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Sunday, May 5, 2002

MT and the MetaWeblog API So what does the MetaWeblog API do for MovableType? First, let me point out that MT does not yet fully support the MetaWeblog API. In particular, it doesn't support categories. More on that in a bit. But the best thing that the MetaWeblog does for MT is allow postings with title/link. The Blogger API doesn't support title/link. So if you post with Radio Poster to an MT weblog with the Blogger API you had to live with the fact that you couldn't add a title or link to your post. Back to categories. I'm not so sure categories are such a big deal for an MT weblog. They aren't quite as convenient for MT as they are for Radio. In MT, a category isn't much more than an archiving tool. If you diligently categorize all of your posts, then later you can go back and provide special archives of your categories. But without some work, you can't really use categories as separate weblogs as you can in Radio. But in MT you can do something that may be as good: Create whole new weblogs. So I'm thinking that if I were to use MT instead of Radio I would create weblogs for my Radio categories. Then each weblog would have its own templates and calendar and archive. Plus, with a little work, I bet I can get Radio Poster to stream to multiple MT weblogs the way I now stream to multiple Radio categories. That might be a cool Radio Poster feature. comment ()  9:32:47 AM  #   Radio Poster and MovableType MT 2.11 is out. I upgraded and now Radio Poster can post to an MT weblog using the MetaWeblog API. Almost. It won't work with the currently shipping version of Radio, unfortunately. There's a bug in Radio Poster. Well. I didn't have anything to test it with except Radio, so a bug slipped through. The problem is that when posting with the MetaWeblog protocol selected, Radio Poster ignores the Blog ID field in the configuration tab and always uses "home" instead. That works fine with Radio, of course. But for MT I need to set the blog id or MT won't let me post. I'm going to release a new version of Radio Poster to fix this problem. But I'm trying to decide how much other stuff I want to add. I really want to be able to control multiple weblogs and right now you just can't do that with Radio Poster. comment ()  9:24:17 AM  #   complaining-about-dave-winer parody This is a hysterical parody of somebody whining at Dave Winer and UserLand. I guess we can easily forget that there's a limit to how much we can expect from UserLand for our $40. I think UserLand has raised our expectations by delivering so much. I suspect, though, that our expectations are out of touch with reality. As an example, to thank Radio users for their patience during the recent outage, UserLand upped everbody's server space from 20M to 40M. I had worried what would happen when we run out of server space for our weblogs but now I see that we should hope for more outages. A couple more and we should be up to a Gig of space in no time :) But the extra space is greatly appreciated. Thanks. comment ()  9:18:13 AM  #

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Saturday, May 4, 2002

MT 2.11 Movable Type 2.11 has just been released. It supports some of the MetaWeblog API, which means that as soon as I upgrade my MT installation I'll be able to post using Radio Poster. I can't wait to give it a try. comment ()  4:57:11 PM  #   finally back up Looks like UserLand finally got everything back up and running. In particular, weblogs.com is back up. That's an important site. It when you update a Radio site it pings weblogs.com. Weblogs.com shows a list of recently-changed weblogs based on the pings it gets. And you don't need to be a Radio site to ping weblogs.com. That is a really cool service that UserLand is providing to the entire weblog community. comment ()  4:52:04 PM  #

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Tuesday, April 30, 2002

MT Templates, part 2 After calming down a bit, I decided to start over with my attempts to get MT templates that look like my current weblog. This time I decided to work with MT, rather than against it. I made small tweaks to the style sheet and low-and-behold, I'm beginning to recreate the look. I've got a ways to go, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. You can check out the results here. But realize I don't yet have any content in it. I need to get all of my posts from Radio and put them in MT. My plan is to add support for blogger.getPost to Radio Poster and then suck up all of my posts into files. From there I can reformat them into what MT wants for import. Somehow Jonathon Delacour got all of his Radio posts into MT and I really wish I knew how he did it. comment ()  9:18:34 PM  #

© Copyright 2002 Will Leshner. Last update: 2/7/02; 2:19:32 PM.