Flashes of Panic

That (the phrase in the title) is an ugly neologism for the subset of the so-called “blogosphere” which uses Movable Type. If I catch anyone using it, I will attempt to collect intellectual property damages sufficient to stop them using it ever again, because I desperately hope it never catches on due to its ugliness.

But if anyone reading this is still using MT, (and it seems like everyone migrated to WordPress or the like since I started using MT,) I’d be interested in hearing about your plugins. I’m compiling a list to be included in a general MT installation, on the theory that installing a slew of plugins from the start will pre-empt user requests for them. So I’d be interested in hearing what you’re using, if any, so I can check them out and add them to the list.

In the course of this project, I’m learning more about the guts of MT than I ever expected to, and I’ve been putting some of what I’ve learned into this site. (For example, I figured out how to fix the search result templates to match the rest of the site design.) Tonight I added a few plugins which will be visible in comment displays: gravatars and a plugin which puts a different background color on comments I make, so they stand out from everyone else’s (so you can see how much more of a knucklehead I am than my commenters.) I could conceivably pick background colors to designate frequent commenters, but since it requires a complete rebuild of 1400-some-odd pages to apply this to previous entries, maybe I’ll hold off on that. You can see both plugins in action in the comments to this entry, and I promise it’s a coincidence that both gravatars are cat pictures.

(Of course, I’m having more fun playing with the software than using it. This was, originally, part of the point of the whole exercise, but I have to make silly self-referential posts like this one in an attempt to share, because let’s face it, televised fishing is more exciting than watching me play with software.)

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