Tread lightly on the things of earth

In assessing the scenes about the Flint, Michigan mother who lost her son in Iraq, Goldstein captures well why I think all parents should see this movie, why each must be full-on aware of the cost of supporting Mr. Bush: There is only one casus belli that could possibly justify visiting this kind of emotional devastation on a mother, only one cause sufficient to permit a society to ask a parent to make a sacrifice so great that it leaves them lost in an endless desert of grief, a blasted husk of a human being …. For example, Rex recalls this funny tidbit: Unless you’ve lost your sense of humor completely, you’ve just gotta laugh when Mr. Moore intercuts Mr. Bush’s tough talk from cowboy movies with actual footage of the corny cowboys in those movies saying exactly the same things.

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Early on in my Movable Type weblog design journey, I let Mark and Anders guide me toward greater website accessibility.

But as time goes on some of these suggestions have gotten long in tooth — Mark himself made some sweeping changes toward “cruft-free URLs” nearly a year ago. What I’ve been most aware of in my configuration to date is how lengthy some of my entries’ permalinks were getting.

Goals

I want to shorten my permalink URLs, and while doing so I might as well also incorporate other changes suggested by Mark et al.:

• Change underscores to hyphens (for more advantageous Googlification)
• Drop filename extensions (a step toward future-proofing against published file format changes)
• Eliminate unnecessary daily archive subcategory (monthly’s enough; I don’t post much)
• Redirect old lengthy permalinks to the spiffy new ones (so incoming Google searchers land on intended page)

Result

before:
http://maikimo.net/mt/archives/2004/06/01/  \    changes_afoot_musings_about_webhosts_blogging_software_freedom.html

after:
http://maikimo.net/mt/archives/2004/06/changes-afoot

How

Shorten filename part of entry permalinks:

Dave’s Short Title Plugin employs square-bracketed keyword(s), if present, as the entry’s short title (or “slug,” the term Mark uses). Non-bracketed keywords continue to function as keywords, which I need for generating related entries.

Install the plugin, then in MT’s Templates > Archiving screen for the weblog under consideration, change the Individual Entry Archive’s Archive File Template format

from
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.html

to
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryShortTitle dirify="1"$>.html

Change underscores to hyphens:

Use Crys’ DirifyPlus plugin instead of the built-in dirify:

which changes previous result to
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryShortTitle dirifyplus="pld"$>.html

(where p = elim all slashes, l = convert to lowercase, d = convert spaces to dashes)

Drop filename extension:

which leads to
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryShortTitle dirifyplus="pld"$>

Eliminate unnecessary daily archive subcategory:

which leads finally to
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m"$>/<$MTEntryShortTitle dirifyplus="pld"$>

as the Individual Entry Archive’s Archive File Template format.

Redirect old lengthy permalinks to spiffy new ones:

Use Nathan’s idea to let MT generate the archives/.htaccess that rewrites old URL formats to new. Here’s the .htaccess implementation I came up with (click the Download link). I’m using this as content of a new index template that outputs archives/.htaccess.

I found parsing extension-free files for PHP directives (which I need) requires
ForceType application/x-httpd-php

so I put that in there, but it then needs to be overridden with a
ForceType none

in archives/images/.htaccess and archives/photos/.htaccess to allow graphics to display.

Precedents

I had observed the following:

Mark’s URLs generated by WordPress now look like
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/06/18/favorite-jokes

Shelley’s URLs generated by WP look like
http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2004/06/21/what-was-interesting/

Default WP permalinks look like
http://maikimo.net/wp/archives/2004/05/16/hello-world/

Default Textpattern clean permalinks look like
http://maikimo.net/txp/article/1/first-post

I’d been slowly increasing my reliance on Mozilla Firefox alongside Camino, which has been my Mac web browser of choice for a long time now. FireFox plus Chris’ splendid Web Developer Extension is pretty compelling if you’re trying to master CSS techniques. But recent days’ official nightly Mac Firefox builds have been wonky.

(Official nightly Mac builds of Firefox and Camino are usually fine; they’re certainly effortless to grab using Reinhold’s FireFix and CaminoKnight, respectively.)

In the process of reverting to a nonwonky Firefox build, today I notice that Martin (MMx2000) provides the occasional unofficial nightly build. I’m using Martin’s firefox-mac-TRUNK-2004-06-05 at this moment, and it seems wicked fast relative to the official build. Wow.

Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Martin.

2004-08-14 update:
Firefox wonkiness resolved altogether, and by wonkiness I mean its window layering kept getting confused and its text fields seemed to randomly stop accepting text. I don’t know how many times I tossed my preferences and started new.

