Tomorrow evening my parents will be flying back home.

They have been living with us for one week now, and it has been really wonderful. At this moment they are enjoying the weather in the swimming pool, just like most other afternoons.

Before going home, they will say goodbye to my in-laws.

They can get along very well, despite of the huge communication problems they have.

Tonight we will surely play some cards (for the last time) and have a small dinner. Tomorrow they will pack their backs, go one more time to the swimming pool, and catch the airplane.

We will surely miss them; our house will be more empty without them. But the good news is that we will see them again when we will visit the Netherlands next month.

I am having some problems in the comment form of my individual archives.

After entering a comment, the form correctly sets the mtcmtauth, mtcmtmail and mtcmthome cookies.

But if I view the page later, the contents of these cookies are not loaded into their respective fields (I’ve tried it with Moz and IE6). My browser tells me that document.comments_form.email is zero or not an object. Of course I checked my template, but I cannot find anything strange.

The <form> element has id=“comments_form”, and the field is also nicely called email.

I don’t know where to look further anymore. Can somebody have a look at this page, and help me with the solution?

Yesterday evening my parents arrived for a short holiday in our house. I came home from work a little bit late, so I had to run a little bit to be ready before they arrived. I cleaned the last things, ironed our clothes and prepared a spinach/salmon quiche and a salad with cheese and apple.

When MJ arrived with them, I showed them around in our house. My mother only had seen it before we started the reconstruction, and though my father had visited us in January, enough things have changed in the mean time.

At half past ten we started our supper, which was even for us a little bit late. Fortunately my parents had eaten some krentenbollen (anybody knows the translation?) in the airplane. After supper we talked a little bit and we showed them our holiday photo’s from Croatia.

This morning before going to work, I prepared the table for breakfast. While they were eating, I gave them our map of Lleida and explained them where our house is and where they can find interesting things. I also explained them how to make coffee and gave them the keys of the house. I am sure that they will be alright.

Some of you receive a message whenever I update this site. You can become a member of my update list by filling in your details on the form on my first page. I am using an external service (Bloglet) to handle these messages.

But now that I have my new provider, I am taking things in my own hands again. I have created a MailMan mailing list to which I will add all people receiving messages . At this moment I am still testing—in fact, this post is a test to see whether the notifications arrive to the list—and as soon as everything works, I will change the form on my site, so new subscription will automatically be added to the list.

Movable Type supports a notification list, but has no mechanism to manage this list. I will have to add, remove and change all addresses by hand, and since I am lazy I looked for a way to automate this. So now the only e-mail address in the MT notification list is the mailing list address. After that, MailMan will take care about distributing the message to all interested persons.

MailMan also provides a management interface where the recipients of my messages can configure their accounts.

[Update 12.08.2003] The test performed by this message worked flawlessly, so I deleted the Bloglet service and replaced the subscription form by a MailMan form. In the mean time I was able to help some other people setting up MailMan for their subscriptions by pointing them to the FAQ How do I create a newsletter/announcement/one-way list?.

After a quiet weekend in the swimming pool, the time has come to work a little bit. This week we will receive four visitor from abroad: my parents from August 12 ’till 19 and Roberto and Francesca on Wednesday and Thursday.

So that means preparing the beds, thinking about what we are going to eat, shopping, inviting my in-laws to have a supper at our house, … Fortunately, Maria José is working on a summer schedule, so she has a little bit more time than I have for these kind of things.

The thing that we don’t know yet is what to do this weekend (we have three free days) since it is too hot to stay in the city. The options are beach or mountains, my parents can decide.

It has been three days ago since I switched my site to the new server. Little by little the visitors switched as DNS servers synchronised all over the world. And little by little I noticed some problems on my site.

These problems were related the two changes I made in the set-up of my site: I moved my photo gallery from its subdirectory /photos to its own sub-domain photos.braintags.com and I changed all URLs of the individual archives from entry_name.html to entry_name/index.shtml.

The first change broke all links to the photos (and what is a photo gallery without photos?) which I corrected by editing all 51 entries. Furthermore I still have to create a symbolic link to some files from my main site, like robots.txt.

