Making the Move to Movable Type 3.2
March 5 / 4PM
After two months of wantin' and wishin' to make the switch to Movable Type 3.2, I finally did it. It's taken me the better part of a weekend, but damn it's been worth it. Better spam filtering, faster rebuild times, and even a little AJAX added to the admin console to sweeten the pot. I'm in love.
I'm still cleaning things up around here - formatting all of the templates. It hasn't been particularly difficult as far as the HTML and the coding in general go. It's just time-consuming. I will say that the MT documentation has been a big help and the install process for 3.2 is an improvement over that of pre-3.0 versions. Hats off to SixApart on both counts.
As for SEO, I've shot that to hell. The new version of Movable Type uses a different directory and file naming convention for the entire system. I could've taken the time to tweak the settings to ensure that the transition was seamless to the likes of Google and Yahoo!. But the new naming convention is much, much better. In the long run, it'll pay off.
(In the meantime, there may be a few folks searching for Douchebags and Red Stripe that'll be sorely disappointed. To those people, I do apologize.)
Under the hood, I'm targeting the XHTML 1.1 DOCTYPE. I've got a few errors to clean up here and there. I took great pains to ensure the code is ultra-clean. I'm also working on a stylesheet switcher at the moment that should be ready to roll shortly.
I've taken to calling this latest design "Ex-Girlfriend".
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Comments
web | March 7, 2006 12:24 PM
WORD! This new site is PIMP and clean as a catholic schools girl's cooch. [just wanted to use "cooch" in this comment - enjoy] If you want I can toss you my Javascript that I made (hacked together) which has a list of OLD URL's which you can map to the new URL's ie. mrichard.net/archive/817389.php --> mrichard.net/finally_made_the_move.php it's two javascript files that you include on the 404 page. Its not the best solution in the world but will keep all old links working [I ahd same problem]. Anyways love the new design/logo/style .. BTW -- is that a hard drive in the bottom right?Mike | March 7, 2006 07:24 PM
Thanks for the kudos, G. I'd love to get my hands on that JS script you're talking about. Most of the SEO traffic to my site is now winding up on some obscure system archive page. Yours may not be pretty, but it should be a good interim solution. That's actually a bathtub drain in the bottom right. I started to see it as white wall tire after a while (after 2 days of staring at it actually). And now you're seeing a hard drive. Weird. (P.S. Your use of the word "cooch" tripped my spam comment filter. Nice.)web on mac | March 8, 2006 06:57 PM
Yo Chez, I just checked this on a Mac (Safari 1.2.2) and the header image is a tad funk-ee. Im sure you wither knew about this or were working on it. Just in case really.