Restyling

Everything I know about CSS I learned from experimenting with Movable Type.
And you may or may not care that I’ve never upgraded.  EWM is vintage MT
2.65.  I’ve installed new versions of MT for other folks (another install
just a few days ago, in fact), but I’ve never gotten around to upgrading my own
weblog.  Could be the lag reflects my felt knowledge that the new version
would come with a slightly different set of class and id tags.  No hurry to
bother with it.

Continue reading →

Coded

I’m mucking around all morning with MT RSS tags.  I was using a chunk of
javascript to pull in delicious bookmarks before, but I wanted a bit more
flexibility. Figured MT RSS would deliver. So I read around the net–mostly old
entries from the 2.+ days–and came up with a few plugins I thought would do the
trick: MT RSS and MT List.  Quasi-teaching-aims motivating me; been
plugging away at a syllabus, rest of the pre-term drill. It’s a course in
critical research; we’re going to aggregate like mad.

Now the plugins are running fine.  Together, they pull the feeds through
a db cache on my server so as not to drain the site of origin site with each
visit to EWM. But I can’t figure out how to grab the date tag from the XML. 
The dates are nested in Dublin Core tags.  I can’t figure out how to tell
the plugin to draw the date into the entry you see here (lower right). So I’m
stuck.  Gonna quit before I overheat (or make this brand new nagging cold/s.throat worse).  Here’s the code, culprit in
bold, just for the helluvit:

 <MTList name="feeds">
http://del.icio.us/rss/dmueller
http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/index.xml
http://dwlt.net/tapestry/ripleys.rdf
</MTList>
<MTListLoop name="feeds">
<MTRSSFeed>
<div class="sidetitle"><a href="<$MTRSSFeedLink$>" target="blank"><$MTRSSFeedTitle$></a></div>
<div class="squish" align="center">Reassembled <lastBuildDate><$MTDate
format="%B %d, %Y %I:%M %p"$></lastBuildDate><br/></div>
<ul><MTRSSFeedItems lastn="7">
<li><$MTRSSFeedItemElement name="date"$>: <a href="<$MTRSSFeedItemLink$>"
target="blank"><MTFirstNWords n="4"><$MTRSSFeedItemTitle$></MTFirstNWords></a>:
<MTFirstNWords n="7"…><MTRSSFeedItemDescription></MTFirstNWords></li>
</MTRSSFeedItems></ul>
</MTRSSFeed>
</MTListLoop></div>