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POTD? OMG! WTF? December 2, 2004
As you may have noticed by looking over there to the right, I've added a "Picture of the Day" (POTD) to the site. This is something that's been on my to-do list for quite some time but I finally got around to doing it. It gives me a chance to post pictures of something other than Sam (though she'll definitely be included as well). I also added the ability to comment on each POTD. It was all relatively easy to do with Movable Type, with the majority of the time being spent tweaking the templates to get them the way I want.
My next tweak to the site will probably involve giving the Now Reading, Last Saw, and Now Playing pages similar treatments so that people can comment on them, browse to past entries, etc. Maybe in a week or so.
I'm also contemplating a redesign of the whole site, or at least a new color scheme. I'm getting kind of tired of the current one and want to try something different. I'd also like the excuse to take my CSS programming skizzles to the next level. Any thoughts on this from you readers? Are you particularly enamored with the current design?
In the meantime, enjoy the POTDs, and leave a comment or two! They may not necessarily change every day, but probably a few times a week at least.
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Comments
Posted by Darren & Rebecca Tabor on December 2, 2004 6:40 PM:
Wow, I've got to get a POTD on PlanetTabor. Very cool. That's still one of my favs on the planets.
Posted by Jamie on December 2, 2004 8:27 PM:
It was pretty easy once I figured it out and had an example to look at from the MT forums. I just created a "Photo of the Day" category, put the HTML for the page with the full-sized pic into the "Entry Body" field and the path to the thumbnail in the "Excerpt" field. Then I put this code into the place where I wanted the thumbnail to appear:
<MTEntries category="Photo of the Day" lastn="1">
<a href="<$MTEntryLink archive_type="Individual"$>"><img src="<$MTEntryExcerpt$>"></a><br>
Today's Photo<br>
Comments (<MTEntryCommentCount>)<br><br>
</MTEntries>
Then I set up the container on the main blog to exclude anything in the "Photo of the Day" category. The last thing to do was to find a plugin that let me set up category-specific archives so you could browse from one POTD to the next without seeing the regular entries in between (and vice versa).
From there, it was jiggering the templates to look right (or close enough) and fighting the slippery slope to make a bunch of other, unrelated tweaks while I was at it. I have to say, Movable Type is pretty darn powerful.