General: September 2005 Archives

Over the next several days, I've got a number of real-world projects to complete and matters to decide, so don't expect to see anything lengthy posted here. I'll still be posting, but it'll be more Instapundit-esque in nature.

In the meantime, particularly if you're a Tulsa reader, click on that Tulsa Bloggers link near the top of the sidebar. You'll also find individual links further down the page. I'll try to call attention to the best stories from my fellow Tulsa newshounds, but don't wait for me -- make them a part of your regular tour of the blogosphere.

You should also check out the more extensive blogrolls even further down the sidebar. My personal blogroll now has an alarming 180 entries. It includes fellow Tulsans and Oklahomans, people I've met in person, people I've corresponded with by e-mail, and probably a whole bunch who don't even know I exist, which is cool. Here are a few fairly recent additions you should check out:

A Glass of Chianti, by Sarah Beth, the Latin-reading, Western Swing-loving clarinet teacher from Fort Worth to whose punny music joke I linked earlier in the week. She has me on her list of "People Way Cooler Than Me," which I very much doubt.

Mister Snitch!, a local blogger (i.e., he blogs about local news) based in Hoboken, New Jersey, who has been doing a lot of excellent hurricane blogging recently, and he blogs about national politics, too.

Sexless in the City, by Anna Broadway. I first met Anna at a blogger party before the Republican National Convention last summer. She's an MK (missionary kid), a fellow survivor alum of Campus Crusade for Christ, and a very witty writer. Her blog is about her romantic misadventures in New York and what she's learned about courtship, dating, chastity, and real, lasting love in the process.

Thanks to all three for adding BatesLine to their blogrolls!

And here's a challenge to you, dear reader: The blogroll is really long, but it's arranged in random order, which changes everytime you load the page. Click on the first three -- whatever they happen to be -- and leave a comment here, or drop me a line at blog at batesline dot com, and let me know what you think of the blogs you visited.

Maybe they should just go all the way and rename him "Pastel Pete".

(Via Mad Okie. OSU's Pistol Pete is one of triplets -- besides New Mexico State, University of Wyoming also uses the same mascot.)

I received some especially vile trackback spam today, which you may have had the misfortune to see before I deleted it, and I continue to fight an amazing amount of comment spam. I will likely upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 in the next day or two, so don't be surprised if BatesLine briefly disappears. MT 3.2 is supposed to have better tools for dealing with spam. If that doesn't work to my satisfaction, I'll have to think about making the bigger leap to Word Press or some other platform.

No, you won't be seeing public displays of affection here, but you can now see a simplified home page for the benefit of those who want to check BatesLine via your personal digital assistant or cellphone. BatesLine for PDA has minimal graphics and brief excerpts from the last four days of entries, with links to the full entry. If you access BatesLine via PDA, check it out.

Despite no assistance from Technorati, I finally appear to have Technorati tags working. The trick, I think, was modifying the syndication feeds to add a category tag for each keyword, like so:

<MTKeyWordList>
<category><$MTKeyWord$></category>
</MTKeyWordList>

The idea, and the plugin that made it possible, came from this entry on Laughing Meme: MTKeywordList and Technorati Tags. That entry links to the plugin, a very simple piece of Perl code, which creates the MTKeywordList container tag. The above code, added to my RSS 2.0 feed template, iterates over all the keywords for the entry and generates a category tag.

The equivalent code for the Atom feed template:

<MTKeyWordList>
<dc:subject><$MTKeyWord$></dc:subject>
</MTKeyWordList>

I had noticed that Technorati was treating the Movable Type category names as Technorati tags. The code above produces the same XML for each keyword that was already being produced for the names of each category associated with an entry. It appears that Technorati is scouring RSS feeds for <category> and <dc:subject>, but is completely ignoring hyperlinks with the rel=tag attribute, contrary to the documentation on Technorati tags.

You may notice things disappearing and reappearing. I'm dealing with a problem that only affects Internet Explorer.

UPDATE: Got sick of tweaking things to make IE happy, and decided to replace my templates, which go all the way back to version 2.6.3, with versions that fit version 3.1x. Of course, all the style names have changed, so I had to get a 3.1x style sheet. Then I had to bring back all my customizations, or most of 'em anyway. I was planning to spend the last two hours on actual blog content. Oh, well. Comments on the change in appearance are welcome. I'm thinking of adding a second sidebar, maybe also creating a PDA-friendly alternate main page, sort of like Instapundit has. The default font in the new template is very small, so I changed it back to something more like I had before.

And, yes, as Bobby notes, I will be upgrading to 3.2 before long, and will get to go through all this once more.