Well, glad that that‘s settled. It’s been so frustrating having the site down over the past week because there’s so much stuff I’ve wanted to blog about.

Vacationing in rainy North Carolina and an over-night Linux install of Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl, phpMyAdmin, MovableType and all their dependencies (which was actually quite easy with Ximian’s Red Carpet software) enabled me to do some serious blog tweaking last week. It was nice because there were a lot of things that I’d seen around and wanted to do, but just didn’t have the time. So, without further delay:

Our Story now sports a spiff navigational aid: the breadcrumb trail. In order to get the metaphor, click on the permanent link for this entry and look at the navigation bar. Then, think Hansel & Gretel. The code required to put this together was just some clever manipulation of MT Date tags and some good old text links. The cool thing is that this is a site-wide feature, so every page on this site can be navigated “backwards” through a “hierarchy” using the trail. The trail just uses a regular-old <p> tag rather than an unordered-list, but I’m open to encouragement on that. Inspiration from Adam Kalsey and Mark Pilgrim, but the real reason I put this together is because we now feature an expanded archives selection.

You can now choose to navigate our archives by date, category, citation, and quotation. The new pages made the site archives a bit cumbersome to navigate, which necessitated a new navigational metaphor. The quotation/citation archive is actually a feature that Mark invented [PG] in his quest to support semantic markup. The citations page lists people (or organizations) that we’ve cited here by the number of citations in descending order. The quotations page lists websites that we’ve quoted by using the cite attribute in the <q> and <blockquote> tags. Pilgrim uses a custom solution that he wrote in Python. It’s taken a while for the blogging community to catch up, but Kevin Shay wrote an MT Plugin that generates these pages called MT Collect. Highly recommended. For information as to how to use this plugin, you could peruse our improved Templates page.

The Templates page displays links to almost all of the templates used to power Our Story. The page features descriptions of what each template does on the site and–here’s a real Ken qua geek moment–the date of the last change to that template. What I did was link some text files to my MT template code, so any time I change a template, its text file is updated automatically. The date on the templates page is generated dynamically with a little PHP that checks the last modified date of the template text file, so I never have to think about it.

I also made some more changes to the Mig Photo pages for user-friendlier layout and to help them conform to the breadcrumb trail structure.

I pulled more hard-coded references to kennsarah.net and “Ken & Sarah” out of the templates and replaced them with the corresponding MT variable tags (this was just necessary to get the site running on my laptop anyway).

Finally, I added a blurb about the Schmoze on the About page.

Whew!