I just upgraded Movable Type, the software that runs this website, to version 3.2. It all went quite smoothly and everything seems to be running as expected. I also took the time to finish off a few bits of the design.
And now that’s done I’ll summarise here, for my own records if nothing else, how my site works:
The main software is Movable Type 3.2, available from Six Apart as a free, though unsupported, personal edition that supports one author and unlimited weblogs.
This runs on a MySQL database which is part of my hosting package with Vortech Hosting.
I have two weblogs running currently – the main paul.carvill.com one, and a secondary links.paulcarvill.com one. I wanted to keep the two separate although I’m sure you could achive the same thing using categories in Movable Type.
To display both weblogs on the same page I installed a Movable Type plugin called MultiBlog by David Raynes. It’s not immediately obvious where it is once you’ve installed it – it’s in your System Shortcuts sidepanel in Plugins. It’s really simple to use, basically it provides some Movable Type tags to use in your template, here’s David’s example:
First, make sure that the current blog is allowed to access content in the include blog by checking the access control rulesets. Once that has been established, the following template code can be included in the Main Index template, though it could be any index template that is rebuild when indexes are rebuilt.
<h3>Side Blog</h3>
<MTMultiBlog include_blogs="7">
<MTEntries lastn="10">
<div class="entry">
<h4><$MTEntryTitle$></h4>
<p><MTEntryBody></p>
</div>
</MTEntries>
</MTMultiBlog>
If you do not know the blog id for your side blog, simply navigate to it in the MovableType interface and look at the URL in the browser. It should look something like this:
http://your-mt-site/mt.cgi?__mode=menu&blog_id=7
In this case, the blog id is 7.
A couple of other things. The picture at the top of the main page is randomly displayed from a series of four. There’s a bit of Javascript which picks a random number between one and four, then writes out the bit of HTML that displays the image and inserts the random number in the filename, all before the HTML gets sent to your browser. The filename it generates corresponds to an actual filename of an image in the webserver and that image gets shown.
My domain names are all ordered using Go Daddy. The website is easy to use, it’s easy to search for and order domain names and they have a great control panel for managing all your domains at once. I recommend them.
i think this is a good post. well done, good luck with 3.2.
john
I also like this post. Keep up the good work, more posts like this one plase. I cannot stop typing. Wow, I feel like I could type forever. Actually I think I might stop now.
Pete