NevOn Experimental

Getting MT 3.2 right is hard work

Yesterday, I upgraded my Movable Type blog with the new version 3.2 released by Six Apart last week.

The upgrade itself was straightforward, quick and relatively easy, thanks to the clear installation guide in the new 3.2 manual.

So no complaints at all from the installation/upgrade point of view. Following that guide - plus an excellent mini-tutorial by Elise Bauer on upgrading - means that anyone should be able to achieve a smooth installation or upgrade no matter their skill/knowledge level with Movable Type. So if you're a complete MT newbie like me, you should be ok.

Where I have some disappointment, though, is after the install (or upgrade, in my case).

I do realize that, if you want simplicity in your blog platform, without having to be concerned at all with installing or doing anything like that, then you'd go with a hosted blog service like TypePad (for instance) as such things are taken care of for you. If you want to get under the hood, so to speak, then MT (for instance) might be your choice.

Yet I would still expect some things to be a lot easier to understand than they currently are if attracting newbies to the platform is one of Six Apart's goals.

A hosted server and Movable Type looking likely

I've had some helpful suggestions for the next step in the evolution of my blogs (do I stay with TypePad, upgrading to the Pro service level, or switch to a hosted server solution and run my own blogs).

In combining those suggestions with ones I've already had, plus my own thinking, things are leaning towards the hosted server solution. And I would very likely use Movable Type for my blogs; more on that in a minute.

So I've been looking around to see what's out there.

My first choice would be GoDaddy. My experience with them - I've bought domains there - is very good and their offerings for hosted space are also good. The only negative at the moment is that they don't seem too clued in about using their hosting service for running blogs, judging by the responses from their support team to my emails asking about Movable Type support.

I'm also looking at Bluehost and Midphase, two hosting services that seem to have rave reviews by users. Both offer very attractive deals. I used the recommendations from the Hosting Comparison site which has some great reviews of the various offerings out there.

I did look at PowWeb, but was a bit put off by lots of negative comments from users in their own support forum.

So, decisions to be made soon.

Meanwhile, I'm trying out Movable Type version 3.17 which I have as part of my membership in the Six Apart Professional Network.

I'm trying MT out on a local computer, set up as a server so it will run. I followed Six Apart's excellent step-by-step instructions for installing it on a Windows PC.

Still a bit of learning to do, though - while the MT install went perfectly, the MT-check script which ran on my first use this morning produced this error:

Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Access denied for user ''@'localhost' (using password: YES)

Need to figure out what I did wrong in the configuration, which I suspect is more to do with the MySQL setup and access rights to the database than with MT.

Also getting some great knowledge from Learning Movable Type, a truly excellent resource by Elise Bauer.

Stay tuned...

Rethinking weblog structures and design

Tomorrow, 24 July, marks the one-year anniversary of when I first started my primary blog on TypePad. I actually started blogging in December 2002, with a BlogSpot blog, but it wasn't until a year ago that I really got into gear, so to speak, and became a regular blogger.

In January, I made a major design change to the main blog and started this blog, where you're reading this post. The design on the main blog has been in its current form since then.

When Six Apart upgraded the TypePad service earlier this month and included a raft of new design templates and themes, that got me thinking again about the look-and-feel of both of my blogs and is it to time to change. So with this blog, I applied one of the new designs (the Powell Street 2-column left template) which is what you see today.

I didn't apply any of the new designs to my primary blog. The main reason is that the blog currently uses a customized version of a standard 3-column template which I've changed quite a bit. So applying one of the new design templates would mean that I'd need to spend quite a bit of time in customizing that, and doing it on the live blog.

While I'm quite willing to spend time on customizing, the idea caused me to think more about getting direct access to the template HTML code and creating something a bit more unique from the design and layout points of view.

Playing with TypePad templates

This weekend, Six Apart is doing major upgrading of the TypePad hosted blog service to roll out a wide range of new features (see the post today on my main blog for some details).

One of those features is a raft of new templates. So I'm experimenting a bit with that. I've just changed the look of this blog, using the new Powell Street theme.

I like it. Do you?

It's just a two-column layout (I had three columns before) which is one of the new pre-defined themes choices under Cool Themes. I haven't included all the various different typelists I have, including a very lengthy blogroll (that's still on my main blog). I've used all the template defaults and not, as I did before, adjusted things like column widths, colours, etc.

