Apparently, there’s been some huff and commotion (3, 4, 5, …) out there about SimpleBits and Stopdesign dropping liquid layouts in favor of fixed-width designs. This probably wouldn’t have been as big an issue if we both hadn’t changed (by chance) the very same week.

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No doubt, if anyone is paying attention, they may have noticed a few subtle changes to the structure of this site’s home page. Particularly in the extra column usually rendered on the right side of the page. Some may have even noticed a tiny little change in the main navigation that would be easy to overlook. These changes represent a gateway to the additions to Stopdesign which I’ve slowly been adding behind the scenes. continued

There’s a wholelotta recent buzz around using Movable Type for more than just weblogs. In addition to the comments and tips Jay Allen has been providing here on Adaptive Path’s MT use, Matt Haughey gives us some great insight into how he takes advantage of MT’s flexibility in Beyond the Blog. Just before reading Matt’s piece, I followed Jay’s pointer to Brad Choate’s Doing your whole site with MT. Both of these are interesting reads given my recent foray into the use of MT to power portions of this site. continued

Note: If you don’t care about the technical details of switching over a site and its structure, you can probably skip this entry — it may confuse you, or simply bore the heck out of you.

For the old (second) version of this site, I used a lot of ASP scripting to generate dynamic content and automatically change navigation states based on directory paths and query strings. This new (third) version uses PHP and shifts around some of the directory structure. While I can change and control internal links pointing to my own content, lots of external links exist on other sites which point to files on stopdesign. I wanted to make sure as many of those links as possible still pointed to appropriate places on this site. continued

The conversion to Movable Type is going smoothly so far. I’m continually amazed at the application’s flexibility, power, and speed. The ability to expand its functionality with the plugin architecture gives MT endless possibilities for small-scale sites like this one. continued

I’ve been talking about it for what seems like forever. Over the past week, I finally started to make the jump. If you’re reading this entry, the DNS changes have propagated to your neck of the woods, which means you’re getting the new version of this site. The title of this post is a phrase former colleagues at Lycos used when we were redesigning a site or changing the backend while the site continued to function live on a public server. A task which seemed impossible, but had to be done. continued

Based on recent experience with an indexing robot, I discovered a critical architecture flaw in the way I set up my calendar for viewing Log Entries by Day. Due to a bit of laziness, as well as intrigue of the cool-factor in going to any possible date between 1000 and 9999, I didn’t originally include stops at each end of the archive (earliest post and latest post). The calendar allows a user to tab through each month, one at a time, displaying the dates for which entries are available as links. Nothing special here. continued

Thanks to the recent news and hype of Google’s Pyra acquisition, it seems Blogger has been quite bogged down recently. Lots of transfer errors. Connection problems. Most likely due to every Blogger user trying to post about the story. Unfortunately, for the past few days, on each post attempt, Blogger has been deleting my entire archive list except for the most recent entry. Each time, I end up needing to republish the entire archive again. continued

It didn’t take long for the person (or group) behind the website I mentioned on Friday to pull down or move the site to another address. Perhaps they were too embarrassed, or never intended the site to be seen — at least by my eyes. Since the site appeared to be set up to solicit corporate sponsorships for the event (upwards of $8000 a pop for “Gold” level), perhaps someone realized the dangerous legal territory they had entered. continued

is flattery. But I’m not sure what I think about this recently discovered copy. It’s obviously a work-in-progress. Remnants of my content still poke through in places. I don’t know how long it will stay up, but I’ve taken a screenshot [.gif, 43 KB] or two [.gif, 27 KB] to save for my own entertainment, if nothing else. I’m completely in support of tearing apart a site to see how it’s put together. But I’m a little surprised at the level of detail to which this aspiring Dane has copied and reproduced every single convention, workaround, color, image, and CSS file. continued