Colophon

See also the MTChangelog pages, where finicky detail about this plugin and that spamfilter and the other customized template are offered for you to chew on manfully.

The engine

Movable Type v3.2 from Six Apart. Chosen on the basis of good press, a not-too-offputting installation manual, and a mention of successful use by someone on my domain hosting service (Judith Meskill). I started with version 2.661.

Initially I set up the database as the Berkley format rather than SQL, purely because that's where I found myself in the manual at that point. This wasn't future-proof and I began to get errors on rebuilds that suggested all was not well. I tried to solve these by switching to SQL and then realized I could upgrade to version 3 while I was at it.

The hosting service

ortholog.com[26] is hosted by Tiger Technologies, who provide a nice front-end interface sat on what seems to my amateur eye a rather fully-featured and powerful system. I have no complaints, except that for a while they were running a version of Perl that was perfectly workable but not quite as new as it might be. Life is full of pain and woe so, frankly, if I was too bothered by that I needed to get more perspective.

I had a previous experience with TigerTech helping out with another website run by a friend and colleague. While it was possible to find cheaper hosts, I couldn't find one with a better features list and with a reputation good enough to beat my personal experience.

The code

Tiger Technology's hosting platform supports PHP, which is more or less the only reason why I use a host at all (I have some no-frills webserver space on my ISP but wanted to learn Tricks and Hacks and suchlike). This means I could switch to another blog engine if I wanted (I quite like the look of Textpattern and I quite like the sound of Wordpress) but Movable Type is great so why bother?) Instead I have tinkered with some server-side frippery at a basic level and live in hope of no-one ever asking me any hard questions about PHP or Perl or all that.

I learned HTML by hacking around on a free bit of webserver provided as part of a university account, by improving the resulting mess through the use of the Barebones guide to HTML, by reading the HTML and CSS specs for fun, and then, with all that clunking around uselessly in my head, being inspired by, firstly, A List Apart and then more recently by reading Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards. The CSS Zen Garden provided stimulation while w3schools.com provided the nuts and bolts.

The style

Hopefully mine. This is where I've done the most damage. For ortholog I started with the Movable Type template Gettysburg (no longer available on 6A's site, although they've recycled the name for a MT3.0 stylesheet). Many, many changes later I've ended up with something with enough whitespace to please me but which probably owes a bit too much to Jason Kottke's site. Hopefully I did enough jiggery-pokery of my own[34] to avoid seeming too derivative.

Markup semantic sin: I have more than one <h1> because I think that's the right thing to do.

Stylesheet mismanagement: it's bloated and I will resolve one day.