Yup, the journalling software I'm using is from Movable Type. In one sense, it's simple, but I've got complications including multiple websites (i.e. my wife wants to do a graphic design blog on her site), multiple blogs on the same domain, as well as incorporating a blog into an existing site (this one).
Here are notes between me and our webmaster/programmer regarding thoughts and work on getting it set up...
Each number represents a different email exchange between me and our webmaster, Tom, over the course of a few days. This may give you insight into some of the esoteric issues that arise during a complex incorporation of blog software into existing websites. As for actually doing a text or image and text entry into the blog, it's been easy as pie (although my cooking class is indicating that a good pie ain't that easy).
1.
Is there an issue with setting them up for multiple websites? I'm going to initially set them up on travelpete.com and katfishdesign.net
Anyway, I'll be on it this afternoon after I get back from gaufretting potatoes at my cooking class.
2.
Tom: I might set one up for myself, possibly for tomandjp.com since we've been lame about keeping it up to date. I'm curious if it has any photo gallery type features. (I also want to see about setting it up for multiple sites.)
Me: Yeah, I just tried to add one to travelpete.com and it doesn't seem to show up at http://travelpete.com/blog/
I'm guessing it's a permissions issue... I'll let you know more this afternoon, gots to cruise!
3.
Question answered. Same username/pw whether I go to bilfish/mt or travelpete.com/mt
Either one seems to show up in the right place, but, I believe that from, say, bilfish.com/mt I can't actually set up a blog for travelpete.com/blog.
The problem COULD be that it's really only set up for one blog per domain, and could be having trouble because it probably wants to overwrite the blog I already installed on travelpete.com (Max's Meat Market). I think there's a way to do more, of course, but perhaps there's a permissions problem or something.
Now, I just did my first post for travelpete.com/blog/, from bilfish.com/mt.cgi -- so that worked fine.
Here's a few quick notes:
A. Username Melodious is the one who posted it... That's not what I wanted.
B. In the configuration files, there are two things I would change that are pre-filled in for you. For Site URL, it just put travelpete.com, I'd change to travelpete.com/blog/. For Archive URL to match where it wants to put your Local Archive Path, you need to change travelpete.com/archives/ to travelpete.com/blog/archives/
A final note -- after your first post, you'll realize just how bad the site looks without a full template makeover!!!!
4.
You can set up unlimited "authors" as well as changing the primary (Melodious) to another username. This solves that particular problem. Also, you can associate an author with one or more of the blogs that have been built.
In regards to photoblogs, check out http://chicagouncommon.com for a photo blog using movable type. This actually looks like a sophisticated site...
There's a feature to do thumbnails of uploaded images, if you have the Image::Magick Perl module installed. See http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_uploading.html#uploading%20files for more on uploading files / images). Basically, log into the control panel for a blog, then along the left-hand nav bar the 3rd option is upload file, then it'll ask if you want a new blog entry from that, or just the html to point to it...
As for how it looks, they've got 7 default styles you can check out (see them at http://movabletype.org/default_styles.shtml ). To use one of the Default Templates, here are the instructions. It's easy to do and works great, completely rebuilds all the pages and entries you've already done, so you can "fix" stuff later.
5.
I deleted the original one it made, and then I wanted to make one for Max, as a photo blog.
So, I set everything to bilfish.com/html/maxwell/blog/ and /blog/archive etc....
Then, when I rebuild, it doesn't work and gives me the error that files can't be found. I can't tell, without telnetting in, what's going on. Can I telnet it from the Mac?
6.
Yeah... it does a thumbnail, and then you can have it link to the full picture if you want... I'm probably going to stop doing that and just export smaller pix from iPhoto.
Now that I can ssh I'll play around a bit and check out files and directories.
I'm definitely not up on style sheets and layers and stuff. If you check out http://travelpete.com/blog/ you'll see what I mean, as I attempt to merge server-side includes with layers and a style sheet and the whole thing doesn't quite come out right...
7.
Okay, so far, so slow.
I'm getting up to speed, very slowly, in regard to the dramatic effects on web pages caused by externally linked style sheets. I knew what .css was in a general way, but had never used them. Should've, but haven't.
So, now I'm getting an education.
First, I realized that, for some reason, when I copy/pasted template information from the movable type website into what would become my index.shtml template file (oh, and before that I had to realize that the movable type editing interface was writing to index.html -- so my ssi's weren't working, of course) it was translating open and closed arrows < > into %3c and %3e respectively - so the index page wasn't calling the style sheet for information!
Phew!
Well, I'm getting there, as you can see from http://travelpete.com/blog/
I still don't quite know how to get back my background image and several other attributes, but things are definitely coming along. The template style sheet they include is, actually, rather complex with about 12 different sections of every document described in some detail!
8.
Phew, okay, GoLive has a decent .css editor, so I was able to add the background image back in. Basically, I still think about this like good 'ol html 1.0 days when I pretty much knew all the tags... now, of course, there's no real way to know them, so you have to use a graphical editor to figure it out.
BTW - the template .css file Movable Type provides has about 33 elements defined... so definitely an editor is necessary.
And, I'm stuffing into all my files server side includes as well as adding all this stuff into layers (for reasons of exact positioning).
All of this, of course, doesn't even have anything to do with content for the blog! Sheesh....
9.
So, do you have a sense for whether there's an issue with each and every file pulling from so many different external files such as .css and .shtml files?
It looks like the blog can be rebuilt at any time, so once I get a number of files, I'd be interested in finding out whether you think I need to consider "rebuilds" of all the pages only during low-usage times.
Posted by BilFish at February 10, 2004 06:45 PM