Technical Rejiggering for MT4

I wouldn’t actually call it a site redesign, since I just selected a canned template supplied by MT.

There are many things I love about the interface, and there are many things that annoy me to no end.  I’d like to give people the option of filling out a CAPTCHA and publishing a comment right away, or leaving the captcha blank and letting the usual anti-spam rules kick in.  It’s not clear that I can do that without running into some problems with a very poorly worded message that first asks a loyal reader to log in, and then says “You do not have permission to comment on this blog,” when it really should say “The blog owner will hold your comment for approval.”

I hope those bugs will eventually work out.

I spent yesterday working on a script that would forward permalinks
from my old blog scheme to the new one.  It’s not perfect, but it gets
the job done.

I’ve toyed with using MT4 as the content
management system for my collection of handouts, though I will probably
tweak and re-publish them one at a time, rather than load them all in
en masse.

I am still not sure whether I will try to covert all the existing blogs to MT4, keep the site as is and give the new students MT4 blogs, or keep using my trusty MT3.34 site for another semester.

To do (in between my various other crucial tasks):

• Add “Recent Comments”
• Trim excessive monthly archive list
• Get rid of the gigantic new MT logo (I don’t mind a bit of subtle branding, but that’s obnoxious.)
• Add new home page in MT style
• Adjust handouts to use MT design schemes
• Begin importing popular handouts so I can maintain them & accept comments