Rodent Regatta

Russ did everyone a great service and grouped all the recent CSS references in a single entry at Webgraphics.

I use the Berkeley database behind the scenes of this weblog. Does anyone know of a plugin or tool that turns comments off after an entry reaches a certain age? I’ve seen such things for those who use MySQL behind the scenes, but I’m told that switching from Berkeley to MySQL poses great risks – particularly for those who don’t understand all the issues. I’m willing to consider any proposal you savvy Movable Type experts have for making that switch for me or coaching me through it.

Is this expected to be a feature in Movable Type 3.0?

I really like Movable Type. I like the concepts behind entries saved in a database. I like the notion of categorizing and archiving entries. With forthought, it’s a terrific tool for organizing information.

For the rank beginner, making a Movable Type weblog look like you want it to look is daunting. If, as I did, you come from a background with no web design knowledge and terminology such as XHTML, CSS and syndication mean nothing, the task of customizing your weblog is nearly impossible. Thank goodness for good designers.

Once there’s a little knowledge, danger is just around the corner. Here’s an entry that describes how to start tinkering with Movable Type templates. It dates back to August of 2003, but it has been reposted at ETC. It won’t turn the person with no eye for design into a designer, but it certainly helps explain how the things that get typed on the screen wind up arranged as they are in a ”finished” weblog.

This morning my weblog shows only 729 errors when I run it through the (X)HTML validator. That’s down from over 800. Don’t get excited. When there were 800+ errors, there were more entries on the home page.

Keith Robinson writes Asterisk, a weblog of truly outstanding looks, content and usefulness. He did an experiment. He checked up on the claims of validation by some sites and designers. About half of the thirty he checked validated. It’s a nice piece of work.

Now for the $64,000 question. This home page has over 700 validation errors. Where does one start to remove them? How does one begin to produce entries every morning that don’t introduce new errors? All I want to do is write. Why can’t some writing tool keep me ”valid” as I write?

I’ve used Webmonkey as a reference many times as I struggled with the learning curve of XHTML, CSS, standards and such. It seems a serious waste to think of those archives simply going away. It’s one thing for their to be no new content, but entirely another to lose what’s been produced to date.

However, I’m sure others will emerge to replace the work lost. Here’s an example of some really useful work by Molly Holzschlag courtesy of Meryl.