The second change broke nothing on my site, but some links to my pages on other sites (Google!) broke terribly. Therefore I decided to us my good friend mod_rewrite to serve people the right page. All I had to do was to create a rule to redirect requests for /archives/yyyy/mm/entry_name.html to /archives/yyyy/mm/entry_name/. So I created the following rule:

# Redirect old URI’s to future-proof directories RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule (archives/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/.*).html$ $1/ [R=permanent]

This did a good job, except for two problems: it also redirected the URI of my monthly archives to archives/yyyy/mm/index/ and it added a slash in front of the URI, so the URL would look like http://jeroensangers.com//archives/… The first problem was easily solved:

# Redirect old URI’s to future-proof directories RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !index.s?html$ RewriteRule (archives/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/.*).html$ $1/ [R=permanent]

For the second problem I am still looking for a solution.

Welcome!

If you’re reading this message, the server transfer was successfully finished. Exporting and importing all entries went without problems. Within 15 minutes I had copied all my texts to the new server. For sure there are some broken links (the coming period I am going to make them future-proof), but I will fix that the coming days.

Now all I have to do is wait until the DNS settings have been copied to all DNS servers over the world, and ask my old provider to drop jeroensangers.com.

Change of plans…

Yesterday I told that I was going to redesign my templates and style before switching to the new hosting provider. After one day of design work, I realise that I want so many changes that the rewrite is going to take weeks.

The style I was using until now was based on the default templates of Movable Type, which I adapted by adding and deleting some things, until it looked almost like what I wanted. What I am doing now, is starting with an empty file and adding one by one the elements I want to see. This is a slowly process, since I cannot spend the whole day working on this—I wish I could!

So now I decided that I am going to copy everything as it is now to the new location, and continue the rewrite on the background. Therefore I disabled comments on the most popular entries (to disable comments on all entries I need to edit them one-by-one. There is a script that can do this, but is requires PHP and MySQL, two of the reasons I am switching to another provider).

Now I have to copy the templates and do an export and import of the data. If everything works well, you will read the next message from the new server.

After I purchased an account for this site last weekend, I have been exploring the possibilities and planning how to switch my site to the new server. I prefer to think a little bit before I start copying recklessly.

The thing that took most of my time is making choices, since I have now so many more options than I had before. For example, I have three options to access my e-mail with a web client (NeoMail, horde or SquirrelMail), and three options to analyse the access statistics (AWStats, webalizer, Urchin).

Besides making choices, I have been experimenting on setting up a mailing list for the notifications, created a subdomain for my photo gallery, blocked some IP addresses, activated SpamAssasin on my e-mail, …

All these options are comfortably available through cPanel, something I have never seen before, but which I liked immediately.

Of course I started installing Movable Type, this time using a MySQL database to store all the information.

This gave me also the opportunity to play a little bit with MySQL. After setting up MT, I configured my three weblogs (Braintags, Braintags Gallery and Braintags Static Content), but did not yet copy the style sheets. I want to use this site conversion to update all my templates and styles. I am thinking about using a three-column layout for my main page, since the current sidebar is too long.

Besides that, I want to integrate my photo gallery by using a likewise style. So the next week I will be playing HTML-Kit and TopStyle Pro.

Once this is done, I will export and import all the date and change the DNS record so you all can see the new site (without pop-up banners!!).

FOAF provides an execellent vocabulary for describing people and the relation between people. It is a way to describe yourself—your name, email address, and the people you’re friends with—using XML and RDF.

This allows software to process these descriptions, perhaps as part of an automated search engine, to discover information about your and the communities of which you’re a member.

Of course I created a FOAF description of myself, using the FOAF-a-Matic. You can find my FOAF at http://braintags.com/foaf.rdf. If you link your FOAF to mine, please let me know, so I can update my file.

[Update 03.08.2003]: After seeing 23 404-errors in my logfile, I came to the conclusion that I must have saved the FOAF file with the wrong name. It is now fixed, so it should work alright.

For those people who are too lazy to look into the file, my FOAF description looks as follows:

<rdf:rdf xmlns:rdf=“http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs=“http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" xmlns:foaf=“http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"> <foaf:person> <foaf:name>Jeroen Sangers</foaf:name> <foaf:title>Mr</foaf:title> <foaf:firstname>Jeroen</foaf:firstname> <foaf:surname>Sangers</foaf:surname> <foaf:nick>Beltza</foaf:nick> <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>6fe5a1c9a2f3ce9d6a53d4f82d0e4a92254bba2b</foaf:mbox_sha1sum> <foaf:homepage rdf:resource=“http://www.jeroensangers.com/"/> <foaf:phone rdf:resource=“tel:+34-6-19204630”/> <foaf:workplacehomepage rdf:resource=“http://www.icg.es/"/> <foaf:schoolhomepage rdf:resource=“http://www.uu.nl/"/> </foaf:person>

I don’t notice the pop-up advertisements on this site anymore, since the browsers I am normally using (Mozilla & Firebird) block them, but I know that they irritate quite some visitors of this site.

