/noise/ filtering

posted 2011.12.22 at 02:33

I've applied the current dcr.org flavoring to my old blog. This is in keeping with the updates to PPAC and the DCR strip archive. Same basic formatting for all of them, each with its own trick or quirk or think-through separate from the challenges of loc.dcr and old.loc.

I'm really getting to know Movable Type. Given that my day job involves a good amount of WordPress, it's been a nice change of pace.

The domain reboot got commenting sorted out. LOC got blog importing sorted and let me see out how the No Sidebar data model would scale. PPAC was a bit of playing with pages, as well as a convenient reason to get a bunch of old digital art online. The DCR strip archive was basically an excuse to play with previous/next, though the real motive was updating the archive's aesthetics and re-enabling comments for a blog that actually had some.

All of that added up to /noise/, which gave me the opportunity to play with several hundred entries in the context of monthly entry archives and global find/replace to add a class= to a frequently used unstyled (and unstylable) div. The /noise/ rebuild was also an opportunity to see how MT actually behaves when it comes to importing multiple blogs into a single blog - particularly noteworthy given that two of the three blogs had identical category structures. While the import went quickly and painlessly and behaved exactly as expected, it brought up an interesting point - if I ever merge the ATC books into a single blog I'll need to either rename some categories or do quite a bit of after-the-fact editing.

As the present state of commenting seems reasonably stable, it stands to reason that the best chance I have to see how it actually shakes down is by re-enabling comments on /noise/. The new build is Comments Enabled for all 744 entries - if spam becomes an issue I can Disable comments with a tickybox and retain the existing archive. The old /noise/ commenting system was a black hole of spam - at times it felt like I spent as much time cleaning up after it as I did blogging.

Speaking of existing archives - /pittsburgh/ has been merged into the re-archived /noise/. The original /pittsburgh/ - such as it is - is presently the last vestige of The Old Design that you might stumble upon. While the old MT output of the DCRSA and /noise/ has been Abandoned In Place for linkage purposes, I ultimately decided to merge /pittsburgh/ into /noise/ rather than rebuild another Abandoned Blog that I'll never use again. It added some spice to the project - and as both blogs are from the same era, it makes sense to slap 'em together.

My favorite discovery of the /noise/ build - Previous/Next by Monthly Archive.

My build tour of /noise/ was a positive reinforcement of my decision to reboot dcr.org with a new blog. I'm still me, but I'm definitely not that guy. Not anymore.