My web page skills are getting really crappy.

The holiday break is always the best time to do some website maintenance, but my progress this year has continued to be not-so-good.

I thought that I would be ambitious and try to set up Textpattern after recommendations from Ram. While I found the initial setup and importing to be a piece of cake, I was unable to integrate my blog and linklog into one page. While I tried to follow Ram’s comprehensive post about doing so, I gave up after a while, as I was overwhelmed with the things that I don’t know how to do.

Then I tried upgrading to Movable Type 4. Wow. The frilly Movable Type presents users with a gorgeous backend interface, but again, the setup to integrate of blog and linklog entries are almost impossible, since some of the variables used in MT4 have since been changed or discontinued, causing the rebuilding process to be full of errors, may of which I do not know how to resolve.

I knew this was going to happen, as I recall going through the same procedures some time ago, so I backed up my Movable Type 3 platform.

Then, I thought that I would finally enable dynamic publishing from my current MT3 platform. While I was successful in getting it to work, I realized that my plugins then didn’t work. According to this article on learningmovabletype.com, it doesn’t work because MT plugins are written in Perl while the dynamic system uses PHP.

So there you have it: back to square one. I guess it’s true what they say, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Nevertheless, I implemented a few modifications to make browsing through the site a little easier. The bottom of the this index page lists the most recent entries and comments from both my blog and linklog. In addition, I managed to merge the two lists of comments from the Recent Comments page into one integrated list, rather that two separate blog and linklog comment lists.