But as they say: you get what you pay for. I pay nothing for hosting this site, and in return I’ll have to accept that my provider adds these horrible things to my pages. 🙁

But I have good news for you: today I arranged a new hosting provider, and since I am paying a little bit, they will host my site banner free!!!!!!. I could have upgraded my current account, but I have found a provider who gives me a lot more for less!!!

Here are the specs:

• 75mb disk space
• 5gb/month bandwidth
• Unlimited e-mail accounts
• Unlimited FTP accounts
• Unlimited MySQL 4 databases
• Unlimited subdomains
• 4 mailing lists
• One domain
• PHP 4.3.1
• CGI-Bin (Perl)
• POP3, SMTP, IMAP, & Webmail
• Unlimited e-mail forwarders
• Unlimited autoresponders
• crontab
• …

For me, the biggest advancements are the MySQL database, unlimited POP3 boxes and PHP. I don’t know anything about PHP, but I have seen a lot of handy code that I would like to copy & paste in my templates.

Another benefit is that without the banner code, my pages will contain valid XHTML 1.1 code.

For the coming period, I’m afraid that I will still serve my site from the old location with pop-ups, since I want to set up the new server really, really good, and like to fix some design flaws in the current site.

Be patient, dear visitors…

Már Örlygsson has written a howto on creating ‘future-proof’ URLs in Movable type.

In short, he suggests storing individual archives at http://www.example.com/archive/2003/06/17/12.35.57/. The archive file will be called index.html.

I like this idea, since it will allow me to change my site, without having to change my URLs. If for example one day I decide to use PHP in my pages, all I have to do is change the template and create index.php files. Since the URL’s won’t change, no links break.

Some day I might try to implement this, but I won’t use the directory structure Már proposes (/yyyy/mm/dd/hh.mm/). He doesn’t use the title in the URL, since he writes in Icelandic, which has some ‘strange’ characters. I write in English, so I don’t have that problem.

The other problem Már describes is that the location of the file changes if you change the title. This is true, but I also think that you think first before you post, and choose the best title possible. I have never changed a title of a post afterwards, and am not planning to do so in the future. I do see that this might be a small risk.

I also won’t use a directory-level for the day. Not only because I don’t post that much, but even if in the future I start posting three entries each day, the 90 files per directory won’t be a big problem. The benefit of keeping the URL short and clear is more important for me.

When I want to reread a message, I often just type in the URL. I can’t always remember the exact day, but usually I know the month and the title of the post. With these two bits of information, I can quickly look up a page. So I’ll opt for URI’s like /archives/yyyy/mm/title_of_the_post/.

Today I finished entering my photo’s (51 in total) to my photo log. You won’t find any new photo’s there; all these photo’s have been available on my site for a long time already.

The benefits of this whole operation are that my photo’s can now have more than one category, the navigation is more intuitive and that you now have the ability to leave comments on photo’s (I implemented the photo log in MT). Besides that, it will be easier to maintain the whole thing, since I control my whole site with a single tool.

Now that this is ready, I have only two things left to do: remove the old Image Gallery and forward request for its pages to the new location, and restyle the photo log according to the style of the rest of the site. The first thing I will do today, the second one may take several months.

[Update 31.07.2003]: I just removed Image Gallery and changed my .htaccess file to redirect all requests to my photo log.

After seeing a poll on SlashDot for the number of operating systems you have worked with for at least an hour, I started thinking about my answer to that question.

My first guess would be something like 6-8. After thinking a little bit more, I came to the following list:

• AIX
• Apollo Domain
• BeOS
• Commodore 64 OS
• DR-DOS
• FreeBSD
• HP-UX
• Irix
• iOS
• Linux (HAL91, Mandrake, muLinux, RedHat, Slackware, SUSe)
• Mac System 5/6/7
• MS-DOS
• Netware
• OS/2
• PalmOS
• SCO Unix
• Solaris
• Thu64
• VMS
• Windows 3.x
• Windows 9x/Me
• Windows NT/2000/XP
• Windows CE/PocketPC

That makes 23, amazing!!!

