We took a look at Zempt and went for it immediately. Why? Posters won’t have to open a browser and point to the MT site (Zempt immediately opens the add/edit item window); it includes a spell check; and the interface is simple and fairly intuitive. It would be nice if the editor was WYSIWYG, though, and we’ll have to install and maintain all the instances, but still…

Also, it’s free.

I added contact information near the bottom of the right column for two reasons: (one) that column holds links & general info, so the addition seems appropriate, and (two) that column will not grow so quickly as to bury the contact/responsibility info at the bottom of a long list. However (and there always seems to be a however), I ran into some type-sizing problems.

First, in order to make the contact information (there’s a lot) appear reasonable in an 800×600 window, I had to reduce the font size, which makes it fairly small at higher (1024×768) resolutions. Second, browsers will not introduce line breaks into long literals, so at 800×600 and lower resolutions the email address libraryweb@morainevalley.edu prevents the proper width sizing (20%) of the right column. This makes the left column too narrow and the list of recent entries visually confusing. So I chose not to spell out email addresses but to use the HTML “mailto” link tag instead.

We exported the data from the original (single, multi-category) blog and imported that data into our new (separate) blogs. However, the only data “exported” and then “imported” for images was the image URL– the image files are still sitting in the old blogs’ directories. So before we ask Jenny to delete the old blog, we have to remember to re-upload, to the appropriate blog(s), all the item images.

SLS has given us separate blogs for each topic, so we no longer have to do category engineering. Very nice! No per-category feeds, no individual category archive/index templates, no debugging per-category searching, no error-trapping for uncategorized posts! We’ll retain the posts relating to these topics as an archive of sorts, but life is now a lot simpler. Once the new layout gets OK’ed we’ll use it for all six blogs and ask Jenny to delete our original multi-category blog (we don’t want search engines finding it).

We also added a new page to the Library’s site introducing the blogs, explaining their purpose(s) and offering links to each (it hasn’t been published yet so it’s still a dev instead of a www. It’s at: http://dev.morainevalley.edu/lrc/blogs.htm.

The category searches don’t work. In some instances they do, in others no matter what category initiates the search the results come from the Blog Development category. This may be related to an error that’s returned during a site rebuild; it may not be. We’ll look into it this week.

Anders Jacobsen’s article Optimizing Movable Type - Category XML Feeds showed us the way (his article on MT XML Syndication is also clearly written and very informative). We followed his step-by-step instructions and they worked like a charm: we had a new template (which we named “Category RSS Template” as Anders suggests) that generated an XML/RSS feed for each of our categories.

But we want two feeds for each category: one that carries the full text of a post, and one that carries the headline (item title) only. To do this, we made a copy of our new template and named it “Category RSS Headlines Template.” When setting up the configuration of this headline template (the “Blog Config > Archiving > Add New…” step), make certain that you give the file a unique name– we used “categories/<$MTArchiveCategory dirify=”1″$>/indexh.xml” (We named the first feed “index.html”).

Then, to get the level of content we wanted (full/headline) we changed the <description&gt</description&gt section of the “Category RSS Feeds” template to:

<description><$MTEntryBody encode_xml=”1″$&gt</description>

and removed the <description&gt</description&gt section of the “Category RSS Feeds Headlines” altogether.

So far so good, but both feeds (full text and headline) carry the same <title> value, the name of the blog. Easily solved: in the full text template change:

<title><$MTBlogName encode_xml=”1″$></title>
to
<title><$MTBlogName encode_xml=”1″$> - <$MTArchiveCategory encode_xml=”1″$></title>

and in the headline template change

<title><$MTBlogName encode_xml=”1″$></title>
to
<title><$MTBlogName encode_xml=”1″$> - <$MTArchiveCategory encode_xml=”1″$> Headlines</title>

The <title> value will then include the category name, and the fulltext and headline feeds will have different <title>s.

We are turning off comments since we’re not going to use them (yet). Why? We’re concerned about comment spam, and we don’t want the added task of monitoring reader comments. Right now their value is marginal.

NOTE that the appearance of comments appears to be determined per item and that changing “Allow Comments” to none in the weblog config does not remove the “comments (0)” literal from items already posted. This confused me at first. All items posted before today will carry that literal (unless I go back and change them item by item), but comments posted after today will not. Unaware of the implications, I accepted the MT “Allow Comments” default of closed when we were setting up things. Today I changed the “Allow Comments” default to none (and hope that posters don’t change this). I don’t want to remove the comments code from the templates because there’s no real reason to, except to remove the comments literal from our early posts (a draconian solution to a minor problem).

Six tips for writing better RSS feeds from “Writing the Web.”

We now have per-category templates! Next:

? Create unabridged and headline per-category feeds. (Before that, though, learn about the different RSS versions.)
? Create an “uncatagorized” category/template to catch posts that weren’t assigned a category.
? Create per category searching.
? Check with Jenny about web logs (site stats).

Troy: I’ve been playing with the Resources & Search Tips category page, it’s a bit different from the other category pages, now. And if you liked Jazz Chicago, you should take a look at the unpublished Illinois/Chicago History research guide I was working on last semester (I think I might have included Jazz!)….

Jakob Nielsen’s article on writing for the Web won’t help us decide what’s appropriate for blog posting, but it might help make our posts concise to help avoid reader overload.