Category: movable type

A lovely change in Movable Type caused comments to be sorta really broken for the past week or so. I just now got around to fixing things… so if you tried to post a comment in the past 8, 9 or 10 days and it didn’t work – and you still remember what it was – go ahead and try posting it again! Let’s see if it works…

I finally got around to upgrading everything to Movable Type 4.0 (a, the security edition).\
It’s late, and I don’t feel well, so if things are broken, I’ll get to them later. Really.

I think my comment problems are related to my crusty install of Movable Type. I’m going to re-install Movable Type, and slowly re-add plugins. Things may be funky around here for a little while.\
Update – I think it’s OK now. I deleted a bunch of old plugins I wasn’t actually using, and gave up on using FastCGI. I’ve posted some test comments and things seem at least a little faster, and no errors so far. If you notice anything completely borked, let me know.

Like yesterday’s post about del.icio.us tag clouds, this was an experiment because I was bored. I figured it was so easy to make the link tag cloud, it should be almost as easy to create one from my categories. The challenge is that I have almost 1600 entries (actually, this is #1600!): so many that I don’t want the number of entries in a category to correspond directly to the text size (because 200em is really big).\
All it took was a little PHP on top of the tags to do the category list.\
Of course, this will only work if you can use PHP on your server (and why can’t you, huh huh huh), and if you publish the page as a PHP file. You may want to change the way it increments numbers to get the right scale between categories. Play, and if you end up using it, please post a comment so I can come check it out.\
Here’s what I did (of course, this is the “meat” – you have to add the rest of the page around it):

<code>
<ul class="tags">
<MTCategories show_empty="0" sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend">
<?
$count = <MTCategoryCount>;
$fontSize = 1;
for ( $i=1;$i<10; $i++ ) {
if ( $count > $i ) {
$fontSize = $fontSize + .1;
}
}
for ( $i = 10; $i < 300; $i=$i+20 ) {
if ( $count > $i ) {
$fontSize++;
}
}
?>
<li>
<a href="<MTCategoryArchiveLink>" title="<MTCategoryCount> Entries" style="font-size:<?= $fontSize ?>em"><MTCategoryLabel></a>
</li>
</MTCategories>
</ul>
</code>

The CSS is pretty much the same as yesterday, although I’ve tweaked it just a little since then:

<code>ul.tags {
list-style:none;
text-align:justify;
}
ul.tags li {
display:inline;
padding:0 .3em;
}</code>

Someone on the Movable Type ProNet list asked how to import their del.icio.us tag cloud into thier blog a couple days ago, and since I’m stuck here on the couch, I’d see if I could figure out an easy way to do it… and you know what, there is!\
All you need to install is the very cool MTGetXML plugin, and create yourself a new index template. The important bit to add is this:

<code><ul class="tags">
<MTGetXML keeproot="0"
location="http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@del.icio.us/api/tags/get?"
cache="60">
<MTGetXMLElement name="tag">
<li style="font-size:<MTGetXMLValue name="count">em">
<a href="http://del.icio.us/USERNAME/<MTGetXMLValue name="tag" encode_url="1">" title="<MTGetXMLValue name="count"> links">
<MTGetXMLValue name="tag">
</a>
</li>
</MTGetXMLElement>
</ul></code>

* USERNAME = del.icio.us username

* PASSWORD = del.icio.us password\
Here’s what my CSS looks like to get my tag cloud to look the way it does:

<code>ul.tags {
list-style:none;
text-align:justify;
}
ul.tags li {
display:inline;
padding:0 .3em;
}</code>

And in case you missed the link earlier, here’s what it looks like. Enjoy!\
Update: And because I couldn’t sleep, I did the same thing with my categories. It was a little more involved (because I have some categories with more than 100 entries in them, I didn’t map them right to font sizes, so I had to do MATH!). I kinda like it. It takes some PHP (for the math bits), but it’s almost as easy. I’ll post my template for it later.