Red Leopard

I haven’t made many visible tweaks to the redleopard site since June. This isn’t to say that things weren’t going on ‘behind the scenes’. Here’s what’s happened.

1. System Upgrade

Hurricane Electric (my web host) offered all it’s long time customers the option of free upgrades to the new hosting environment. Feature-wise, it means I now have 1GB of storage instead of 250MB. I currently use about 1MB.

I guess they wanted us old timers off the old machines so they could retire them. The only thing I had to do was log into MySQL and set my password.

For some reason, DNS was screwed up for a couple days but it ‘magically’ worked itself out. I sent an email to support but the problem disappeared before they looked into it.

It just goes to prove the old adage: if you ignore a problem long enough, it will go away.

I can report that the new systems are much faster than before. In fact, Moveable Type running on Hurricane Electric’s machines rebuilds the site faster than my local Mac. I’m the only one on my machine. Sad.

2. MT 2.64

I’ve been busy on the sister site building infrastructure using MT 2.64. It’s all behind passwords so you can’t see it. I’ve not used any new features in 2.64 and it seems to be the same a 2.63. I will probably not upgrade to 2.64 right away for red leopard.

3. Site Code Organization

I construct sites using three major blocks:

• Banner
• Links
• Content

I’ve taken to moving the banner and links code into a module template. It’s located at the bottom of the ‘edit templates’ screen.

I then include the modules in my index templates. It really cleans up my templates and I only have to edit links in one place.

I thought about moving to PHP to create dynamic links but it’s easier to let MT it.

4. Links block dimension

I’ve finally given up on using a 150px wide links block. It’s just too narrow for link names. So, I’ve standardized on 200px wide blocks.

5. Rhymes

Finally, I added a Rhymes link to collect Tracy’s poetry. I may add some of my own. Maybe not. I’m still toying with different Links presentations as her list of Rhymes is getting long.

/k