Changing layouts on the fly on this blog is easy, much more so than making such changes on my main blog which uses a heavily-customized template. Plus I don't want to make experimental changes there - that's why I have this blog ;)

There might be more changes as I play around with this, so don't get too used to any theme at the moment.

Technorati tag: typepad

New look now implemented

So I've put the new look at NevOn into effect. In doing so, I encountered a significant difficulty with TypePad.

What I did was upload two files to the root directory of the blog - the new style sheet plus the new banner image. The style sheet overwrote the one that was there. Then, I opened the blog in Firefox expecting to see the new layout - but the original one displayed.

I refreshed the browser, then emptied the cache and tried again - still the old look. Tried it in Internet Explorer, refreshed, emptied the cache - still the old look.

Then I thought: let's check the settings from within TypePad. Maybe it isn't just a simple matter of uploading a new style sheet. And that is the case - it is not just a matter of doing that when you make a major design change. At least, not with TypePad Plus, the service level I have, which doesn't let you directly edit page code or stylesheets.

When I looked at the design settings, I discovered that they were all still set to the blog layout as it was before the changes. Fixed pixel widths. The previous banner. So I manually adjusted the settings, uploaded the new banner through the settings interface (ie, not uploading it directly as I had done), and saved. This time, the new look took effect.

While I'm curious about how this all works, I'm not that curious! It works and I'm happy with the implementation. But note for any future change: whatever you do to the stylesheet, you still have to make the changes from within TypePad. And that has significant limitations on what you can do.

The problem with colour palettes

Constantin sent me some new banners with crisper-looking text. Far better than those I was able to do myself with Paint Shop Pro 8, as per the RCs yesterday.

I've picked one which I like a lot, a considerable improvement on my efforts. But I encountered one little problem that's all too common with graphics for the web - shifting colours with GIFs.

Here's what I mean.

• Release Candidate 3 - with the new banner at the top. Look closely at the blue background.
• Release Candidate 4 - with my tweaked new banner version at the top. Again, look closely at the blue background.

With RC3, you can see a slight but marked difference in the blue background about three-quarters of the way along to the right. With RC4, there is no colour difference.

The banner in RC3 has the blue set as 345C84 (RGB: 52.92.132) whereas the colour should be 2D5781 (RGB: 45.87.129) as it is in the blue background behind the banner.

The way I solved this was to take the banner and make the blue (which has palette entry number 28) as transparent, then save it as a new GIF image. No other changes.

I've caused this situation from the outset by selecting 2D5781 as the blue colour. According to the rather neat Color Schemer Studio which I've been playing with for the past week (it has a 15-day trial), this colour is not web safe. So if you create an image with this colour and then save it as a 256-colour GIF, the colour will be matched to the closest palette entry, not this colour. There's more to it than that, though - here's a good explanation of web-safe colours on the Web Developer's Journal site.

Anyway, Constantin has been a massive help. So I'm almost ready to make the layout switch on my main blog. After a little further testing, mostly to make sure I don't mess up the style sheet, and some re-ordering of the sidebar items (it's a bit disorganized at the moment) in the blog, I plan to make that switch sometime later today.

New blog layout RC2

(Posting this with BlogJet. Yes, it does support multiple blog accounts. Thanks, Dmitry, for explaining how. It is actually quite simple to set up, when you know how.)

So I've tweaked the font size for 'NevOn' in the banner graphic so this further layout is really a minor increment:

• NevOn layout: Release Candidate 2

Not wholly happy with how the words look in the banner - not as crisp-looking as I would like - but that's the best I can do with Paint Shop Pro 8.

Sleep on this, decide tomorrow.

New blog layout RC1

Constantin's ideas and suggestions for the new layout I plan to implement on my main blog have been extremely helpful. The new layout is a 'minor current design refresh,' not a brand new design.

Thinking about what he suggests, I've now got very close indeed to what I'm happy with. Re-did the banner graphic with laptop-typing at the left now. I used a style sheet (style_1.css), edited the banner image location and file name and changed the alignment to 'left' rather than 'center.' The more I thought about how I re-did the banner, the more ranging it left seemed logical.

So here's the new layout:

• NevOn layout: Release Candidate 1

Yes, I like the look of it taking up the full screen width rather than the narrow columns with lots of space either side. The only thing I don't like right now is that 'NevOn' in the banner is too big, ie, font size. I'll re-do the banner with the name slightly smaller.

