March 10, 2003

Fun with my site

Okay folks, some of you may have noticed that my site was unavailable for a few minutes a little while ago. That was because I was fooling around with the templates again. First, you will notice that I have moved the Category link up to right under the title of each post. That way you'll be able to decide whether or not you want to keep reading (that is, if you can decipher my somewhat cryptic category names; one day I will find a way to make the descriptions of each category available). Second, I have added a php script to change the dates on the posts showing on the main page to "Shire reckoning." This is just another step in the Tolkienization of my blog. (Don't worry, hobbit-haters -- you can still see the normal date of each post if you click on the link, which has now been separated from the date and is helpfully labelled "link.") I got the script, which you can get here, via Solonor. He is the one who came up with the idea. "Never trust an elf!" Heh heh.

Update: in case I wasn't entirely clear, and I see that I wasn't, Sue Bailey was the one who actually wrote and supplied the script. Solonor had been trying to do something like it, which is what I meant by "he came up with the idea." No neglect, script-stealing, or misapplication of credit was meant.

Final update: never mind. I have taken the script down as of 10:30pm, March 11th, 2003. That makes my use of the script about one full day, give or take a few hours. It worked fine; that wasn't the problem.

Posted by Andrea Harris at March 10, 2003 07:29 PM
Comments

Test.

Posted by: Andrea Harris at March 10, 2003 at 08:20 PM

"Never trust an elf or dwarf as far as you can throw 'em."
Harvard Lampoon, "Bored of the Rings"

Posted by: Michael Lonie at March 10, 2003 at 08:26 PM

Now that is cool!

You're my Tolkien Geek Hero/ine, Andrea :)

Posted by: Ith at March 10, 2003 at 08:38 PM

No fair!

I can't get it to work!

Do you know if .php extensions only works in the newest version of movable type? Just wondering if I should continue fiddling or if I am wasting my time...

It's such a cool idea!

Posted by: Ninjababe at March 10, 2003 at 10:08 PM

You have to change all your html file extensions to end in "php" instead. ("Php" means "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor." Yes, the acronym is the first part of the acronym. Read all about it here.) Anyway, it's easy to do in Movable Type: just go to the MT Management screen and go into your templates and change all the endings of the html files as above. Then rebuild your site. Then go into your ftp site with whatever you use to upload files (that you don't do through the Movable Type interface, that is -- I use WS-FTP LE) and delete all the files in your blog folder that end in "html." To be on the safe side I'd save the html files to a folder on your computer first. I didn't do that but I like to live dangerously. I also have a test blog in another folder I set up first. ;)

You might want to first make sure your web host provides php -- it's an installed language, like Perl is (that't what MT uses), and it has to be installed on the server for php pages to work. Anyway, good luck, and you can always ask a question on the MT forums -- set it up so the forum replies get emailed to you. They are usually pretty prompt.

Posted by: Andrea Harris at March 10, 2003 at 10:46 PM

Last time I looked, Pdawwg was down.

It's like "Old Yeller" all over again.

Posted by: Steve H. at March 10, 2003 at 11:28 PM

YES!

I got it to work!

Thank you, Andrea.

Now, I can spend part of my lunch hour doing the same to Ith's blog... Let's see how long it takes her to notice the difference [weg]

Posted by: Ninjababe at March 11, 2003 at 04:37 PM

You're welcome.

Posted by: sue at March 11, 2003 at 06:58 PM