My gentle readers, let me tell you that today, this blog is celebrating its first birthday. While you might or might not have been disappointed that I have been rather silent lately, the reason for this has been the preparation of a movable type installation over on www.almostadiary.de (no need to link, the auto-forward to blogspot is still working). The “tschwarz.blogspot.com” installation is going to stay in place for the moment.
Of course, MT offers a better functionality and having control over my archives is certainly worth a lot. But if you’re not happy with the MT templates, getting an MT installation (with a few bells and whistles) to work across just the most common browsers does take a lot of time and determination. If it had not been for my annual coding adventure, I likely wouldn’t have done it.
Especially importing your comments from reblogger to MT was a hazzle that involved creating a caif standard xml file from html through word’s search and replace functionality. Not a recommended method, but one that can work. However, while all comments have been atributed to the right posts in MT, Phil Ringnalda’s Yaccs comment import script wasn’t able to work with Reblogger’s timestamp, so don’t be surprised when comments seem to have been posted in 2005…
Also, many older posts still have headlines that are compiled from the first 5 words of the entry given the lack of a title tag in blogger’s free version, and I haven’t assigned categories yet. Neither have I installed the trackback feature.
So there are still things to do, especially as I just decided against using the prepared autumn design for the moment for reasons of recognition and weather. This means I have to do some table adjustments which will take another half-an-hour or so. Despite almost complete reliance on CSS, I am still using tables for the main columns for the moment. With just CSS I couldn’t motivate Netscape to do what I wanted. As for 4th-generation browsers, I have decided against trying to support them.
But anyway, “almost a diary on MT” is going online tonight. Let’s celebrate!
But now I’m off to celebrate something else first.