Doing all this in Paint Shop Pro 8, which is all you really need for simple work like this.

Constantin is a wizard!

In my email this morning was an overnight note from Constantin Basturea who writes the PR Meets the WWW blog. Not only that, Constantin is the architect of the Headlines from PR Weblogs list and the owner of The New PR Wiki CEO Blogs List.

He has some great suggestions for layout ideas for my main blog. He did more than just that, though.

Constantin took those ideas several steps further by actually creating some pages so I could see what they looked like:

I tried a couple of tricks for the layout of your blog. First, I tried to see if there's a way to center the banner -- and I found one. Please see:

nevon_experimental_1.html
(the corresponding CSS is: style_1.css)

Second, I tried to replace the dark blue banner with a silver one:

nevon_experimental_2.html
(CSS: style_2.css)

But in this configuration the laptop photo looks out of sync with the rest of the layout, so I tried to align it with the right side menu (the blogroll):

nevon_experimental_3.html
(CSS: style_3.css)

The only problem I see with this approach is that the banner will stay aligned to the right, and it will not look so good on very big monitors (bigger than, let's say, 1600x1200 px). But again, few people have such monitors right now.

In my email back to Constantin, I said I'd place these files within this experimental blog as I will be looking at them quite a bit, so rather than consume his bandwidth let's consume mine.

The most interesting thing here to me is the use of style sheets. That hadn't occurred to me. When I read Constantin's email, I had one of those duh! moments. Of course - a style sheet. I think I was too wrapped up in the assumption that I couldn't do a style sheet with my Plus service level on TypePad, as you can't dive directly in to the HTML code in the template.

That's erroneous thinking, as within the root directory of the blog, I see a file called 'style.css.' It might be just a simple matter of uploading a new style sheet file to overwrite the existing one.

So I have plenty more to do now with this design experiment than I originally thought. But that's cool!

This really is a massive help. Again, Constantin, thanks for your knowledge, skill and selfless help.

(Constantin was also my 'design mentor' when I first created a blog on TypePad, last July. He had some great suggestions that helped me understand how do some things on TypePad that would have taken me ages otherwise. A wizard!)

Solid blue banner not so good

(Using ecto again as BlogJet doesn't support mutliple blogs on the same account. Big weakness of that program.)

Using the banner from the main blog just doesn't look good here with the solid blue across the whole screen width. Plus re-creating it again, I didn't do the height the same so the overall solid look was way too much.

I've reverted back to the text headline as I re-think some more.

Blue text (2D5781) on a white background. Getting a bit closer to how I think I want it, but too much white overall. Added the faint silver tint (F2F2F2) to the left and right columns as per the main blog. The idea here is to help focus the eye on the main content in the center column. But, that white headline/banner background makes for too much white.

More experimenting tomorrow.

Drew dropped in earlier, left a comment in the previous post. Nice. Took me a bit by surprise, though, when I saw the Gmail notifier popping up with the comment notification from TypePad as I thought this blog wasn't on any radar screen. Obviously is :)

Thinking about the banner

(I'm posting this using ecto for Windows, see how it works in this blog as part of the profile that ecto recognizes.)

So, re the banner.

One of the things I've not been able to figure out in TypePad is how to center the banner image. Whatever I do, it just won't center.

What I'm going to try is to recreate the current one with a transparent background, so you'll just see the title and the laptop-typing image. Then, I'll set the banner background colour to what it currently is on the main blog.

Then it won't matter too much if it's not centered. I think.

See what happens.

Full width display

The template for this blog is a 3-column one, which I've customized so that the blog displays across the full width of the screen rather than in the narrow columns that are so common on blogs.

The settings are these:

• Left column: 200 pixels
• Center column: fluid
• Right column: 200 pixels

I like how it looks. My main blog has the same left and right column settings, but the center column is set to 500 pixels.

Before I make a change (and I will), I need to re-do the graphic banner on that blog. It's designed to 900 pixels width. I think I'll need to do one of two things:

1. Either keep it as is but ensure the banner background behind it is exactly the same colour; or
2. Think up something entirely new.

I'll likely experiment with it here!

Just setting up

I've just set up this new experimental blog as a place to try out some things, mostly design and layout ideas.

I've not really explored all the options TypePad offer in this regard, and I don't want to mess around with my primary blog.

So let's see what develops here.