Over the last few evenings I’ve been adding some new things to the site, mostly stuff no one will notice but cool none the less.
I’ve been getting really sick of looking at those standard Moveable Type permalink URLs so I’ve implemented “M·r’s solution”:http://mar.anomy.net/entry/2003/06/22/17.15.00/ of future-proofing my URLs. Sure, I could have really done some nasty stuff that even M·r suggests but I think his idea is a good one.
One annoying thing with comments has been when an entry doesn’t have any comments you’d just see the “Comments” header on the archive page which looked kind of naked in a way. So, I’ve implemented the MT plugin “EntryIfComments”:http://www.nonplus.net/software/mt/MTEntryIfComments.htm which allows me to use a simple tag to determine if an entry has comments or not so I can display a friendly message instead of nothing.
I mentioned the rise of “comment spam”:/archives/2003/10/11/16.13.33/ a few days ago and I’m starting to get even more spam type comments. I found the first p0rn comment this evening so I’m glad I’ve implemented “Jay’s Blacklist”:http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/10/mtblacklist_stop_spam_now plugin. This is a really nice piece of work, blocking comment spam based on the URLs spammers post instead of the comments they leave or their sometimes random IP addresses. The whole thing is configureable and even includes 400+ known spam URLs to get you started. Thanks Jay for some excellent work!
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after trying to get my site to validate, I noticed that a tag such as <a id=”0076423″> (as a replacement for the deprecated <a name=”foo”> tag) would not validate properly–an id must start with a letter. so what I did instead was make my permalinks look like:
http://chrishiller.net/archives/basketball/paul_allen_interview.php
where the .php file is named by “dirifying” the entry title. I figured I wouldn’t repeat entry titles (can’t be too sure, I guess, but…). I saw this on Zeldman’s blog and thought it was a neat idea.
I’ve read about that method as well but didn’t want to make sure I always had a unique title. Other options included using the keywords field to define the ending URL. In the end I felt that the date/time based format was quick and easy.
I’m still working on the validation part of my blog as I know it works pretty well in all current browsers that I’m in no hurry.