As part of my Movable Type 4.1 upgrade project, I noticed that depending on my template settings, republishing the whole site would get extremely slow. Movable Type sometimes catches flak for this because it’s designed to serve static pages, so the "build" time tends to be a bit slower. (A good tradeoff in my opinion.) There is much room for improvement on the rebuild times. It looks like the next release of Movable Type will focus on performance and scalability, so here’s my first contribution to that effort. After some trial and error, I discovered that the Archives sidebar widget…
The code and design for this site have pretty stagnant for the last two years. Everything was functional, but the design was old and needed some serious improvement. With the recent release of MovableType 4.1, I decided to put some time into this and get it upgraded. Many hours later, it’s done! I spent lots of time on this — probably too much — but wanted to come up with a clean upgrade process. To back up a step and look at what I was trying to achieve, these were my goals for the upgrade: Create a more useful template…
The CSS-Tricks site has a cool article this week about using weather data to change your website’s appearance. Of note for Yahoo developers is that they’re using the Yahoo! Weather web service to fetch current conditions. The article has an accompanying sample page which focuses on the CSS and PHP code necessary to swap out the page appearance. The remaining work would be to intelligently identify where the visitor is coming from and fetch their weather automatically. Kind of a neat application for a service that probably doesn’t get a lot of attention.
Joel Spolsky has a great article today regarding the Microsoft release of the Office binary file format specifications. Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? If you started reading these documents with the hope of spending a weekend writing some spiffy code that imports Word documents into your blog system, or creates Excel-formatted spreadsheets with your personal finance data, the complexity and length of the spec probably cured you of that desire pretty darn quickly. It’s a good summary and Joel raises some good points about how the file format likely got so complicated over time. He’s also…
SixApart just released a really interesting tool to help owners of Movable Type websites customize their style. To learn more, read the announcement on the blog – “Introducing the Movable Type Design Assistant” – or head directly to the design assistant and start playing with it. The assistant is a step-by-step wizard that starts with one of a few popular default templates, lets you choose from six standard column layouts, and tweak your CSS. At the end it shows clear directions for implementing your new design on your site. I liked the column layout in particular; it really makes it…