Tapirtype Blog

My parents are visiting us in Seattle. Last weekend we used their rental car to take a trip to Mt. Baker. I have some of my pictures up on Flickr here.

Yesterday, we went to the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, to see the BRAND NEW BABY TAPIR!

It's always interesting - and usually frustrating - to watch and listen to the other visitors at the zoo. There's always someone else there who really appreciates the experience and wants to learn more about the animals, but it seems like for every visitor who takes that attitude, there are a dozen more who, really, all you can think is, "Explain to me again why you paid the admission fee?"

I've upgraded to MT 4.0.

I thought I'd been smart by trying it locally before upgrading online, but it turned out to be a bit more difficult that I thought it would be. To be fair that's mostly because I took the opportunity to make a couple of changes. MT 4 has Textile and Markdown built in, including as dynamic php scripts. I know you could install them that way before, but I didn't want to go to the trouble and that provided a block to using dynamic publishing. So now I've enabled dynamic publishing for most indexes and archives other than the entries themselves. I can't have the entries themselves published dynamically for now because I use php inside entries to publish my photo galleries and that won't work in dynamic publishing.

I've also switched from MTKeyValue to CustomFields. Custom fields isn't compatible with dynamic publishing either, but it is a bit slicker and I'm working around that for now because I'm only using it to publish the recent photos feature which I publish as a static file that is php-included.

I also started using MTFastsearch and even got it working along side dynamic caching, using mod_rewrite to redirect requests to fastsearch directly to a custom mtview.php script which has the caching disabled. In the process I found out that I don't entirely understand what is going on with the .htaccess created by dynamic publishing. Many things that I thought should work would not (for instance I had to put the rewrite I just mentioned up at the top right after turning rewrite on), and some things wouldn't work at all. I seem to have everything but the redirect form the .org site working now.

I also disabled fastcgi for the moment. It seemed to work out of the box, however the memory requirements seem to be even worse than before and I was getting the strange out of memory errors very frequently. The CGI performance doesn't seem to be too bad right now and we'll see how things are after the eventual TextDrive transition to Solaris.

All in all, so far, so good. I'll have to spend some time investigating some of the new features. I got the updated authentication options working (with some difficulty involving the __trans business) except for the option to register directly with the blog, for instance.

Update: One more dynamic publishing snag. It seems that when I delete a comment via the admin interface, the change won't be reflected on dynamically published pages. It is reflected on static pages, so the actual comment disappears from the entry. But the indexes still publish the cached version with the comment total unchanged. The work around seems to be to jog MT to clear the cache by turning caching off and then back on after deleting a comment. I haven't tested this with deleting other content, but the process of actually making a comment on the page seems to work just fine.

Before she left for Boston to resume law school last Saturday, Sasha and I took a trip to San Juan Island, staying at the States Inn. We had a wonderful time and some of our pictures are up on Flickr.

Subtitled: woot, no spam!

So spam was getting kind of silly. Akismet was not catching, well, anything.

Enter the new MT4 options.

Umm... When you use the phrases "in the tradition of Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "in the style of Kevin Smith with borderline potty-mouth humor" to support each other, you make me think you may not have actually watched Buffy.

Nothing against Kevin Smith, by the way. We do love. But come on.

(And yes, Buffy had it's share of the silly as well as it's share of the potty, but that was so no the point.)

I just discovered something odd... MT used to use SmartyPants to translate typography elements (such as quotes and em dashes) when using Textile 2 text formatting (as well, of course, as when using Markdown).

For a moment I thought it had stopped when I saw –– in one of my old entries instead of the — that they should have been translated into. But it's stranger. Turns out all my static pages, get the Textile right, but don't use SmartyPants (or any other html entities translator). However, my dynamic pages get it right.

Ummm... Hopefully someone will get on that real soon now, so as to not force me to learn about Movable Type text formatters and take matters into my own hands.

Also, MT seems to think I'm in Mountain time in spite of my best efforts to convince it that I'm in Pacific. Or maybe it stopped respecting daylight savings... Interestingly this only applies to the date applied to entries. The "Last auto-save" message tells me the correct time. shrug

Update (typography fixed): I fixed the typography problem by manually turning SmartyPants on in all of my static templates, adding smarty_pants="1" to the tags that write out content that might have typography elements in them (MTEntryTitle, MTEntryBody, and MTEntryMore). This should have the side benefit of ensuring that all entries get the best possible typography translation no matter the text formatter used. Also of note is that SmartyPants is smart enough to not process within html comments or php code blocks so it won't break javascript or php code in entries which is important for my galleries.

Still no idea what the time shifted-by-one-hour time-stamp thing is all about, though.