I’m still working away, behind the scenes, on my new version of Monsters from the Id. The first release probably won’t look much different from what you’re seeing right now, but trust me… it is. I have to say that I’m very impressed with Movable Type. It’s a very slick system. And so many people make use of it that there is a lot of information online about tips and tricks that you can do.
I’ve been trying to set it up in such a way that it will be very customizable once it’s up without redoing the structure again. I am going to have about 60 files that won’t exist anymore, but I think I’ve found a couple of PHP scripts that will allow me to create an array of redirects in the “404 File Not Found” page. The cool thing is that I’ll only need one file–not 60–and I won’t have to keep the old folder structure that iBlog created. Plus with this script, it will literally say, “Oh, you tried to find this page? Well, it’s now this one.” And send you on your way.
Every page of the new weblog is now a PHP file (you know with a .php extension). I don’t actually have a single line of PHP code in any of those pages yet. And I might not have any in there by the time I go live with this update. But by naming the files .php from the get go, I’ll be able to add code to the pages later and I won’t have to do yet another round of redirects when the name changes from .html to .php.
One thing I did notice in the course of this redesign… despite my best efforts during the previous conversion of my website from tables-based layout to pure CSS, I definitely did NOT have XHTML 1.0 Strict code. I thought I did. I knew there might be a few issues with the stuff that iBlog was generating but I didn’t realize the extent to which my code was bad. Well I’m happy to say that I ALL of my new pages are XHTML 1.0 Transitional. They’re all good. I’ve run them through the validator and they check out. I might even be able to bring them up to strict but there’s one variable embedded in Movable Type which produces a image tag with the ‘border=”0″‘ attribute and that’s a no-no in Strict. So we’ll see.
The biggest culprits in my code were the links I made to sites with databases. Often the URL in address bar in my web browser would have several of the “&” symbols separating the variables that were sent to the server. I would just copy and paste this URL in my link but that’s not quite correct for a webpage. You need to encode the “&” like this “&”. Using that will give you valid XHTML code.
It’s too bad that I outgrew iBlog so quickly–it’s always nice to support Mac software. But Movable Type is so much more flexible, I’ll be able to make posts on computers other than my own–even *shudder* Windows machines!