Meta-Blog vol. #2
So as I gently ease my way into this pastime/hobby/way-of-life/thingy we call 'blogging', I have started doing a few things you may or may not find interesting, but which will kinda (I hope) help me make this whole blogging malarkey enjoyable for me, and for whoever reads lifewithouttoast.com.
1. I have begun the mammoth task of lashing a whole shitload of my pics up to Flickr. I had been Flickr-ing half-heartedly for a good while, but I have recently uploaded pics from my UK holiday last year, and will follow this with Attchoo! festival photos (more on that later), some nice panoramics (a few are up already), and general random crap.
2. I will try and add a few links to my sidebar in the 'del.icio.us lin.ks' bit, every day (the linkroll is missing at the moment, I'm working on that, in the meantime go to del.icio.us/matt_man). These links are all the stuff I find interesting/funny on the web. Read them, most if not all are good stuff.
3. Using the aforementioned Flickr.com, I hope to start 'moblogging'. This will probably start in March.
4. I will be making more (hopefully funny/cool/fascinating) videos and putting them on Google Video, so I can embed them in the blog. Some I hope will be more than 3 minutes long.
Anyhoo, for everyone who reads this blog (there's at LEAST 5 people who do), cheers, and I hope you enjoy it.
(posts)
4.21-en
Geek Support, fixing of bugger-ups, moral support, code splicing, tech. administration, whining, über-nerdery and fetching of fluffy coffees by 
Comments
I do enjoy it. You've only been doing it for 5 minutes and it's already better than mine *sulks*
Posted by: annie | February 8, 2006 7:28 PM
Aw, thanks! I do try. Most of the time. And I think yours is great! I'm still going through the why-am-I-doing-this phase. And I haven't a clue what I'm going to do next.
Posted by: Matt | February 8, 2006 7:49 PM
The blog's great (that goes for both of you, in fact), and I'm not getting any of the why-am-I-doing-this vibe.
Maybe it's just me, but I find one of the most useful parts of Adrian and Dan's sites is the feed of recent comments. Something to think about, while you're messing with the sidebar.
Posted by: QE | February 9, 2006 1:10 PM
That's an 'Adrian, can I have my f***ing recent comments box now please?' type-thing. Adrian is busy at the moment, there will be a recent comments box sometime after the 17th of this month.
Posted by: Matt | February 9, 2006 1:12 PM
Update: I have done the recent comments thingy myself (thanks to learning moveable type and Eric's Grumbles). Still a bit of work to be done on the styling, but it's there.
Posted by: Matt | February 9, 2006 7:52 PM
Nice work. Might be time to go for a new grading in geek-fu.
Posted by: QE | February 10, 2006 12:16 AM
I'm going for my green belt next weekend! :-) I've been trying to figure out how do eliminate the breaks between the commenter and the comments, as there's a lot of empty space in the column. If anyone knows how to do this please let me know (anyone who isn't Adrian I mean).
Posted by: Matt | February 10, 2006 12:35 AM
It should be pretty easy once you've found where the HTML for a comment (and perhaps the HTML for the column), but I wouldn't know where they live in MT I'm afraid.
If I stumble across anything in my virtual travels, I'll let you know.
Posted by: QE | February 10, 2006 10:20 AM
I think the HTML you want to look at is probably in the main index template (although since the Recent Comments doesn't seem to be a standard module the linked one doesn't have it).
You may also need to check what class attributes it uses and see if the entries in your stylesheet are appropriate.
(this may be a double post: they take a few minutes to show up and I can't remember what I already said)
Posted by: QE | February 10, 2006 10:51 AM
Yeah it's in the main index template all right, but it's in MT markup and I haven't a clue what it means, I mostly just copied-and-pasted and changed a couple of parameters.
Posted by: Matt | February 10, 2006 11:55 AM
Assuming the markup is similar to that of the Recent Posts block (and others in that default template) it's mainly a case of finding the start and end of the loop block. It might begin with something like
and end with (with some < & >, obviously), although maybe that's just wishful thinking. Once you're in the right place you can just leave the funny <$ ... $> in place (since the variables are in a good order anyway) and play around with any 'p', 'br', 'div' and so on that have snuck in.Good luck with it :-)
Posted by: QE | February 10, 2006 1:20 PM
There's no 'p's or 'br's, and the only 'div's are before and after the whole block of code. I'll try messing around and putting a 'p' or two in, and see what happens! To be honest, I'm more pissed off that my del.icio.us linkroll javascript isn't working, and the tagroll is working fine. It appears to be inexplicable.
Cheers!
UPDATE: Weird. By putting the tagroll/linkroll into the sidebar twice, it seems to work now. This messes with my head summat rotten.
Posted by: Matt | February 10, 2006 1:42 PM
I had a 'why didn't I think of that earlier' moment and looked at the source of the finished page, to check those comment things.
The structure (and I'm using [tag] rather than real tags and making up my own MT variable names which might not be right) seems to be
You're fine up until the comment body, which unfortunately begins with a [p] in each case (I assume that they get added when being entered, rather than when being displayed as most other systems would).I suspect those last couple of [br] do show up in the template, but they're not the main problem; you'll need to strip the [p] from the comments (and preferably all other HTML too; a [/div] could get nasty) and for that you'll need someone who knows MT far better than me, I'm afraid.
Hope that helps. If you ever have a problem with Nucleus, phpBB or Drupal I'm more likely to have an answer ;-)
Posted by: QE | February 10, 2006 7:44 PM
Thanks, QE and Matt! That means a lot, coming from people who know their HTML from their elbow.
Posted by: annie | February 11, 2006 3:55 PM
I know my HTML from my elbow, but unfortunately, I don't know my CSS and MT from my arse. And you're welcome Annie! :-)
Posted by: Matt | February 11, 2006 3:57 PM