BrockLi Soup

Live and learn, right? Well, I’ve learned a few things about web hosting.

GoDaddy sucks, straight up. I don’t like their admin pages, the server was slow, and half the things I wanted in MT didn’t work (TypeKey and e-mailing comments, for example).

I was only with them for a week and a half before I got fed up and switched to 1&1. I signed up for 3 months at $10/month and got a free domain name, so I got RBoland.com too (it points to this site). After playing with their admin panel for about an hour, I canceled my GoDaddy account and made the DNS changes to point BrockLi.com to their servers. I had no trouble getting MT working perfectly, it’s noticeably faster (even on static page loads), and the admin interface looks a lot better and is more intuitive. I can’t tell you how pleased I am with these guys right now.

Once I got everything up here, I set about importing my old entries. MT exports one long file with all the entries in it, so I went through it and made a lot of changes at one time - updating URLs to the new domain, fixing the way I do images in posts, moving all pictures to Flickr, and adding keywords to all the posts. Importing it went smoothly, so I’m pretty happy with MT.

I did a little tweaking to the design. I still want to make it look a lot better, but I like it a little better now. One thing I really like was a small script I found on John’s Jottings to make Technorati tag links out of entry keywords using Brad Choate’s MTPerlScript plugin. I haven’t found a good way to tag posts instead of categorizing them, but that can wait for now; for the time being, I’ve just removed the category list.

I also whipped up a blogroll real quick. I want to make the sidebar more flexible without using PHP to include another file or pull info from MySQL. I found out how to make custom template tags, but I haven’t got it to do what I want. I’d like to be able to make a tag like <MTSidebar> that will cover everything in the sidebar. Problem is, you can’t use other template tags (like <MTDate>) within the custom tag definition. After looking for half an hour, I finally found that the default MT tags are defined in MT::Template::Context. It’s not hard to figure out what functions there go with what template tags, but I’m not good enough with Perl to figure out what the arguments need to be. If I could figure out what they need, I could do things like call _hdlr_sys_date where <MTDate> would normally appear.

For the time being, I’m walking away from it. I may decided to play around with it some more later, but I’m pretty happy with how well everything has gone so far.

Tags: blogging, movabletype

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.