Turns out the problem began with the release of Firefox 0.9, and the conflict is with Codetek Virtual Desktop Pro (v3.1, current). Quit CVD and the Firefox problems go away.

The bind, of course: I don’t want to live without Firefox, nor can I, given my workflow, live without virtual desktops. Here’s what I thought was the stopgap solution — Desktop Manager, the GPL’d free virtual desktop alternative for OS X (DM v0.5.2rc2 at this writing). But now, 48 hours of using DM later — with its associated Firefox (and Thunderbird) hassle-free operation — I’m prepared to say DM is not just acceptable, it’s awesome.

Which is what I also said, to my surprise, about Quicksilver. Once again, the Free Software alternative to a superb commercial utility meets or exceeds the commercial utility in quality and usability IMO (free DM meets commercial CVD, free Quicksilver meets commercial LaunchBar). The commercial versions are groundbreaking and I give their authors full credit for originality and ingenuity (and have given full price, BTW). But given a choice, I’ll usually choose, use, and promote the Free Software version, not because I’m a cheapskate, but because I want infrastructural software to be available to everyone.

I’m not sure it’s fair but it is where I’m at.

TextDrive. Last week from a lonely hotel room in beautiful Pleasanton, California — I was in the Bay Area for Documentum training — I (without much planning) jumped on a stellar webhosting offer from Dean Allen, maker of Textpattern, and thus became one of the lucky VC200, first “venture capitalists” of many customers to come in Dean’s (and business partner Jason’s) new webhost service TextDrive.

As the Textpattern CMS is TextDrive’s emphasis (but not requirement of course) perhaps I should devote more time to mastering it.

Textpattern. I’ve been admiring Textpattern for quite some time as an alternative web publishing system to Movable Type, which I’ve been using happily for the last year and a half.

Why an alternative? Not because I’m all a-dither about the Movable Type 3.0 pricing brouhaha — I like MT, understand it reasonably well, and appreciate its Perlishness relative to PHP. And I trust Ben, Mena, Anil, et al. to get the pricing/licensing kinks worked out.

Freedom. I’m interested in an alternative because I’ve been a Free Software enthusiast and advocate since my immersion into Linux in early 1998, and I want to use truly free weblogging software. (Shelley and Mark provide informative takes on freedom, blogging, and software licensing.)

WordPress. WordPress is another truly free contender (GPL license) and perhaps has the most post-MT mo’ right now. Shelley’s extensive writing about it at Burningbird (just search her blog for “wordpress”) persuaded me to look closely at WordPress, and it is indeed wonderful.

But Dean’s style just radiates from Textpattern (BSD license GPL license as of g1.19) in a way that intrigues me and captures my imagination. And my <ahem> skim-only, read-only “participation” in the Textpattern community over the past several months tells me these are people I’ll enjoy knowing better.

Objects. Textpattern employs software engineering concepts that rang familiar as I studied Documentum last week. For example, instead of uploaded graphics files being scattered in the filesystem of a served directory where they’re hard to track, each graphic file uploaded to Textpattern becomes an object with category, alt text, and caption metadata accompanying it. The uploaded graphic filename itself is of no consequence — it’s actually saved with a numeric filename — because Textpattern keeps the physical file associated with its image metadata. This easy-to-grasp object approach (where behind the scenes the object == filesystem file + database metadata) is generally how Documentum does things.

Object-oriented thinking in this context is still somewhat new to me, so I may be making too much of this. But I was struck by — and impressed by — the conceptual resemblance between Textpattern and Documentum on this.

Sizzle. Even though I advocate Free Software, I nevertheless use Mac OS X on my PowerBook most of the time instead of the completely free Gentoo- or Debian Linux distributions, each of which is as extraordinary on PowerPC hardware as it is on ix86 PC hardware. My use of Mac OS X is a conscious decision to forego a bit of freedom in exchange for enjoying The Most Empowering OS I’ve Ever Experienced. But even within the half-free, half-not-free world of Mac OS X, I use much Free Software, thanks primarily to the Fink project.

Here I am two and a half years into blogging, and I’ve cycled back ‘round to thinking I don’t have much to say. The unholy alliance between church and state in the U.S. is now unraveling on its own, thank God. The malign incompetence of our Executive Branch is becoming common knowledge. In my railing against these in this blog I’m hardly the lone voice I felt like last year; I’m now one among many. And of these many political- and faith-obsessed oriented bloggers, most write far more effectively than I do. So maybe now is a good time for me to be quiet and learn free blogging software.

I hope to return to writing about odds and ends I find interesting, useful, beautiful, lifegiving, instead of being constantly consumed by political/religious anger and despair. After all, blogs that showcase the multifaceted interests of people I’m delighted to meet are the blogs I most like to read.