Day: October 1, 2003

MT Category Archiving

looky

I want to have different individual archive templates for postings in different categories. Why? Because the way I implemented my Daily Links and Amazon entries means that the individual pages for those entries will usually be a blank page. Additionally, traversing the “linked list” of the various individual entries will bring the casual surfer (or more likely a crawler like Google) to those blank pages.

Obviously, I should just remove the links at the top which form this linked list. But wouldn’t it be nice if I could link around postings of certain categories? Maybe by linking to the next posting of a given category?

A possible (heavy-duty) solution is writing modules for new functionality in MT:

  • Turn off archiving for certain categories. More generally,
  • Enable the blog author to specify templates based on the category of the posting. Possibly this could have some kind of “MTArchiveAbort” tag in the template to tell MT to stop generating the page and link around the posting. If just this tag was implemented, and some conditional tag based on the value of the posting’s category, you wouldn’t even need to implement “turn off archiving for certain categories” because you could just have a bunch of individual archives which abort themselves for the categories which are persona non grata and no archive templates which don’t abort those categories.
  • Also sort of related: shouldn’t you be able to disallow comments on certain categories of postings?

There are lighter-weight (i.e. “hack-ier”) approaches to turning off individual archives for entries in the “Link” category. Two major options on implementing this:

  1. Eliminate individual archives altogether for every category. One thing that would break is Comments- right now the way I surf comments is usually at the bottom of the individual archive. However since I have a popup for adding and viewing comments on the main page and the monthly archives, they are still available… just not as visible. Maybe have some crazy layer/javascript voodoo like on Aaron’s reading list? Comments could be shown or hidden?

    Another thing this breaks is RSS, because right now the URL my RSS entries point to is the individual archive page for that article… refs would now go back to pointing to the anchor for that posting on the monthly archive (or on the index page, which may be the MT default):

  2. Keep all the individual archives, but force them to go into directory trees named for the category. Then, turn off all access to the individual pages for the “Link” category postings. Not a real elegant solution, since the archive pages are still generated when you make a new posting… Although I could just tell the web server to redirect all requests to that area to my main index page!

    Also note that this idea is compatible with having different individual archive templates for each category- For example:

    • The categories are A and B
    • The individual archive templates are x and y
    • The template x is for category A, and might look ugly for category B
    • The template y is for category B, and might look ugly for category A

    So, every time there is a posting, say posting 404, we would generate all the permutations in their proper directories. Supposing entry 404 is in category A, MT would generate:

    • archives/A/x_404.html
    • archives/A/y_404.html

    That is, all the individual archive templates… even though only the one using template x is appropriate. So all you do is never link to the file using template y.

    Notice this increases the time it takes to process a single entry- if there are N categories, you multiply your current build time by N.

In order for either to work, I believe it would be necessary to break the “chain” of individual archives at the top of the page, because each page might now be in a totally different directory hierarchy… although it would be still possible to reconstruct the directory, so maybe this is an unfounded concern.

I want to have different individual archive templates for postings in different categories. Why? Because the way I implemented my Daily Links and Amazon entries means that the individual pages for those entries will usually be a blank page. What should I do?

Show Killers

looky

There are some actors who have been associated with so many cancelled television shows that they have been dubbed “show killers.” Do a search on any of these names with the phrase “show killer” and you’ll see how this works.

“Show Killers” are characterized by a large number of TV credits in successive years, and frequent mentions on Jump the Shark. Accomplished show killers can kill a long-running, successful show… although there is a certain amount of scapegoating involved!

Some notable Show Killers and their IMDB entries: