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February 18, 2008

Lunar eclipse and Providence Geeks Wednesday, fighting with Movable Type tonight

Illustration at NASA by Larry Johnson of Shadow and Substance, where the animations foreshadowing Wednesday's eclipse tell the whole story.

From NASA, Total Lunar Eclipse,

On Wednesday evening, February 20th, the full Moon over the Americas will turn a delightful shade of red and possibly turquoise, too. It's a total lunar eclipse—the last one until Dec. 2010.

The Sun goes down. The Moon comes up. You go out and look at the sky. Observing the eclipse is that easy. Maximum eclipse, and maximum beauty, occurs at 10:26 pm EST...

The source of the turquoise is ozone. More at that link.

Code red: Also Wednesday night, Feb. Geek Dinner - Wed. 20th 5:30-9pm @ AS220. Providence Geeks gather and palaver once a month, and they get a light show this time.

There's also a featured presentation. Here's how co-alpha pGeek Jack Templin describes this month's:

Andrew Schiller, founder of Woonsocket-based Location Inc./NeighborhoodScout.com, a nationwide neighborhood search engine for home buyers and movers with 1.8 million unique visitors last year, will be talking about their patented search technology that answers the first question most home buyers have: “where should I focus my house hunt?”. The audience will try the algorithm by ‘building their ideal neighborhood’ on the site, and finding the local neighborhood that best matches the ideal imaginary one. A sneak peak at NeighborhoodScout v2 will reveal flash-based maps, data mining that has produced new levels of granularity for neighborhood crime, appreciation rate, and school ratings, and ‘smart search’ taken to a new level. Andrew will be joined by Andy Couture, VP of Business Development for the company.

All under a red moon.

The two are simultaneous, with totality coming last.

I used to be a poet, but now...: I've been up all night (again) coding the new Movable Type 4.1 templates -- it's the software behind these blogs, and an upgrade is coming.

I agree entirely with Ann Torrence of Pixel Remix, who wrote ((web)mastering MT4)

The documentation for the new features is appalling... For example the entire content of the docs on the new tag, is:

Now I guess users can tappity tap and consult Google-Giver-of-All until we figure out that in the MT3.3 plug-in from which this tag seems to have originated, [include_blogs="blog#"] or [exclude_blogs="blog#"] was the syntax for the attribute and give that a try, but doesn't it belong in the docs? Jeez Louise. Extra points if SixApart would output a system level table that cross-walks blog id number to blog name. Otherwise, you can hunt for it by logging into MT, navigating to that blog's tab, and then running your cursor across a url in your browser until you find "&blog_id=[some#]". How convenient.

I've since found a little more on the syntax of that Multiblog tag -- and used it tonight -- but I've been doing a whole lot of tappity tap myself. If I hadn't taught myself MT template tags on these earlier MT blogs, I'd be sunk. As it is, what were once giant but unified templates have had their parts squirreled away in style sheets, modules and widgets, so the hard part is finding the pieces and putting the puzzle back together in ways that are standard for editors but not for Web designers.

I was an English and History major, so I don't think in code. I treat it all as a foreign language and eventually I stop ordering three potato courses, as I did the first day I arrived in Spain.

I know how to say "I'm sorry" in lots of languages -- (Mandinka? No problem. It's "Hekatu") -- but I think these pages should be saying it to me.

Eventually, it will enable good new functions such as podcast feeds, but right now I'm adding RSS feed icons back in, rassling with nested Chinese boxes and eyestrain, losing sleep and getting punchy, with the occasional "Eureka!" thrown in when another piece of it works.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 6:24 AM | Permalink

Comments

Guessing that the authors of the code are not English majors, I'm sure that they would be greatly appreciative of your kind offer to spend your own (unpaid) free time to develop a proper open source Movable Type documentation guide. In English, of course. And then listen to the whiners complain about how English is not their native language, that you owe them an apology for having to muddle through your stuff.

Posted by: I'm cheap but not easy on February 18, 2008 9:46 AM

Ah, you're right, "cheap but not easy": I'm griping. And I actually really like Movable Type a lot.

I'm not talking about wanting, needing or writing literature. Lots of MT users are bloggers, not programmers, and need a bit of help to get started. All most of us want are examples of the code syntax for new tags, what they can and can't do, and how it's done. There must be examples that were tested on a real blog.

I will share (and have shared code snippets I work out with others trying to solve the same problems. (The link goes to an example of linking to an index template that puts the latest blog headlines on another site. Much of it came from an example someone else passed along that I modified and put where search engines would show it to others trying to call blog headlines hosted elsewhere into their own sites. I've answered emails about the link end, too.)

I like this free exchange of information -- I'm a blogger, after all -- and like it when I can be useful, give a little back for all the help I got when this was all opaque to me.

And I am very sorry if this is your code and this wounded you. If it is, may I ask you a few questions, or have I blown my chance?

Posted by: Sheila Lennon on February 19, 2008 12:15 AM