Of course you can always discuss about the definition of an OS. I decided to group some closely relates OS’s like Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me, and the different Linux distributions, but other people might consider each of them as a seperate OS. I have been thinking to group all flavours of Unix (including Linux) in one group, but than I would also have to group all flavours of Windows. Fact is that the different Unices can be very different from each other, so I left them alone.

What is your list? Have you worked with any OS that is not on my list? Just leave your list in a comment.

I mentioned them yesterday: the not yet so famous band Apesjit.

Why Apesjit? Sure, they are not the greatest band I know, but they are nice guys, certainly funny and play quite well. In short, they deserve some promotion and I gladly reserve a small spot on my site for them.

The first time I met Apesjit was in 1999 when we went to the Nirwana tuinfeest, a small festival in Lierop. We didn’t know what to expect, but after seeing Apesjit on Saturday early in the afternoon, we knew that we would have a great weekend. What a show!!!

Of course we immediately bought some t-shirts and after that directly to the band to complain about the text on the shirt. This was the case: they tried to convince us that you have to pronounce the band name as in English: Ape-shit. However, the spelling of their name is definitely Dutch (and their lyrics are Dutch as well), so we continued pronouncing the name in Dutch. Part of the t-shirt contained a dictionary page, explaining what Apesjit is, and according to the band we could see there how to pronounce it: Eip–∫jit. We told the band to make up their minds and choose between their Apeshit or Eipfjit. Until that moment we will continue using the Dutch pronunciation.

After that first concert we have travelled several times to the far south of the Netherlands to see them (on stage or looking side by side to other bands), and we even arranged a concert for them in Harmelen.

Now that I live in Lleida, I cannot visit them anymore. I surely would have liked to see their performance at the zwarte cross, where they played from a truck driving over the cross track. And surely they will be present at the coming Tuinfeest festival; not to play, but to enjoy the music and drink some beer.

If I want to see them again, I will just have to wait until they are famous enough to do an European tour. Until that moment; all I can do is give them some publicity…

I missed an important (for me at least) event: two days ago, the Mozilla Thunderbird project released their first milestone (version 0.1).

I have been using a nightly built for some weeks now, and I am really happy with it. However I have ran into some minor issues, which I hope will be solved with this release. I am going to download and install it in my lunch break.

Over the years, the emphasis of my site has changed a lot.

I started a personal site mainly to experiment with this new phenomenon. First I created a list with hyperlinks, mainly to sites about the Internet and sites about music.

After that I added some info about myself and started writing a sort of diary.

Later I was able to export data from my CD database, so everybody could see which CD’s I own. Besides experimenting with databases, I did this because I think that someone’s music preferences tells a lot about the person, and makes it easier to identify the writer.

Just before moving to Lleida, I created a completely new site with stories and photo’s from my life over here. Now, 20 months later, I am looking at my site, and feel that something is missing. This site does not swing, it does not rock and it does not dance. This site misses music!!!!

The only fragment of music on this site is the link to ApeSjit on my blogroll.

Listening to music is one of my greatest hobbies; the moment I come home I turn on the radio or put a CD. Since this site is about me, it needs music. Therefore I created a new category, so I will be stimulated to write about music.

In the future I will try to add my CD database again, but I want it to be completely automated, since the old solution needed a lot of manual copy and paste work. And maybe I will add the ‘Currently listening to’ feature so many other sites show.

This site is going to rock!!! :-D

The first half of my life I have been a big fan of Lego. And I guess that I still have a warm place in my heart for this construction toy, because I was immediately exited when I say the Mini-Mizer (Flash required), a tool to create your Lego alter-ego. I played around a little bit, and this is the result:

Does it look like me???

[Update 28.07.2003] MJ showed me better hair and a cooler t-shirt, so I updated the image.

I’ll be honest: this site is not receiving a lot of visitors.

Sometimes I have the feeling that I am the only one reading my texts. And I know exactly why. The main reason is that this site is not so interesting. And that is because I am not a great writer.

That sounds really pessimistic, but in my opinion it is realistic. My style of writing has been created at school; due to my education I mainly write down the ‘cold facts’, and try to use as less words as possible, while the sites I like to read are funny, well-written, poetic, …

The other problem this site suffers from is the subjects. I mainly write about two subjects: my life in Lleida, which is only interesting to the people who know me, and some technological news, which van also be found on a thousand other sites.

