The Blog of Harald

Well, everyone else is doing it….

“MovableType 2.6”:http://www.movabletype.org/ has been released. The upgrade was quite painless; the only major thing I’ve done so far is to update my comments form a little bit, and install “Brad Choate’s(Brad Choate)”:http://www.bradchoate.com/ new “MT-Textile(MT-Textile)”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mttextile.php plugin. (This entry is formatted using it :-).

Major features of interest to me:

* the new formatting plugins, and the fix to the “Convert Line Breaks” HTML formatter that allows blockquotes. These two were my biggest issues with MT. The Textile formatter will make it easier to format entries in “Adanflaen Nights(Adanflaen Nights)”:http://www.cfrq.net/~rolemaster/ , and the HTML exclusions fix means I’ll almost never have to unset “Convert Line Breaks” in my weblog.
* The Sanitize plugin (only because I’m slightly paranoid).
* bug fixes (which are always good).

The other new stuff I can take or leave; they’re not relevant to any of my blogs. Still, nice to have a new release, and even better to have well-supported software like this!

I haven’t tripped over many interesting things in BlogSpace lately (everybody’s arguing about the Power Law stuff instead). My thoughts are mundane, like deciding what I’m going to have for lunch, or when I am going to have time to go sample those Reid’s Dairy one-point cheescakes :-).

Seems like a couple of months ago I had too many things to blog about, and now I’ve got too few. Ah well; it’s winter, and time for sitting by the fire[place] with a good book. Come spring the world will quicken again, and by August I’ll be rambling about anything just for an excuse to stay in the air conditioning.

Speaking of which, I just gotta love a climate with a 50°C seasonal temperature swing. Last summer the A/C couldn’t keep up with the 39°C afternoons, and yesterday my son’s ski trip was cancelled because it was -11°C (with a 45-65 km/h wind.!). The new high-efficiency furnace ran for 13 hours yesterday; good thing we replaced the old one in December!

Anyway, I’m off to play with Wiki technolgy some more; I might convert Adanflaen Nights over, and/or use 0xDECAFBAD‘s Wiki + MovableType combination. A Wiki makes more sense for static reference content like the game information pages, while a weblog makes more sense for the campaign notes stuff. Hmm…

TrackBacks are comments. They are comments left on someone else’s site rather than your own, but they are comments nonetheless. Movable Type makes a distinction between entry comments and TrackBacks that seems artificial, and it made more sense to me to have TrackBack ping data appear within the comments portion of a Movable Type site.

I agree, and so I’ve installed the Simple Comments plugin in MovableType, and updated my templates.

While I was at it, I also swiped the format for the comment form from OxDECAFBAD, because it’s smaller and neater (even though I normally dislike using tables for layout).

In Blatherings
Debbie mentioned that she was experimenting with Trackback. So here’s a ping!

I don’t know why pinging my blog didn’t work for you; I just tried it and it worked fine, and I don’t see anything in my apache logs from you accessing mt-tb.cgi. Strange?

Update: of course I can’t see the ping I just sent, because you don’t have a ‘Ping Template’ defined for blatherings :-)

Debbie says my trackback doesn’t work, but I didn’t see any entries in the apache log, so I’m testing.

The Blog of Harald: Trackback timeouts cause problems with my blog