mark nottingham

housekeeping

Sunday, 9 November 2003

I’ve done some adjustment to this Web log; you may or may not notice the differences. Most of is is cosmetic and tightening up of the templates, but I’ve also changed the URI layout (thanks, Mark), and as a result RSS aggregators may act strangely before they settle down. Or not; mine, Shrook - a very fine aggregator for OSX indeed - doesn’t get tripped up.

P.S. The old archive pages (which were laid out according to MT’s default, in the /archives/ directory) redirect to the new ones. For a few minutes I had a Moveable Type template that used a META refresh to go to the new one; after finding that too unspeakably ugly for words, I came up with this (some spaces added to make it sane):

<MTArchiveList> <MTEntries> Redirect permanent /blog/archives/<$MTEntryID pad=”1”$>.html https://www.mnot.net/blog/<$ MTArchiveDate format=”%Y/%m/%d”$>/<MTIfEmpty var=”EntryKeywords”><$MTEntryTitle dirify=”1”$></MTIfEmpty><MTIfNotEmpty var=”EntryKeywords”><$ MTEntryKeywords $></MTIfNotEmpty> </MTEntries> </MTArchiveList>

which writes to archives/.htaccess. Please tell me if you have any problems.

P.P.S. it was somewhat tempting to take “/blog” out of most of the URIs here, especially for individual entries. I think I’ll leave it there for now, because it enforces a delineation between the content managed by MT and that which I manually edit. This is interesting because doing so is useful to me, not to you, but it’s evident in the URIs that I expose to you; if we had better Web metadata tools to describe the URI space and map content as well as permissions to it, this probably wouldn’t be necessary.