#movable type

My Findings on coComment and Movable Type 3.2 Integration

· 4 Comments
coComment

After 12-hours or so of usage and debug­ging my MT tem­plates to prop­erly inte­grate with coCom­ment, I finally got some­where to say the least. If you need to catchup to what this is all about, you may read my pre­vi­ous arti­cle on what coCom­ment can do.

Any­ways, I finally got around fix­ing my Indi­vid­ual Entry Archive tem­plate. I did the following:

  • I for­mat­ted the TITLE-tag as stated in coComment’s Sup­port sec­tion,
  • fixed my old MT2.661 JS comment-related code to use the mt-site.js pro­vided on MT3.2,
  • and edited my CSS to reflect the change I have done with respect to the mt-site.js

Thing is, now I’ll have to fix the cookie part. It should be sim­ple. I think I just need to change the com­ment form’s vari­able to match that of mt-site.js. Then, match those changes in my CSS.

One other issue I found through this lit­tle exper­i­ment was that coCom­ment looks for the default markup in terms of the sub­mit but­ton. That is,

<input type="submit" accesskey="s" name="post" id="comment-post" value="Post" />

So keep that in mind for those of you who just cut-and-pasted your MT2.661 code dur­ing your upgrade to MT3.2. It’s just too bad that we can’t use our cus­tom image-buttons. So @Steph, if you are read­ing, could you please address this as well with the team =)

Also, place­ment of the coCom­ment JS code in the header is tricky and strict. I was try­ing to fig­ure out why the heck it wasn’t work­ing when I went on to try JS place­ment. I ended with the following:

&hellip;
<script type="text/javascript" src="<$MTBlogURL$>js/general.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<$MTBlogURL$>js/mt-site.js"></script>
<MTIfCommentsAccepted>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!&#8212;
window.onload = function() {
individualArchivesOnLoad(commenter_name);
}

// coComment entry-specific variables
var postURL = "<$MTEntryPermalink$>";
var postTitle = "<$MTEntryTitle smarty_pants="1"$>";
//&#8212;>
</script>
</MTIfCommentsAccepted>
</head>

Last but not least, how do we tag key­words with mul­ti­ple words? I tried sep­a­rat­ing with com­mas, using double-quotes and plus-sign but to no avail. If you know, let me know. Help me, help you.

Other than that, coComment’s cur­rent ver­sion is rock solid of a tool for blog­gers. Enjoy!

coComment Helps Us Remember What We’ve Said

· 9 Comments

I was actu­ally think­ing of some­thing like this. I was going to make it my first RoR project but that might just be to ambi­tious. Any­ways, plain and simple,

coCom­ment is the only ser­vice that allows you to enjoy the full poten­tial of blog com­ments on the web. Before coCom­ment, the blo­gos­phere was not a global con­ver­sa­tion, but tons of frag­mented, hard to fol­low, and untrack­able discussions.

Using coCom­ment, you can now keep track of what you have been com­ment­ing on, dis­play your com­ments on your blog, and see what is new in the dis­cus­sions you are par­tic­i­pat­ing in (if other users are also on coComment).

One con (at the moment), is that “users can only track com­ments from blog posts that they have actu­ally com­mented on, and only com­ments left by other cocom­ment users are shown.“1 But this was a day or so ago. I have to check the new ver­sion out myself as I’ve just signed up a few moments ago.

Along with their news yes­ter­day about ver­sion 0.4c being released, the team also men­tioned the fact that there is now a Fire­fox exten­sion for coCom­ments. This addi­tion, for sure, will make things a bit eas­ier than hav­ing to use a book­mar­let on the user’s com­puter.

There might be one small gripe though. As I was tak­ing a look at coComment’s Blog Inte­gra­tion sec­tion which lists which browsers and blog/CMS/site-platforms it sup­ported, I read that Mov­able Type blogs must have the fol­low­ing format,

<title>blog name : article title</title> or
<title>blog name | article title</title>

Oth­er­wise, the com­ment (in coCom­ment) will show up as “(untitled)”.

So, see­ing that, there might be an issue of hav­ing every­one involved have a stan­dard way of tem­plat­ing their TITLE-tags. I, for one, see this as a big thing (so it ain’t “small” after all). If this is true, and hasn’t been addressed in it’s next iter­a­tion, coCom­ment is pretty much forc­ing every­one to do “this and that.” Then again, we’ll see how this plays out with Micro­for­mats. So if you are listening/reading this oh-Lords-of-coComment, please do let us know. (Then again, I just signed up and haven’t got­ten to play around with coCom­ment that com­pletely yet.)

