Okay y’all, I need to rebuild the whole blog database now, and to do that I need to delete all the archived pages so that Movable Type can save its new files into an empty folder.  Fetch is going to take its sweet time doing this, so if y’all come across any broken links, please wait a half-hour or two and they should appear if you hit ‘reload’.


The reason for all the fuss is that I want to make MT name my archive files by the title instead of by an incomprehensible ID number, like ‘02_000573.html’.  I don’t mind the goofy filenames, but the problem is that whenever I have to rebuild the database from scratch (by importing a backup I’d exported earlier) the whole damn thing gets renumbered, and all my internal links inside the blog entries get broken.  Anybody who’s ever imported an MT backup will know what I’m talking about, it’s a fucking pain.  It also breaks any Trackback pings, though I only have one of those to break at the moment.  But if I name all the files by their titles, I can do all the renumbering I want and it won’t mess anything up.  It’s not something that happens every day by any means, but I have already needed to do it like three times since I started using MT.  I want to avoid that shit in the future and get all my broken links cleaned up once and for all.

If I’m going to do this (and I am) I have to be careful not to have two posts with the same title in the same folder, because MT will try to overwrite any files with duplicated names.  I just went through and renamed all the posts that could give me trouble, mostly in the photos and ticket-stubs area.  It really only applies if I have two entries with the same title AND same date… because the way I want to name ‘em is like so: ‘29-this_is_the_title.html’, with the day of the month being first.  That way they’ll wind up more or less in order when I view the directory list.  I already have things being filed into folders by year and month, so that helps a lot.

I’ve been trolling the MT support forums for a more elegant solution to the file-renumbering problem, but this seems to be the best option for now, until MT gives us a better way programatically.  Another solution which many folks have mentioned is to include the date AND the full time in the filename, on the theory that you probably wouldn’t post two things at the exact same second.  But that would be even more grody-looking than the old way — it would look like ‘29070000-this_is_the_title.html’ for something I saved on the 29th at 7am on the dot.  My links wouldn’t break, but… ugh, that’s just yucky.  But I don’t have to go that far; all I have to do is make sure I never name a post the same way twice on the same day.  That shouldn’t be too hard, and it’ll encourage me to come up with more creative titles for my posts for a change.

I have SO much other b.s. work I want to do on the site, beyond just adding more content.  Among the things on my to-do list are:

  • Mess with the style sheet to personalize the default template a little more
  • Fix the funny-looking fonts that I messed up the last time I played with the style sheet
  • Put the front page into a table layout instead of using CSS for the sidebar, so it won’t always look so screwy in older browsers.  Either that or create separate index pages and redirect people based on which browser they’re using, but that would be more complicated!
  • Improve the organization of that sidebar menu, maybe create a pulldown menu to filter blog posts by category
  • LIST the categories of all posts under each entry title (’Filed under: Site Updates’ or whatever)
  • Clean up the master archive page so it’s not a thousand feet long.
  • Make the little calendar thingy on the front page navigable so you can go to the previous month.
  • Add an ‘On This Day’ feature.  That’ll probably be one of the first things I do actually, the next time I get a chance!

Any more suggestions?  I’m not saying I can do it, or will do it, but I’m definitely open to ideas.  I really want this place to be as user-friendly as possible, even if it is a total spaghetti-bowl!