Two books on Movable Type that caught my eye…
Movable Type 3.0 Bible Desktop Edition by Rogers Cadenhead — This arrived earlier today. Since I just started reading it, I can’t offer an opinion on it yet. I will say that it gets my thumbs up for the following:
- unlike so many other computer/tech books I’ve accumulated over the years, it weighs a lot less than a small car and doesn’t take up half my desk
- it doesn’t include a CD/DVD of useless ‘tools’ and ‘templates’
Hacking Movable Type (ExtremeTech) by Jay Allen — I pre-ordered this one today. Should be available by May 30, 2005.
I have re-released my blog. In its previous incarnation, I hadn’t dealt properly with multiple domains hosted on my Brandego server and as a result, comment posts, etc., left the user with URL’s pointing to Brandego. Since dixson.org is under the Brandego umbrella of sites, the URL issue was ugly and, worse, it caused problems. So, using a combination of URL rewriting, cgiwrap, a symlink, and an afternoon of hacking (the good kind), I was back in the blogshpere. Well, I thought I was. I ran into problems with the Berkeley DB used by default in Movable Type (MT). Instead of troubleshooting the db issue, I took the advice in the MT config file, “Consider using the MySQL configuration…”, and a few minutes later I had a MySQL db in place, issued the mt-load, and was off and running.
Delving into an MT configuration when you are in a shared hosting environment is a challenge, especially when the hosting provider recommends a different blogging package and no ISP provided install HOWTOs exist. But now that I have done it (and written it all down), it’s possible for the several other domains on this server to also purchase and install MT under the same shared hosting account. Two great resources with valuable information for installing MT that I recommend: davidbau.com and elise.com
Now it’s on to authoring some new templates and CSS to change the default blog look…