… and I just know you are fascinated to hear that the latest round of site fiddlin’ is just about wrapped up. For the curious:
- I added domain-restricted searching via Google to the sidebar. Google seems to pay attention to my site, so it seems to work fairly well.
- The drop-down archive menus are now sitewide.
- In a related matter, I added the appropriate new secondary category archive flags (KG of the Week, Monday Art, Blimp Week) to the appropriate entries and cleaned up some incidental duplicates.
- I added the sidebar to all of the ancillary pages.
- I made the category archives navigable, and edited their format to increase load speed.
- I’m still futzing with “Recent Entries” on the archive pages; currently the “recent” list is, in fact, what’s recent within the appropriate category. I think I have a brute-force workaround in place but I believe there’s a better way.
- Last but not least, I’m working on a “recently discussed” link area for your easy reference, currently viewable only on the main page.
*phew!* man, the rebuilds are starting to D R A G, though. All those queries and page builds for pore ol’ l’il perl to crunch thru… good camel, good boy.
Hunh, you know, what I *should* do is build the sidebar once into a flat text file, and have the pages call it in either at page view (via PHP or shtml SSI) or (this is somewhat preferable) at perl-munging time. Hm, yes, that’s the way to do it.
Okay, how does that Recently Discussed feature work? What are the tags?
I’ll follow up in email. I’m still messing with it, a bit, but here’s the important bits. Sadly, MT reads the tags and strips them. So, below, replace the square brackets with standard HTML greater-than and less-than tags, OK?
I’m still messing with it, a bit, but here’s the important bits:
[MTEntries recently_commented_on=”10″]
[a href=”[$MTEntryLink$]”][$MTEntryTitle$][/a] (Comments: [$MTEntryCommentCount$])
[br /]
[/MTEntries]
cf docs here:
http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_tags.html#entry%20listings/archive%20pages
and see theredkitchen’s slicker implementation (which includes when. who, and an excerpt)
http://theredkitchen.net/, scroll down or search for “Recently Commented”
My implementation refreshes only at full pagebuild, don’t know about theredkitchen’s.
I’m still jimmying stuff around – I need to collapse the internal site info on the right so that the links are above the fold. I have some ideas.