All in all, the ser­vice is prac­ti­cal and very use­ful for those that like to read and inter­act with dif­fer­ent blogs. It’s great for coCom­ment to have got­ten around and imple­mented some­thing use­ful to the mil­lions that are very involved with interblog-interactivity. In it’s cur­rent state of ver­sion 0.4c, I just can’t wait to see the other fea­tures it will have when it rolls out from “beta”. Pretty much, like all the other “Web 2.0″ application-sites. =)

Con­tinue read­ing →

  1. Michael Arring­ton, coCom­ment visit to Sil­i­con Val­ley [↩]

The Style Contest

· 1 Comment

Six Apart, Adobe and Style Mas­ter spon­sors The Style Con­test. So what is it exactly about? Well, plain and simple—because “Design matters.”

Design­ers are the unsung heroes of the blo­gos­phere. Their work allows users to express a char­ac­ter, theme and per­son­al­ity with their blogs.

The Style Con­test was cre­ated to enable the design com­mu­nity to indulge and explore the con­tri­bu­tion their exper­tise makes to the qual­ity of blog­ging tools and the user experience.

The con­test spon­sors share this sen­ti­ment, and have reflected their com­mit­ment in the prize pool val­ued at over $17,000.

Designers—-this con­test is for you. To thank you. To rec­og­nize you. To reward you.

But alas, it is mostly for MT, Type­Pad and Live­Jour­nal users (or those with expe­ri­ence with the three I’m guess­ing). To get more info about the what-when-where-who-how, you can check out the con­test rules over here. So get those chicken-scratch going and pen­cils sharp­ened up, the dead­line has been set for 15 May, 2006, 10:00 pm PST.

For those par­tic­i­pat­ing in CSS Reboot on May 1st, you might as well jump in as the con­test is said to have a total sum of $17,000. Not to men­tion, every con­tes­tant wins!

Con­tinue reading →

Movable Type 3.2 Free from Beta

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OK. So this might sound some­what geeky but oh-damn-well… this involves technology—a part of me. Any­ways, Six Apart’s Jay Allen announced last night that Mov­able Type 3.2 will be released on 8/25/05 in the AM. That was cool.

I mean, for those of you that have been fol­low­ing our blogs (Kelly, Juan, Ryan and I), you may notice the “Pow­ered by Mov­able Type…” text-link some­where. I have been using their great soft­ware since 2002. After all these years, through all the hack­ing and cus­tomiza­tion, if I have to do it over again and pick a blog­ging soft­ware… it still would have to be Mov­able Type.

Yah, it might sound bias (I know) but MT has proven itself (IMHO) after numer­ous ver­sions that it adapts to new and un-forecastable changes in the Blo­gos­phere, and most impor­tantly on the WWW. “What changes?” You might say. Well, first of all, I have to give credit to Blog­ger for mak­ing me curi­ous enough to start and express my thoughts on mostly about any­thing, as I was “bored as hell” one day dur­ing a pro­gram­ming class back in UCI. I remem­ber back in the days that I wanted to do more stuff with my first-ever blogsite. I felt con­stricted to what I was offered, and just need a new solution.

So after Yahoo!-ing (no Google yet in my vocab) and con­fer­ring with var­i­ous peo­ple on what stand-alone blog­ging soft­ware, a cou­ple of names came about. I remem­ber James using b2, so that made it on top of my list along with other ones from hotscripts.com. But alas, after a lot of think­ing, test­ing and research­ing com­mu­nity forums of the respec­tive blog­ware… I found Mov­able Type’s to be the most active, inno­v­a­tive and solution-driven group of invidi­vid­u­als. This was the decid­ing fac­tor in mak­ing my leap-of-faith to switch from Blog­ger to a stand-alone blogware—thank god I made a good choice.

Mean­while, I can tell you a lot more of my his­tory with MT and how it affected and helped my career in Tech­nol­ogy but that can go on for­ever. I’ve seen it evolve from a strict blog­ware, to a CMS, to a publishing-platform, …to who-knos-what with this new release. It has:

  • helped me share my day with friends and fam­ily (vice-versa),
  • keep my design-skills stay creative,
  • pushed me to increase my knowl­edge of new web-technologies (i.e. XHTML, CSS, etc.)
  • and… type faster, to say the least =)

So whats in it for you, I don’t know. Its really an open-ended ques­tion that has no right or wrong answers. But I do know this, it proves that it is a “small world.” And every nano-second, new ideas are being thought of to get peo­ple to inter­act with each other more. After all, we’re only six degrees apart.

PS. Thanks to 6A-fam and MT-dev com­mu­nity for their great hard­work in pro­duc­ing another prod­uct (that I feel) will have an immense effect on the inter­net and how peo­ple inter­act with each other.

PPS. Thanks to 6A-fam for pro­vid­ing us who beta-tested 3.2 with this badge haha =)

I beta tested Movable Type 3.2