Phil’s Diary - [Blog @ http://www.philsdiary.net/]
I’ve been using MovableType for a few months now. And in that time a few people have asked me what it is, whether it makes my life easier, and so on. So I thought, for the benefit of those of you pondering the same question, I thought I’d try and give my view.
MT is a piece of software essentially written to create diarys/blogs/journals. It can do other sites of course, but as it’s geared to a calendar based system, this would be bending it from it’s purpose.
If you already use an HTML editor like Dreamweaver or Frontpage (or notepad), you’d use it to create your diary in place of those products.
But it’s not a piece of software you typically run on your PC. Instead it sits on your webserver. You use it by visiting a subset of your website, and using it’s web based interface.
While it uses a database it isn’t a truly DB driven website it creates either. The database stores your diary entries, and the software then uses that to create static pages, which visitors see. There are DB driven sections, such as the comments pop-up, or the trackback pop-up. But for the most part the site that visitors see is static HTML.
The static pages are made from the data in the DB, and also from a template. The template tells the software where about to put the text from the DB, and also how to wrap it in HTML.
So how does it make life easier? Well it maintains all the links and indexes in a date based diary like this.
For example. I’m typing this now into it’s web based interface. When I finish typing and hit submit, the software kicks into action. It will create an individual HTML page for this entry (the one linked to under ‘permalink’). It’ll add this entry to the rest of the current days entries, and create a day page, for Nov 16th 2002. This will be used in future by the “On This Day” link. Next it adds this entry to November’s current month page, which is mainly used in the archive. Finally there are the category pages. It’ll add this entry to the top of the “Technology” Category page.
Once it’s done that, it’ll update the main index page. It rebuilds that from scratch, shuffling last weeks entry off the bottom, and putting this at the top. Updates the calendar, and the “recent” entries section too. It’ll also update any counters (ie. how many entries there are in a category).
As well as creating all those pages, it creates all the links that link them together, so that when a new month is added to the archives, the archive menu is updated.
So how does it make my life easier. Well in essence the only work I need to do each time I post is type the text. Once I’ve done that, MT swings into action and does everything else for me. I don’t need to do anything more. Really.
Now Frontpage already does this to a certain extent, because it’s got a site manager, which will create links. But I don’t even have to graphically drag anything. Once I’ve type the entry text and hit submit, absolutely everything else is taken care of automatically.
Before when I was using Dreamweaver, I’d spend about 5-10minutes per entry creating a title, naming the page, saving the page, creating the next and previous days links. Updating the previous days next day link. Then adding an entry to the current month, and linking it to that entry.
For many days I was spending at least as long, if not longer creating and setting all the links for an entry.
Now, all I need to do is type the text. Saving me a lot of time. Which is one reason why I’m a lot more happy to make multiple posts on a day, than I was then.
So what else is there to say? Well a few qualifying statements.
First there are other bits of software to do this for you. MoveableType isn’t the only bit of software to work as described above, there are others too (b2 and GreyMatter spring to mind). There are bits of Windows software that run on your machine, dedicated to creating diarys. There are also hosted ASP providers who will host all the software and provide an interface for you to work with.
Second, I’ve not gone too far down the route of modifying the default MT template. Sure the colours are different, but if you look at some the MT blogs, people have gone far more radical. The template method that MT uses means that within reason there are very few layouts and styles you can’t do. I’ve stuck to using CSS because it allows a nice simple way of providing alternate colour schemes for you to use (as well as making it easier to keep the site styles consistent). At the moment my current favourite colour schemes is Scheme 1.
And finally. This is just what I know from my current use, which admittedly isn’t years and years of experience.
If you do keep a blog and have been considering using MT, then I’ll gladly answer any questions about it that I can answer. If you’ve decided to use it, I’ll also help you out (from getting it working, to the “how did you do that” type questions) if I can. I’m not the only form of MT support (there’s a whole message-board doing that), but I’ll help if I can.
Posted by Phil on November 16, 2002 11:21 AM | Categories: Technology