Last night I decided to update the templates for my website. Movable Type basically uses webpages with custom variables to generate the pages on the website. MT3.01D was released a couple weeks ago. I upgraded the server software then but nothing else. There were several fixes to the way comments worked so I knew that I was going to have to update my templates if I wanted to use those. Plus they were supposedly truly XHTML 1.0 Transitional which the 3.0 versions were not.
I was a little nervous about it but it actually turned out to be quite easy. My templates are not much different from the ones that it ships with. Of course what tool made it so easy? BBEdit. What else? 🙂
I went through each template saving the original 3.01 version and my version as text files on my computer. Then I used BBEdit’s “Find Differences” command from the Search menu. After selecting the original and my version, the two documents where displayed side-by-side with a third window at the bottom listing the lines numbers with the differences. By clicking on the line numbers, the effected areas where highlighted in each document. With that it was quite easy to make the necessary changes.
Of course I being who I am, was not quite satisfied with that easy step. I needed to make sure that my documents were XHTML 1.0 Strict. Which took a lot of debugging and running through W3C’s page validator. That part took a bit longer. But now I am. Or at least I am with all of my recent posts. I still need to check some of the early ones. Plus it’s not necessarily that easy to check all the comment pages that can be generated—preview and error and whatnot—since they are generated on the fly. I’ll still have to look at those at some point.
BBEdit saves the day, yet again. You are using it yourself, aren’t you?