31.07.08
Movable Type Express
Since I want to give this blog a new direction and host it under a different URL, I'm currently looking at the release candidate for Movable Type 4.2. I always found it a bit of a nuisance that the standard templates are not more modular (that there are predefiend modules for headers, footers, sidebar etc.). That's why I like the widget management (probably alrady a MT4 feature) and the new possibility of using Server-Side Includes for these widgets.
After importing the articles of this blog, publishing the complete site took 3:34 minutes (and that is already much faster than the MT3 version I'm using). After setting two, three widgets to use SSI, it took 1:28 minutes. That's impressive, and I believe there is even more room for improvement. Nice!
Verfasst von crenz um 17:30 | Kommentare (0) | TrackBack
20.06.06
We interrupt our normal programming for an announcement…
Currently, the comments function does not work correctly. Comments are added to the system, but the pages are not rebuilt. If you want to leave a comment, just go ahead and do it (and ignore the error message). It will appear after I rebuild the page. I hope to fix the error soon.
Verfasst von crenz um 08:58 | Kommentare (0) | TrackBack
13.01.06
Happy Birthday, pair Networks!
My webhost, pair Networks, has turned 10 on the 11th of January. For an internet company, this is a considerable time in business. I've been their customer since May 1997. Since then, a lot has changed – I have witnessed transitions in FreeBSD versions, the famous sendmail/procmail to qmail transition, the creation of their own account control panel and others. Also, my original harddisk and bandwith allotments have increased probably around tenfold.
In their newsgroups, I had quite a number of nice contacts. Even though for some years, I don't frequent those groups anymore, I still remember those times fondly. Once upon a time, I even created a pair resources page.
Once, hosting used to be hideously expensive in Germany. In the meantime, there are many offers on the hosting market, and I could manage to get a cheaper price with one of the hosters here. However, I know that pair is reliable, honest and has strong values and company ethics. All these convince me to stay with them.
To celebrate the occasion, I created a pair blog button (
) using eKstreme.com's button maker. I might upload it to Steal These Buttons.
Happy birthday and thanks for (almost) nine years of wonderful service!
Verfasst von crenz um 00:51 | TrackBack
20.12.05
Baobeiblog
Ming Ee now has a blog as well.
Verfasst von crenz um 08:10 | Kommentare (0) | TrackBack
27.11.05
Moving server
Apologies to those who had trouble accessing my blog yesterday and today. I upgraded to Movable Type 3.2 and broke the multi-language posting on the index pages due to a mistake of mine, and today I moved the blog to my account at pair Networks so I can give up the dedicated server in Germany I no longer need.
I've been with pair Networks for eight years now, so everything should be smooth…
Verfasst von crenz um 00:06 | Kommentare (0) | TrackBack
21.10.05
First post with Flock
I just installed the Flock Developer Preview. I'm curious to see whether I can really post directly into my blog… I quite like the integration of del.icio.us.
PS. Seems to work, but I'll have to find out how to enter my language selection tags using Flock.
Verfasst von crenz um 08:36 | Kommentare (0) | TrackBack
14.09.05
Google blog search
Google has a new blog search page. I'm curious to see whether this blog here will appear some time soon as well.
PS. I overlooked that Google currently only incldues blogs that send pings to services like blo.gs or weblogs.com. Guess I'll have to activate that...
Verfasst von crenz um 07:55 | Kommentare (0) | TrackBack
17.05.05
Blogging in multiple languages using Movable Type
When I first had a homepage nine years ago, I wrote all content and HTML by hand. Publishing in two languages at that time meant lots of copying and pasting. Later, I started to use SSI and then wrote myself a parser for multilingual content and Perl code, which is still active on my current homepage.
Given my fascination for the richness of human language, it was clear to me that when starting a blog, I don't want to settle for just using the current lingua franca, English. So I decided to find a solution that will allow me to publish both in German and English. That proved to be harder than I thought.
Upon receiving no replies in the Movable Type community forum, I wrote my own MT plugin that helps me write multilingual content. I can write an entry like this
<!de>Zuerst die deutsche Fassung, <!en>then some english<!> and this applies to all languages.
thus dividing up the content in several languages. These language markers are not really tags in an SGML/XHTML sense, as they cannot be nested (which is intentional). They can be used even in post titles or category names, so that most content can be multilingual.
To create the actual pages, I duplicated each template for each language so that I now have two index pages, two archive pages etc. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to create multiple files from one template yet. Another approach that I am still thinking about is to create only a single set of pages and use a post-processor to split up the content.
So far, the system works remarkably well, even without hacking MT (something I wanted to avoid). However, I still have problems with trackbacks -- currently, a trackback shows all the text, which can be a bit confusing.
Verfasst von crenz um 11:53 | Kommentare (1) | TrackBack
28.04.05
Weblog
Finally I managed to open a “public notepad”. Let's see how it goes!