I don't miss Movable Type
I do, however, miss the times when I didn't have to deal with, or even think about, its terrible templates. All that 'rebuilding' is bad enough, and the default page structure is even worse. All those nested divs, and none of them closing until the end!! It's enough to give you nightmares.
Short, semi-coherent, complaining posts. That's all you're gonna get until I have time to pause and get some sleep.* And you're gonna like it!**
*If that ever happens.
**Or at least quietly put up with it for a couple days. Please?
SNOOZR
OMG, it's been like so totally long since i rapped a'chall! So much to say! Well, okay so first of all that total hotty finally asked me to the dance...
oh no wait. this is my GROWN UP blog. Um, i guess i gotta write like grown-up news. Hmm, the stock market plunge yesterday? That totally sucked, right? And, oh, my hair? Still brown.
Britney Spears, eh? Wow.
Last weekend Dan and i were entering the front door of a local eatery, and as this other couple walked out of the door i overheard the woman saying, "You know, I really wanted to cut my nails before I came out. I don't know why I forgot." People, it was like i was looking into a fun-house mirror. THAT'S US! i thought. Sharing the most booring possible details of our daily lives? because there is really nothing more interesting to talk about? Wow, it was like looking at myself in five years. Except, like, if we lived in a bizarro world where we ate an hour earlier.
In all seriousness, there is a lot of stuff going on in our lives, like a bajillio-million hours of homework. But if all i talked about on this blog was significance of r-squared in clinical trials, you guys would be like: OMG! snooooze-fest! Except for you Becky. (Hi Becky! My R-square is above .5!!!)
Boycott Movable Type!
Yes, Ben and Mena are cuteóat least, I guess it's cute that they're married and have this big successful new-internet company and all. But taken on it own merits, their company has issues. I mean, the company they run, not the company they keep. I mean, I'd be happy to have them over for dinner or something, I guess; they're fine company I'm sure. Er... But I can't complain too much about their product, and specifically their product's tendency to put two or even three <div>s around every element in the html it produces. And even worse! They're not even around the elements, they... Oh wait. What's that you say? I can complain too much about this? And I am, in fact, doing so now? Well then, don't click on that little link right below this text!
What they do to, for example, a simple post is as follows:
<div class="post">
<div class="post_body">
Post Header
<div class="entry">
<div class="entry_body">
Post text blah blah blah
<div id="more_text">
I'll leave out the extra div wrappers; you can imagine them all there.
<div class="post_footer">
Some links and junk go here
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
That's not an exaggeration, I don't believe; it's actually even worse than that. I just got wicked board of formatting indents with the space bar. WHICH THEY DO TO!!!!! It's because their whole system is designed to be edited in a web browser, like this post. Which suggests that they want it to be editable by people who don't know how to, I don't know, use ftp. So why do their tags look like "<$MTEntryDate format="%x %X"$>"?! I have it on good authority that dollar signs and percent signs in the same tag are very intimidating to non-programmers. They sure are to me!!
Just in case you thought I was exaggerating about the not-closing-divs-til-the-end thing, I present you a real-life example from a template I happened to have up in my other browser window. It's the end of the master archive template, if you're keeping score at home.
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Really. Could that possibly be a fragment of semantic markup? The answer, is no.