Converting CGI Movable Type Templates to PHP
I love Movable Type. I really do. But there are two things about it which really chap my hide. The first is that it doesn’t offer dynamic page serving, so I must recompile my entire site after making a change. I can live with this problem as recompiling is just a question of hitting a button and waiting awhile.
The second problem, however, is that Six Apart left a few important pages as raw CGI queries. I’m talking mainly about the Search Results page, the Comment Listing page, and the Trackback page. I understand why the company initially set things up this way since when Movable Type first came out, not nearly as many people were using PHP as they are now. But now that PHP is so widespread, it would sure be nice if the company offered its customers an easy way to convert these templates to PHP.
Short of this, I’d like to share the ways I de-CGI’d these templates on Mike Industries. If you build portions of your pages dynamically with PHP, this entry is for you.
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March to Your Own Standard
So what’s up with the little grey button at the bottom of this site? It is my official Invalidation Badge. It’s mere presence on every page of this site renders my entire domain XHTML 1.0 Non-Compliant. Invalid. Erroneous. Whatever you want to call it. Here are the various crimes this one line of code commits:
- An ampersand is not properly encoded
- An alt tag is missing
- An attribute called “myfavoritetag” is made up
- An attribute is missing quotes
- A script tag is missing its type and language attributes
- A non-closing tag is missing its trailing slash
- A tag is upper case… gasp!
By invalidating my entire site with this one line of code, I ensure that I am made aware the instant it matters. The instant this stuff starts to break anything in the real world, I will know. If I only had a few small errors on a few random pages around my site, I could easily miss the day when “the big switchover” happens and wind up with broken pages I don’t know about. And since this code is in the form of a server-side include, I can freely remove it with a few clicks.
It’s kind of like carrying a canary down a mine shaft with you. As long as the canary is alive and chirping, you know you’re okay for air. Actually, I guess it’s not really like that.
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Interview: The ESPN.com Redesign
Interviewer: Eric A. Meyer, for Netscape Communications
ESPN.com, the online sister of the ESPN cable networks, serves up more than half a billion page views every month, so when the home page of the site dropped all layout tables in favor of structural markup and CSS-driven layout, the Web design community took notice. To add to the intrigue, the site’s design is (as of this writing) being adjusted over time, so that the site is in effect making the latter stages of its redesign process public. For a personal site to do such a thing is rare enough; for a major commercial site to do it would have been almost unimaginable.
The DevEdge team was as fascinated as everyone else, so we asked Associate Art Director Mike Davidson a series of interview questions via e-mail. We were so thrilled by his detailed answers, we decided to to split the interview into two parts rather than be forced to make major cuts for length. In this first part, Mike talks about the benefits of the new design, selling management on the move, browser testing, the ethics of upgrade requirements, and more.