But I am like this, and this is my site. Even though not a lot of people are reading my writings, I really appreciate the people who do take the time to read it.

Because they are interested in my life now that I am living far away. Or because they are interested in some technological information I have been writing about (I hope that you could use the information I gave you). Or because they accidentally came here looking for something that is nor here (most people arriving on my site through a search engine are looking for Spanish curse words or serial numbers). No matter why they are visiting this site, I appreciate it.

But still, deep in my heart I keep hoping that one day this site will have a group of enthusiastic regular readers posting comments on the things I write.

To make this dream come true, I only have to do one thing: write better, more interesting texts. I’ve got work to do!

Movable Type is a great tool for creating personal sites (and some other types of sites as well), mainly due to its flexible template system and its many features like trackback, image upload & write functionality, sanitising,…

Regular readers (are there any?) of this site know that I did not need a lot of time to set up this site. However, I still keep on tweaking parts of the site to make it even better. It started with converting the templates from XHTML 1.0 to XHTML 1.1. After that I moved a little bit around with the different items shown on the pages, and adjusted the style sheet.

And soon I ran into the limits of Movable Type. Some things are simple not possible, are they? Fortunately, I am never the only one facing the limitations, and usually one of the guru’s out there solved the problem for me, always with a plugin.

Plugins are the feature making MT such a great tool. If MT cannot do it, there is always a plugin that can do it for you!!!

The following list describes the plugins I am using at the moment, and why I am using them:

BlogCopyright I could have created the functionality of this plugin by using a template module, but this is simply easier. BlogCopyright automatically creates the copyright message at the bottom of each page. It uses the year of the first and the last post and the author of the first message on the page. This means that I don’t have to change anything when we enter the year 2004.

ifEmpty This is more a programmers tool. It allows me to hide certain elements when they are empty. I use it in the definition of the file location of my Static Contents section. There, the category gives me the directory in which the file is placed. If there is no category, the file has to be placed in the root of the site.

macros Another tool to automate things. I use this plugin to create automatically the right code for some common abbreviations and acronyms. For example, MT becomes <abbr title=“Movable Type”>MT</abbr>. By the way, the macros are automatically created from a short list using the MTPerlScript plugin (idea shamelessly stolen from Mark Pilgrim).

otherblog Normally the sections are completely separated; you cannot access data like the name or the contents from an entry from outside a section. I am using a special section to manage my static contents, but would like to use some elements like the banner from my main section in the templates of the static contents. This plugin allows me to do this.

perlscript Again a very low-level plugin. This plugin allows me to execute Perl scripts from my templates. I use it to create my yearly archive pages, since MT only offers monthly archives. I am writing since 1997, so the list of monthly archives is way too long, therefore I created the yearly archive pages.

simplecomments There are two ways to react to my writings: you can leave a comment, or you can write about it on your own site and notify me using TrackBack. By default, MT keeps them separated, providing a list of comments and a list of trackbacks. In my point of view, comments and trackbacks are basically the same, but in different places. Therefore, I prefer to have a single comments list, with both the comments residing on my site as the comments written on other sites. SimpleComments does this for me.

smartypants Smartypants fixes the typographic punctuation of my entries. It converts straight quotes ( " and ' ) into “curly” quote HTML entities, dashes (“–” and “–”) into en- and em-dash entities and three consecutive dots (“…”) into an ellipsis entity. Just to make it more perfect…

I just noticed that I have only written technical texts during the lasts weeks, and since this is a personal page, hereby a short update on my life:

Things are going regular. I am very busy at work, and go home to relax. Despite of the heat in the city, we manage to keep our house cool by blocking any ray of sun during the day (our 30 cm thick walls also help a lot…). In our free time, we mainly relax: in the sofa, on a terrace, in the cinema or in the swimming pool.

Not really special, and that certainly is the reason you haven’t read much about it.

A month ago, I wrote about the shortcomings of Internet Explorer and how this might stop innovation on the Internet in the coming years.

All over the web, people have expressed their worries, and a lot of web designers are afraid to have to deal with an obsolete browser for many many years. And of course, an action has been started to convince users to switch to another browser: Use a Better Browser. They ask site owners to place a button on their site, linked to a page explaining why other browsers are better than IE.

