Well, it took the better part of a Labor Day weekend, but I finally finished upgrading and improving my blog empire. I installed the newest version of Movable Type (As a business I had to pay for this upgrade, but the tech support was most worth it. I still recommend Movable Type, but it’s becoming more and more a real techie solution. I’m beginning to get over my head.) and had to rework a lot of my templates and CSS code to take advantage of some of the new features.
I also took the opportunity to give Quotables and ReViews a face-lift, basically folding them into the Monkey Outta Nowhere scheme to minimize my maintenance time. I also reworked these thoughts a bit. The biggest change will be right here on the home page. Using the amazing new Movable Type technology (OK, it’s not that amazing), I’m running the latest entries from all my blogs: thoughts, Monkey Outta Nowhere, Quotables, ReViews, Linkteria (do I ever update that? No.) and Spacebar (Speak’s blog) right here. I hope it’ll be a great way to check out all my latest content without having to visit so many sites. And it’ll make things easier on me when it comes to deciding where to blog about something, knowing that visitors to thoughts will get everything. Hopefully it’s not overload. Every now and then I’ll post a bunch of quotes at once to Quotables, which could be annoying, but hopefully it’ll be all good.
So there you go, updated blogging action. Let me know if see anything around the site that looks funky or doesn’t work.
UPDATE: OK, so apparently it wasn’t looking as good as I thought it was. Looks like we had some problems with Internet Explorer (of course), so I’ve tried to fix most of those. Hopefully you see a sidebar there to the right. If not, let me know. Those using IE might also see a grey bar at the top, just below my little pictures and above the actual blog entries. That shouldn’t be there. Let me know how things look so I can finalize this sucker and get it looking decent for everybody. Thanks.
Ummm… hate to break this to ya, but on IE PC, it’s looks the same, if not worse.
I see zero new fangled features, and some new layout wackiness.
I realize I am a fool for not using FireFox, or buying a Mac and using Safari, but I’m joined by over 80% of the internet world in my foolishness… so yeah. I’ll email you some screenshots.
Revised:
Now I see the changes (user error ;-). But the layout is still wacked out on IE and FireFox PC. Screenshots on their way.
Lousy IE.
My problems come because I was trying to use the CSS to get an expandable page layout, basically setting up the page size with percents rather than set pixel amounts so it would expand based on your screen size. I like sites that do that, so I wanted mine to do it. But apparently CSS or Movable Type’s use of CSS doesn’t accomodate that very well (MT’s default CSS templates all use set pixel sizes). I spent hours trying to get it to work without the sidebar jumping to the bottom and I thought I had it. Doh. Stupid things like 1 pixel borders were messing it up every time.
Unless anyone has any brilliant solutions, maybe I’ll just go back to a set size. Bah.