About This Site

This site is built with Movable Type (currently I’m using v3.33). Movable Type has been a great tool that’s really flexible. I’ve only had to do a minimal amount of adjusting my layout to fit the tool.

A benefit of using Movable Type is the strong pool of plug-ins that have been created. I’m currently using:

• MTFlickrPhotosets Plugin (by Jim Flanagan) displays all my photosets from Flickr
• Markdown (by John Gruber) as my primary markup language for entries (it also works with SmartyPants)
• SmartyPants (by John Gruber) to include smart quotes and ‘em’ dashes
• OtherBlog to assemble my three blogs into one. I’m using this to merge in items from two sub-blogs: Articles and Projects. This works well as long as the main blog is updated more often than the sub-blogs. Otherwise, entries on the sub-blogs will not appear on the main one. (If anyone is interested in the details, please let me know.)
• WordCount to count the words in each entry

Previously I used CityDesk by FogCreek Software (featuring Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame). CityDesk was great and I still use it for another site I maintain, but being a desktop application limited my ability to post from different locations. CityDesk is especially useful for those who don’t control their own servers — it can publish to any server that supports FTP.

My goals for the site construction and page markup include:

• Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup (W3 Validator)
• Simple markup and layout, using CSS and without tables (except for data)
• Minimal Javascript (currently being used for TrackBack and Comments, but I may clean that up)
• Degrades gracefully for small form-factor devices such as PDAs
• No special markup for any specific browsers
• All links should remain valid, even as site architecture changes

I’m a big fan of RSS and I’m delivering mine in RSS 2.0 format. Some specific details include:

• RSS 2.0 format, providing a simple format with extensibility
• RSS feed is valid (Feed Validator)
• <link> elements are true permalinks
• <description> elements contain the excerpt with all HTML stripped
• <content:encoded> elements contain the full excerpt enclosed in a CDATA block and do not have HTML stripped
• <title> element always included
• If I update a weblog entry, I make it clear with an “Update” note at the end
• Currently publishing last 10 entries