Yeah, well, I’ve been hankering after a 3 column layout for a while now, and this one works in both IE6 and Firefox. My old 2 column layout does not play well in Firefox: probably something icky to do with either divs, or it doesn’t understand the width expressed as a percentage. It only took all day. However, part of yesterday and much of today were spent chasing after a 3 column solution that simply would not work; I found a much more workable one that was easier to adapt at the Moveable Type support forum. For the record, the…

I’ve uninstalled MT-Bayesian, a plug-in for Moveable Type that was supposed to be a sort of spam filter for comments. It wasn’t working right and the creator does not recommend its use anymore now. I still have MT-Blacklist, which I’ll keep running until it’s worth upgrading to MT3.0 for the more robust comment and trackback management. However, now comments are flakey – specifically the comment-preview script doesn’t seem to be working. At first I thought I’d lost a comment I added, then when I refreshed, it was there after all. I’ll try to get that fixed this weekend.

Yesterday, it was the Little Free, Web-Based News Aggregator that could. Today, totally new look with clickable tabs, blogs, feeds, and all kinds of clicky goodness. Some of the new features are interesting (tabs and sharing feeds) and some are not (kind of a harsh blue on the eye when looking at the aggregator, it needs to be paler and less painful). Some of their choices for font size and so on are a bit questionable, too.

Damn it, I can’t figure out why the links section busts so spectacularly in Mozilla. I’ve been Googling around on it… there was one place that indicated that a similar problem was caused by the scripting for Sitemeter. I’ve got another stats package, so I took that out. I’ve got the silly poll (which nobody seems interested in anywa) that also uses Javascript, but David thinks it’s something else. Other links I ran across earlier seemed to think it was the old problem of touching floats or divs or what-not (I can’t describe it, but I think I get the…

Well, I think I’m approaching the apogee of the third stage of blogging, at least in Moveable Type. Oh, no, not because I’ve learned everything there is to know about MT, but because I’ve learned just enough to know there’s a hell of a lot I don’t know about what I’m doing with the blog; when I run it through the validator there are a hell of a lot of errors that I don’t really understand (well, some). I might be able to do a lot of cleanup, or more likely a lot of damage to my main index template…

Man, it’s always something. Moveable Type’s acting all wonky and pear-shaped.

Blue Belt Your skills are adequate from managing day-to-day life as a MT-Do, but you still have much to learn. Take the MT-Do test I might have ranked higher if I had installed MT all by myself, or if I had actually made modifications to the program (what, I can’t even figure out how the macro thingy works unless I can see how someone else did it and adapt). But glee! I’m not a white belt. There’s consolation.

Oh my GOD! Amazon links are finally working right. Thank you, Silverberry! I never could get Brad Choate’s version (slightly different, similar effect) working; I ran across a reference that it had to do with smart quotes replacing dumb quotes (guess what I have?) The “complex” macro uses overLIB, process tags, and I suspect there’s something I should do with encode_js in order to deal with apostrophes in the titles of books. <MTMacroDefine name="amazon" ctag="amazon"> <MTIfNotEmpty expr="[MTMacroAttr name='asin']"> <MTAmazon devtoken="XXXXXXXXXXXXXX" associateid="xxxxxxxxxxx" search="[MTMacroAttr name='asin']" method="Asin"> <a href="<MTAmazonLink>" onmouseover="return overlib('<img src=\'<MTAmazonSmallImage>\' align=\'left\' border=\'0\' hspace=\'5\'/><b>Amazon Price:</b><MTAmazonSalePrice><b><br />Released:</b> <MTAmazonReleaseDate format="%B %Y"><br /><a href=\'<MTAmazonLink>\'>Buy me…</a>',…