and forward request for its pages to the new location, and restyle the photo log according to the style of the rest of the site. The first thing I will do today, the second one may take several months.

[Update 31.07.2003]: I just removed Image Gallery and changed my .htaccess file to redirect all requests to my photo log.

Over the years, the emphasis of my site has changed a lot. I started a personal site mainly to experiment with this new phenomenon. First I created a list with hyperlinks, mainly to sites about the Internet and sites about music. After that I added some info about myself and started writing a sort of diary. Later I was able to export data from my CD database, so everybody could see which CD's I own. Besides experimenting with databases, I did this because I think that someone's music preferences tells a lot about the person, and makes it easier to identify the writer.

Just before moving to Lleida, I created a completely new site with stories and photo's from my life over here. Now, 20 months later, I am looking at my site, and feel that something is missing. This site does not swing, it does not rock and it does not dance. This site misses music!!!! The only fragment of music on this site is the link to ApeSjit on my blogroll.

Listening to music is one of my greatest hobbies; the moment I come home I turn on the radio or put a CD. Since this site is about me, it needs music. Therefore I created a new category, so I will be stimulated to write about music. In the future I will try to add my CD database again, but I want it to be completely automated, since the old solution needed a lot of manual copy and paste work. And maybe I will add the 'Currently listening to' feature so many other sites show.

This site is going to rock!!! :-D

I'll be honest: this site is not receiving a lot of visitors. Sometimes I have the feeling that I am the only one reading my texts. And I know exactly why. The main reason is that this site is not so interesting. And that is because I am not a great writer.

That sounds really pessimistic, but in my opinion it is realistic. My style of writing has been created at school; due to my education I mainly write down the 'cold facts', and try to use as less words as possible, while the sites I like to read are funny, well-written, poetic, ...

The other problem this site suffers from is the subjects. I mainly write about two subjects: my life in Lleida, which is only interesting to the people who know me, and some technological news, which van also be found on a thousand other sites.

But I am like this, and this is my site. Even though not a lot of people are reading my writings, I really appreciate the people who do take the time to read it. Because they are interested in my life now that I am living far away. Or because they are interested in some technological information I have been writing about (I hope that you could use the information I gave you). Or because they accidentally came here looking for something that is nor here (most people arriving on my site through a search engine are looking for Spanish curse words or serial numbers). No matter why they are visiting this site, I appreciate it.

But still, deep in my heart I keep hoping that one day this site will have a group of enthusiastic regular readers posting comments on the things I write. To make this dream come true, I only have to do one thing: write better, more interesting texts. I've got work to do!

Movable Type is a great tool for creating personal sites (and some other types of sites as well), mainly due to its flexible template system and its many features like trackback, image upload & write functionality, sanitizing,....

Regular readers -- are there any? -- of this site know that I did not need a lot of time to set up this site. However, I still keep on tweaking parts of the site to make it even better. It started with converting the templates from XHTML 1.0 to XHTML 1.1. After that I moved a little bit around with the different items shown on the pages, and adjusted the style sheet. And soon I ran into the limits of Movable Type. Some things are simple not possible, are they? Fortunately, I am never the only one facing the limitations, and usually one of the guru's out there solved the problem for me, always with a plugin. Plugins are the feature making MT such a great tool. If MT cannot do it, there is always a plugin that can do it for you!!!

The following list describes the plugins I am using at the moment, and why I am using them:

After yesterdays post I started playing more with Movable Type. I decided to move some static content from my site to a separate section, as described by Brad Choate. At that moment, the only static content I had were the HTML error pages, displayed in case somebody asks a non-existing page. These pages were implemented as index templates, but with the new method I can treat them as normal texts without having to edit HTML code. I also decided to move the Stylesheet templates to the new section, since they are hardly ever updated.

After entering the texts for the error documents, I ran into a problem. I wanted to use almost the same templates as I am using for the rest of the site, but these templates make use of template modules (text snippets), which are linked to a specific section. So I started looking for a solution to display information from one section into another. And I found exactly what I was looking for: MTOtherBlog.

After this success I created some more static content (a Spambot trap), and fixed my search page with the MTOtherBlog plugin.

I am very happy with my MT static content solution. However, after this experience I realise that MT is not suited for the Fimcap site, since it has too much static content in a more complex directory structure. This would mean that we have to create a seperate category for every subcategory, which would make it difficult to manage.