Jon Hicks recently posted an excellent article on image rollovers with CSS. This eliminates the need for complicated JavaScript code in your site design while still allowing those rollovers that many have come to love. This is certainly a bookmark that should be in the toolchest of all CSS designers.
I’m not a big fan of Movable Type’s default calendar setup. With individual archiving enabled, the links for each day on the calendar take you to the last entry from that day. I think that it makes much more sense for that link to send you to a daily archive for that day. So now my calendar does just that.
Here’s how it works. First, I installed Brad Choate’s MT Regex Plugin. Next, I added a regex line at the top of my main index template:
<MTRegexDefine>s|^(.*/)[^/]*$|$1|</MTRegexDefine>
This regular expression removes everything after the final slash in the url for the calendar links. This works for my site’s setup because my daily archive is the index for the directory that contains that day’s articles. Different configurations might need some tweaking. For reference, here’s how I have my archiving configured:
| Individual | <$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d/"$><$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.fs |
| Daily | <$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d/"$>index.fs |
| Monthly | <$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/index.fs"$> |
| Category | <$MTArchiveCategory dirify="1"$>/index.fs |
I apply the regular expression to the calendar links by changing the MTEntryLink tag in the calendar to the following:
<$MTEntryLink regex="1"$>
Save, rebuild, and you now have a calendar that links to daily archives.
Dylan Tweney wrote an interesting article about using PHP to spiff up your MT blogroll. I’ve already incorporated this partially into my site. The gist of the article is that you create an additional blog which contains one blogroll link for each entry. The index page for that blog is then pulled into your main blog’s index with a PHP-based include. Very slick!
I just stumbled upon the Manhattan User’s Guide yesterday. This site seems full of tips and recommendations that should be useful for that next visit to the Big Apple. The daily articles are informative and well-written. I know that I’ll be consulting this site before my next trip to Manhattan.
