fine whine

I'm getting better with hand-tuned CSS. My site hadn't really seen a makeover since I got rid of the wood grain buttons back in 1998. The blogs are modern technology, of course, but several directories aren't. Choosing which ones to update is not a simple process — I have created many directories that nobody ever sees, like the elusive /mbd, the "official home" of a text adventure game I never completed. Anyway, I went after the site's changelog first and it came out pretty decent, and then I tinkered with /songs to match the more updated directories. Songs was somewhat of a special beast, as I hadn't thrown any new material in since 1998 and its main purpose for existence was to make money off of CDNOW linkage.

Then CDNOW went the way of all the tiny dotcom stores (i.e. merged with Amazon) and my links were likely useless. Also I stopped writing about the songs I liked. After all, though I may like a song I don't need to write an essay about every single one. So in its new incarnation, Songs that rock, it is primarily a list of the songs that I like more than the others, without justification or excuses. Someday I'll link them to Amazon, but I suspect nobody will ever buy anything through my links. After all, I haven't either.

Also, I added a couple of those 80x15 images that litter the blogosphere, down there in the bottom left.

I've written about coincidences before. More than likely I will do it again. Anyway, some strange happenings have been, er, happening in a much more virtual context. So they don't really matter as much, and they're more likely more coincidental.

Anyway, I run a links blog, ketchup. As far as I know, nobody visits it. Sure, I get hits but I'm rather convinced that most of them are robots, or crackers trawling for a vulnerable server. Why, I wonder, do the crackers not go after the robots? So I periodically post links. There are more than sixty links listed, all culled from random surfing and other sources. One such source is BoingBoing. It's a great site, run by a great bunch of people, linking to wonderful and interesting places to go and things to see. I bookmark a great many of them.

So I was a little surprised to find a link to Michael Menkin's site about aliens and children. On Ketchup I had linked to its sister site, wherein Menkin explains the methods and necessity of procuring a thought-screen helmet. And so soon! But it's a big web out there — some would call it worldwide — and such things can happen by chance.

I was surprised a day later to find a link to TokyoFlash, another site I'd linked on Ketchup. The writeup was only two down from Menkin's. Could it have been coincidence again? I know it's not malice or something sinister, since BoingBoing had two other sources for the same links. I doubt it's malfeasance in any form, but I have to say it's strange. Eerie even. But I'm not mad. In a way, it's kinda cool.

I'm torn... should I go to the Ohio State Fair today? I've heard some strange tales indeed, of fried Twinkies and dangerously unsafe rides, but neither is as tempting as they would've been in my youth. Am I getting old or just grown-up?

OK, you got me, this was a feeble excuse to put "fair and balanced" on the page, in slight defense of Al Franken, whose newest book was set to be taglined as such until the Fox News Channel brought forth legal action. While I can see the validity of their claim, I also recognize the sheer ridiculousness of going after a satirist and former SNL cast member. And all the cool people were doing it, I was told...

So I've rewritten the way I keep track of changes made to the site, such that I can easily use a new front page design. I'm slowly making progress redoing all of everything to make it valid XHTML with CSS2. Considering the last major redesign I did was about three years ago, the time is long since overdue for such a thing. Anyway, I was manually moving all of my changelog entries over back through February of 1999. Many of them I remembered typing in, but others puzzle me. Seeing as I'm the only one who looks at them, though, it shouldn't matter.

And thinking of things that don't matter, I'm finally a Blogshares millionaire. Some people are able to build up to a million b$ in a week: it took me a couple months. I think I know what I'm doing now, though, and should have doubled my money by July. Too bad it's all fake... I wish the real market worked this advantageously for me.

Seeing as I use a very simple kluge to separate the links and writeups for my (other) blog, I needed a simple kluge to get the titles of my links back out. Surely, I thought, nobody else puts a link in EntryMore with only "link" for text and the actual site name in the link title, thus nobody would've made such an otherwise pointless plugin. Whilst searching for information on how to develop my own, I stumbled across Kevin Shay's Collect, which while being much more useful and powerful, nevertheless can easily be coaxed into doing precisely what I want. Non bloggers need not read on.

Basically, my entries are structured like this: a couple paragraphs in the regular Entry describing a link given in the EntryMore, as in this example:<a title="Ketchup, my links blog" href="http://mikelietz.org/ketchup/">link</a">It's set up this way to be easily updatable and consistent, and so far it works pretty well. The problem I encountered is that all of my EntryMores read exactly the same text: link, and only can be told apart in a browser supporting title attributes. And MT doesn't natively support any sort of a->title parsing. So for me to make a master list of every link ever blogged, I'd need some help. Enter a plugin.

I stumbled across Collect, and with a little trial and error I came up with this snippet of code. It spits out the entry's title and a link named with the link's title. Not too bad for ten minutes' work. My index template using it is now functional if not totally styled, and you can see it here. My code is below for anyone interested, though I doubt anyone else is cheating quite in the same way I am.

<MTEntries lastn="999999">
<MTCollect tags="a">
<$MTEntryTitle$>
<MTCollectThis>
<$MTEntryMore$>
</MTCollectThis>
<MTIfCollected tags="a">
<MTCollected tags="a">
<a href="<$MTCollectedAttr attr="href"$>"><$MTCollectedAttr attr="title"$></a>
</MTCollected>
</MTIfCollected>
</MTCollect>
</MTEntries>


You see that little number down in the corner? I've updated MovableType to 2.64. What difference that makes to you is probably little, but it makes me happy to be current.