More MT Setup
By Oli
At 1:16 PM · Sunday, 17 August · 2003
To Weblogging
Well, things are progressing slowly. I’ve installed Smarty Pants, but have yet to work out:
- how to make individual post URLs (which are dirified from the page title) a subset of the title rather than all of it (to keep the URLs short but the titles informative)
- how to keep HTML out of the page’s title when it appears at the top of the window (ie the
<title>tag in<head>) for individual posts, but include it when the title is used as the page header, so I can use acronym tags with informative titles etc
For the first problem Mark Pilgrim is using Brad Cholate’s MTIfEmpty plugin and putting the title into the “Keywords” entry field. This has the disadvantage that you then can’t use the Keywords field for adding keywords to an entry. Another method might be to use Brad Cholate’s MTKeyValues plugin, which lets you make your own variable fields. This looks more promising, if only I can work it out!
I have no idea how to solve the second problem, as the only person I’ve seen doing this (Mark Pilgrim again) appears to be adding the HTML automatically using a Perl macro (for adding <acronym> tags). I want a bit more freedom than this, such as the ability to add a span to de-emphasize parts of the story heading (very useful for long titles). I wonder if I’ll have to make some kind of crazy Perl macro myself to strip everything in <> until </title>? Sounds scary. Maybe I can dirify it, but I bet this will convert everything to lower case.
As an aside, I was interested to see my weblogging role model (idol? ;-) implementing the same things I was a few days after me. At this rate I may one day write something of actual use! OK, onto the design - this weblog is too ugly!
