Thursday, 24 June 2004
Geek Ahoy!
Anyone who's read entries from around the time I started my blog (oh, those long-gone golden days of - er, this past February) knows my love-hate relationship with the medium.
On the other hand, the tools - oh, the beautiful, shiny tools - are really pretty damn cool. After conducting a very scientific (and obviously thorough) survey of three of my friends' blogs, I decided to follow their unanimous endorsement and use Movable Type. Note that there's no hyperlink there: by their license agreement, I have to put a link to them somewhere on my home page. I figure that's one too many required linkages - so find it yourself, you grabby little punk.
There's been a recent uproar among the blogging community - faintly audible as a cough among the cacophony of all the world's true miseries - about Six Apart's change in their licensing requirements. I'm not going to get into that here (free software vs. Open Source is probably better saved for when - and if - I write about Linux), but Mark Pilgrim has a pretty good article about it and its effects. For the present, suffice to say that Mark has a great point: Movable Type is "free enough."
No, what this entry is about (or is supposed to be about) is the fun side of things - the geek side, really. Movable Type is pretty feature-complete in itself, but can be made even richer via plug-ins (the term for those little modules of third-party code that extend an existing piece of software, like the ubiquitous Flash plug-in for your browser).
Lives change, Web sites grow, blogs evolve. Something I originally thought would be perfect becomes an annoying limitation, so I change it. The latest little fix-er-up is my topic handling.
You'll notice that, to the right of my entries ("to the right," that is, unless I decide to change my site's layout), I have a little icon. Click on it - go ahead, just be sure to come back here using your browser's "back" button. I'll wait... Done? See, it gives you a list of other entries in the same topic.
Duh, you say. Well, "duh" is right, but Movable Type out of the box only allows me to show all the topics associated with my entry. That's fine if I always want to show all of them (when I have the space), or if I only every have one. But what if I only want to show the main one on some pages (like my home page), and all of the topics on other pages (like the page that shows the full entry)? No go.
So I whipped up a lil' ol' plug-in. Now, I can show only the main topic when I want to, and a list of all the topics when I need to. Like I said earlier, pretty damn cool.
So, I hereby announce two new topics: Joining the self-evident topics of France, Life, Movies, Music and the coyly mysterious Meta (blog entries about my blog), I give you Reviews and the all-powerful, all-important Geek. Ta-dahhh.
Befitting an occasion so splendiferous, I inaugurate the Geek topic with this very entry. Though others will appear before it in the archives (due to tagging the otehrs with a secondary association), this is the first entry whose main topic is actually "Geek."
...
Criminy, that was boring.
I hate blogs.