Tag: gnegg.ch

You may know that I’m using MovableType for this blog. Now they have announced the Version 3.0 and unlike the previous versions they put a hefty price tag on it: What once was available at no cost, now requires you to pay $70 and more. Not only that: Where you was quite free in adding users and blogs to your installation, this is now limited too – even the most expensive edition allows only for 15 Weblogs.

I have no problem with paying for (really good) software (I actually use) – I even donated $45 for this installation you are seing here, but $70 is much – even more so that you don’t get something you can thinker with, but some restricted proprietary piece of software that is quite against what blogging is about.

For now I’ll be staying with what I’m currently running, but I’m certainly looking for alternatives. Too bad that another company went from developer- and community-friendly to just making profits with it’s good name.

Update: Actually they do still have a free personal edition, but this green box at the right side is so badly layouted that I’ve just overlooked it. Additionally you still have to pay the full price if you want to see the “updated”-feature. And it’s much more than what was required previously

This is the 100st entry here on gnegg.ch rejoice!

Now that I’ve created the new design for the front page, the next step was to get working at the archive. As I disliked the Popup-Window, MT created for comments, I had a look into the detail view of an entry, aka. the individual archives.

It’s not yet linked from the new index-page, but here’s an entry using the new template. You may see that I’ve chosen some more useful filenames for the individual entries, that the sidebar is now also visible in the sub-pages and that the comments still look like they did in the old MT-layout – richard has not provided me with a good looking comments-template yet.

By the way: This would be an entry with trackback-pings. Looks quite nice to me.

If you by any chance visit gnegg.ch, tell my what you think!

With the monthly archives now working, I finally enabled the new layout per default. There are still some tweaks to do, but those will require me to learn even more CSS which is the next thing I’ll do. And there is the search results template still coming in the old design. Will fix that too.

But for now: Enjoy!

Many thanks go to Richard for providing me with the template.

With my recent motivation in posting here, the desire grew to actually create a layout for gnegg.ch. I’ve asked richard whether he would be so kind to create one which he actually did. Many thanks Richard.

Now my knowledge in HTML is quite limited. The last time I actually did something in HTML besides tweaking some templates here and there to enter some dynamical content in, was about three years ago – way before CSS was something browsers did actually understand.

So – to make things interesting for me, I deceided that I will use no tables, no old-fashioned HTML-hacks, but straight CSS and DIV’s for “converting” Richards Photoshop-File to something your browser understands.

At first, it was quite difficult, but I made quite some progress as the time continued. The code looks quite nice too.

But have a look for yourself.

Currently I’m working at adopting the layout to the rest of this MT-based pages which at first will involve quite some reading the documentation. Until I’m ready, the alternative index-page above is the only thing you’re going to see about the new layout, but it’s already MT-integrated, you if you want, you can bookmark it insted of the old index-page.

I will post some newbie-notes for CSS-beginners later on.

i’ve fixed the search-engine and the comments feature yesterday. apt-get upgrade can be disasterous when you have manually installed perl-modules and perl is automatically updated vom 5.6.1 to 5.8.0. I had to comment the mod_perl-stuff from the httpd.conf just to get the server up again. And then in the rush for fixing everything else, I completly forgot to re-enable the mod_perl directives for this weblog. Sorry.