Tapirtype Blog

There are many obvious reasons why it sucks to be back in Seattle: Separation from Sasha, facing work after a long absence, etc. But one thing sure doesn't suck.

Praise be for decent coffee! I really tried to find an independent coffee place in Boston that had good coffee. I tried to think of it as just being different. But no, it's not. It just sucks. And that no one there seems to realize it is the strangest thing.

But my first cup of coffee back here was absolutely perfect.

Well, looks like Six Apart has released a new version of Movable Type with increased FastCGI support. Presumably this means they've finished tweaking the whole MT::Bootstrap setup, etc. Well, I'm glad I didn't get around to revising my instructions yet.

Hopefully this update will fix the remaining stability problems I've been having with my FastCGI setup. Of course they recommend using Apache and Textdrive previously frowned upon that to me, so we'll see. First I'll just try the update with my current setup and then I might try it under Apache again to see if that'll work now. Either way, a more public, stable, and accessible way to use Movable Type under FastCGI is a very good thing if for no other reason than that there will be just that many more people noticing bugs and clamoring for fixes.

Well, I did the update and basically seem to be back at status quo. Comments are still flaky under fcgi, so I'm still using normal cgi for them. That may be because I'm not using the Bootstrap module right, this way works for now.

I think I've fixed comments under FastCGI. I added one line from the Bootstrap module to the dispatch.fcgi that wasn't in Brad Choate's original instructions and that seems to have done it. I'll update with better instructions soon.

Update put up some more details at the top of the old instructions. I promise I'll get around to putting up comprehensive updated instructions one of these days.

I just tweaked the design of the blog a bit. One of the remaining hold overs from the standard design that I wasn't happy with was the way the bottom of the entries were handled. It placed the authorship and date of the articles at the bottom, meaning that you had to look get through the entire thing to see who wrote it and when, and almost worse, the horizontal lines got very repetitive and harsh. Hopefully this update addresses this.

Incidentally, I made the design changes with using Bare Bone's free TextWrangler and MacRabbits's appropriately named CSSEdit 2 which they sell online for about $30. TextWrangler is about as good as it gets for a free text editor and is really useful for editing files in place on sftp servers.

I adore CSSEdit for so many reasons. First off, you've got to love a company named MacRabbit who, when they charge you for their software, have the transaction be with "Space Carrot." The real reason I love them, though is that when I originally bought CSSEdit 1 it was full of bugs and I kind of regretted it. But just when I was about to give up on them, they sent me an email telling me that they were giving me a free upgrade to CSSEdit 2 which fixed almost all of my problems.

CSSEdit has a few killer features. First, it allows you to instantly preview the changes you make to the file as you type (though it still seems to get out of sync occasionally and require a manual reload of the preview). Even better it allows you to look at any web page, extract the css files it uses and override them with the version you are editing. This makes tweaking existing styles very easy, as any new page you preview that references the same css will preview with the new overriding file. It also allows you to click on any element, see it's bounding box--with padding and margins--and see all the classes it has inherited. It's hard to overstate how useful it is to be able to see the bounding boxes of your elements as you edit, because, love style sheets as I do, it isn't always very clear how the bounding box will end up. It also does a good job of making it easy to switch back and forth between editing the code and using their own GUI.

Anyway, I'm a fan, and between those two tools, for under $30 I've pretty much completely replaced my need for an expensive web editing program from Adobe.