My latest baby launched

December 23, 2005

I absolutely wanted to get this out before the end of the year. I managed, and I’m happy that I did, because this means we have a fancy fun platform to work with in the new year.

The migration, compared to the others I’ve done, was relatively painless. We wrote a custom plugin for our previous blog system that dumped the entries, comments and trackbacks into the Movable Type import format. It almost worked out fine, even all the UTF-8 weirdnesses — just make sure that the file remains UTF-8 at all times.

One small quirk though. Suppose MT comes across this bit of data in the import file:

 -----
 COMMENT:
 AUTHOR: aaaa
 IP: 11.22.33.44
 DATE: 09/03/2005 11:41:00 AM

 -----

That is, a comment with an empty body. MT then apparently freaks out and places the whole thing into the comment body, whereas it should all be actually metadata, and there’s no body. I’m not sure what behaviour should be the most “correct” here. At least it’s easy to find and kill these comments (empty comment is of no value), but you have to do it because otherwise you’d expose some people’s IP-s to the world, and that’s not so good from privacy standpoint. Just search for “AUTHOR” in comment bodies, because no sane person has that as the comment text, and do a bulk kill. (MT-s power searching and editing features rock. Obviously designed and done by someone who knows what they’re doing.)

Back to the share blogs. I have the privilege to work with some of the world’s greatest designers and HTML/CSS gurus who do everything you need and more. So we’re quite happy with how it came out. Especially I like the comment bubbles — both other commenters’ texts and “my” entry bubble. I haven’t seen this anywhere before and I think it captures well what Skype is all about. If this picks up, we might think of making it a public Movable Type theme or something, but first let’s get some feedback and see.

My latest baby launched

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