Although I agree with them that IE is quickly becoming a dinosaur, I don’t think that a button will let many users change their browser. However, they will change because of (lack of) features. If other browsers have features IE does not have, users might switch.

Therefore, the best way to convince IE-users to show them the tabbed browser interface and pop-up blocking of Mozilla and create sites using code that is not supported by IE.

Of course, degrade gracefully. Something as the position:fixed CSS property can serve for this purpose, for example for creating a floating navigation bar which will always be visible on the top of the screen. IE users will simply have to scroll up to navigate (as always), while visitors with newer browsers will have the benefits of having the navigation always at hand.

Other features that can be used to create better sites, are described in Eric Meyer’s css/edge. These won’t work on IE, but won’t make the page unusable.

So go ahead, design your pages using the latest coding possibilities, but degrade gracefully!!

A while ago, I explained how I configured the server to return HTTP Error 410: Gone for all requests for pages created with my old CMS.

After installing Movable Type, all pages of my site moved to another location, and I was not able to work out the new location of the files. In short, error 410 says: The requested file used to exist on this location, but it has gone to an unknown location. This message is more clear than the message returned by default; the famous 404.

I always check the server logs for 404 messages, since it might indicate that a link on the site is wrong and I’ll have to fix that. One of the files coming up regulary in that log is the default MT stylesheet styles-site.css, which I have replaced by my own stylesheet with a different name.

I immediately wanted to add this file to my ‘410–list’, but then I realised that 410 is not the correct code, since I do know where the file went.

Therefore a better solution would be to return code 301 (permanent redirect) together with the new location, so any smart client would simply redirect to the new address.

To implement this, I only needed to add a single line to the .htaccess file:

Redirect permanent /styles-site.css http://www.braintags.com/paz.css

This line tells the server to redirect requests for /styles-site.css with code ‘permanent’ to the file http://www.braintags.com/paz.css. Remember that the destination always has to be a complete URL!!

After yesterdays post I started playing more with Movable Type.

I decided to move some static content from my site to a separate section, as described by Brad Choate. At that moment, the only static content I had were the HTML error pages, displayed in case somebody asks a non-existing page. These pages were implemented as index templates, but with the new method I can treat them as normal texts without having to edit HTML code. I also decided to move the Stylesheet templates to the new section, since they are hardly ever updated.

After entering the texts for the error documents, I ran into a problem. I wanted to use almost the same templates as I am using for the rest of the site, but these templates make use of template modules (text snippets), which are linked to a specific section. So I started looking for a solution to display information from one section into another. And I found exactly what I was looking for: MTOtherBlog.

After this success I created some more static content (a Spambot trap), and fixed my search page with the MTOtherBlog plugin.

I am very happy with my MT static content solution. However, after this experience I realise that MT is not suited for the Fimcap site, since it has too much static content in a more complex directory structure. This would mean that we have to create a seperate category for every subcategory, which would make it difficult to manage.

The buzz started with the redesign of Adaptive Path by [stop]design and Jay Allen. They used the Movable Type blogger software to produce a commercial site. And not only as a CMS to publish their ‘Appearances’, ‘Essays’ and ‘News’, but also to manage the static content of the site! Jay Allen posted a description of how he set up the Adaptive Path configuration.

Other people already had the same idea or started working after reading the above story. Doug Bowman of [stop]design started managing his portfolio with MT, Matt Haughey explains how to use MT in alternative ways, like creating an About page and using the database fields in different ways. He also lists some sites using MT this way.

And finally, master MT-hacker Brad Choate explains how to use the MT-categories to place static content in directories. Managing static content with MT is definitely THE hype of this week!!!

I have been reading all this with a lot of interest. Already for a while Sebastiaan and I are thinking about a CMS for our Fimcap site, since this site is at this moment completely maintained by hand at HTML level.

We do use some Server Side Includes (SSI) to handle general content like the page headers and footers, and NewsPro for some content, but mostly we have to change the HTML code. This makes it also really difficult for others to contribute to the site, since they first have to understand HTML and the organisation of our site.

We have been looking around a while ago, and the best fit I could find at that moment was Plone, but since Plone is so completely different from what we are doing now, this would involve a really steep learning curve.

But now it looks like we can do it in MT. We can manage our static content, create templates, and store our dynamical content. The only thing I have to figure out is how we can implement the site in three languages. I guess I will just set up a demo and start playing…