Don't Back Down

I know. Movable Type isn't designed to be a completely dynamic publishing system. If you use dynamic publishing, you risk your site going down because it takes more resources or MySQL isn't running. While valid, I'm less concerned about that last point, as a part of the site that I enjoy is the commenting process. Without MySQL, comments won't happen either. Plus, I love what I can do with Smarty.

So I'm staking my hopes on my site, and more specifically, MySQL, continuing to run, and I'm making most of the site dynamic in nature. The biggest change recently was the introduction of comment pagination - this means if there are a billion comments on an entry, they don't all load at once, but instead you get a page at a time. I don't think I'm quite done with the comment process in general - notably I need to make some more sensible links and work on save times - but I like the way it's working now.

You hopefully didn't notice, except for the lack of comments for a brief time, but the individual entries are now being built dynamically as well as the other archives (Category and Date-Based). About the only thing left that is static is the home page, the archives page and the software page.

I also made some changes to the archives. Previously, pagination would use a "query string" at the end of a URL to bring up the second page of the archive. While that will still work, it wasn't what I wanted. So I tweaked mt.php, and now the pagination uses a number at the end of a URL. So instead of index.html?p=2, the links will use index.html/2. In either case, all you have to do is change the number at the end to another number to view another page.

Finally, I switched the order of the archives. Previously they were listed in descending order, like the home page. That means that each new entry moved all the other entries down one, and potentially onto another page (or even to an entirely new page). I realize that people like to bookmark things, and as such, it means what you bookmarked on the first page might not always be there. It also meant if you were browsing the archives, you were reading backwards. So I flipped the sort order, meaning all archives are in ascending order - you start at the beginning and read to the end. Any new entries will then be added to the end, and anytime you bookmark a page of archives, it will contain the same entries when you return.

Let me know what you think about the changes, and if there's anything else you'd like to see along the way.