phil ringnalda

Not only is David Gagne’s Blogdata tutorial (explaining how to do a set of icons at the bottom of each post for links to categories, comments, mail this post, etc.) a cool trick that I’m going to have to steal, it also finally made the Movable Type template modules idea click for me.

It’s really a pretty simple idea, just put any code that’s going to appear in more than one template in a separate template module, and then include it with <$MTInclude module=”name”$>, but once you get used to it, it’s a very cool thing. My first use for it is a “doctype” module, while I fight with Mozilla over whether or not a <hr> in an XHTML document should jump outside its parent and run clear across the entire body. I know, a doctype isn’t really something that you should be changing so often that you need it to be in an include, but I’m fickle like that. Then when I get done fighting with that, the whole sidebar is going into a template module or two, along with the popup comment code. I just hope it doesn’t include recursively: if you can put an include in an include, I’m sunk. Just like too much of my coding, I’ll end up with two hundred one line modules.