Back from Glastonbury, and it seems people have been busy in my absence. A while back I integrated some Javascript from “Stuart Langridge”:http://www.kryogenix.org/ which parses Textile formatted text into HTML – I used this code to create a live preview for commentors (which itself was inspired by the HTML live preview on “Jon Hick’s”:http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/ site). Jeff Minard spotted my “original post(magpiebrain – Live textile comment previews)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/2004/05/18/preview on the subject, and “took it upon himself”:http://www.creatimation.net/journal/textile-live-preview to add support for some aspects of Textile formatting that were missing from Stuart’s original script prior to integrating it into his own very nice blog (another site that has encouraged me to start a minor design overhaul). When I get a spare moment, I’ll certainly be integrating Jeff’s changes into this site.
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3 Responses to “Updated live comment preview”
Hi Sam,
How was your trip from Glastonbury ? Visited the website and it looks like it is a very exciting festival.
By the way I see that a lot of bloggers are using Movable Type as theri blogging platform.
And when I read their blogs, I cant help noticing that the entries url end with *.html e.g:…../entry.html. This is very interesting, does movable type actually generates HTML pages for each entry when you update your blog ?
Glastonbury was fun, too hot, too cold, too wet and a little miserable all at the same time – so exciting is probably accurate 🙂
“Movable Type”:http://www.movabletype.org does indeed generate html pages when you update your blog – in fact it can generate any text file. I’m using Movable Type to generate PHP files (I just use some Apache wizardry to hide the fact that my files are PHP by obscuring the suffix).
Movable Type is a perl based application that runs on your ISP – you interact via a web-based console to edit content (which is stored in a DB, in my case MySQL). Once you’ve made your changes, MT triggers a page rebuild, which depending on what you have changed determines which pages need rebuilding. After a rebuild, everything apart from site search and comment posting is static content and so it’s quite efficient.
MT is a little more complex to setup than other blogging systems, although for someone with an ISP which provides the required Perl modules and a knowledge of UNIX/Linux it should take more than an hour or two to get running.
If you want, you can spent an age tweaking it, as there are a large number of plugins which can enhance your site. If you like the power of Movable Type without the hassle, “Sixapart”:http://www.sixapart.com (Movable Type’s makers) offer a hosted service called “TypePad”:http://www.typepad.com. Movable Type itself is free (if you want no support beyond the normally helpful forums and only a few blogs) or you can pay to get support, more blogs and users – for most people out there the free version is good enough.
That is very interesting. I am currently constructing my own blog. I want to write the code from scracth (just for the fun of it). I am writing it in Java using struts,and hibernate.
I am thinking to generate static HTML pages for each blog entries. I think by doing this, my apps wont need to query the DB everytime somebody want to see a full view , with posted comments, of a blog entry.
And I am wondering whether the effort of maintaining and creating the HTML pages actually worth the effeciency reason above.
Thanks for the reply 😀