Well folks, I’ve fixed my notifications by installing MT Notifier. If you were subscribed to my notifications before, you should have gotten a notice about this entry. Installation was pretty straightforward, although it didn’t seem like it would be. Frankly, I should have done this weeks ago.
There are several very cool things about MT Notifier:

1. I don’t have to do anything to get notifications sent out, they’re automatic.
2. There’s a user management system for subscriptions. Each person can access their subscriptions and change them as they wish.
3. You can subscribe to the entire blog, a specific category, by entry and you can choose to receive notice of both entries and comments or just entries.

I’m going to have to figure out how to create a form to add subscriptions like I had before. The old form calls the old (broken) notification system, so I’ve removed it. I’ll also have to figure out how to add a subscription checkbox to the comment form so folks can subscribe to comments.
If you haven’t been here since the notifications stopped, the last entry that you were probably notified about was just before the upgrade to MT 3.15. If you’d like to catch up, start here.

Testing MT notifier. Here goes …

I’ve implemented an upgrade to my commenting form that I’ve been working on.
It starts with the Quicktags I first saw at Arvid’s Movalog site. He tweaked Alex King’s JavaScript Quick Tags that I guess are built into WordPress. I took Alex’s files and hacked my way through them until I ended up with a 2 line series of buttons with different labeling.
I added to that the instant previewing that I stole from Greg’s blog. It was part of the equix theme for the WP 1.5 theme competition.
So, now you can add bold, italics, underline, strike through,

blockquote,

links and

• bulleted

or

1. numbered

lists to your comments at the touch of a button! All while watching it magically appear at the bottom of the page.
Now, to work on those notifications …

I changed the monthly archive, category archive and main page templates so that the post title is a link to the post’s permanent link. In other words if you scroll down and click the words INTERVIEW QUESTIONS and you’ll end up here.
Yeah, I know you’re all exited so, break out the hats and hooters and party like it’s 1999.

I installed a new plug in called MT Acronym. It adds acronym tags to known abbreviations. Why? Well, why not?
Let’s test it:
AAC, CoC, CDRW, DHTML, GSSAPI, ICOC, ISDN, JPEG, PERL, RM, SPEBSQSA, SSLUG
Fun, huh?

I’ve entered (or will be entering, depending on when you’re reading this) a couple of new links at the left.
The first is kendallball.net. I found Greg through Radical Congruency. He’s pursuing his Master of Arts in Missions degree right now at a Church of Christ college (I think, but I don’t know which one!) I enjoy reading his stuff and I really like finding folks who are from a Church of Christ heritage. I surf over to his place pretty regularly.
The second is the blog at New Wineskins Magazine. Another link found through Radical Congruency, New Wineskins is a magazine that is not Church of Christ affiliated (that I can tell) but most of the folks there come from a Restoration movement background. Greg does some writing there too along with several others.

Well, I still don’t know what exactly is causing my email notifications not to work, other than (according to users at the MT support forum) it’s related to upgrading to Movable Type 3.15. I’ve been unable to get any info on how I can fix it or when a new release is coming out. So, in the mean time I’ve come up with a work around. Since I’m still getting the notifications, I set up my email program at home to automatically forward them to my notification list.
Hopefully Six Apart will have a solution soon.
UPDATE: Well, it only took about 30 seconds to figure out the problems with that system.
First, in order to BCC the list (and not broadcast everyone’s email address) I had to use an Outlook template. Well, that stripped all the relevant info about the post out, leaving a blank message.
Second, the rule could only be set up to reply with a template, which meant that I received another copy of the notice. That triggered a second reply to my list which I would have also gotten, triggering another reply … I shut off the perpetual email machine before I annoyed the heck out of my faithful readers.
Sorry, I tried.

I’ve completely redone my blogroll (that’s the link menu on the left) using the MT Blogroll plugin from Arvind Satyanarayan. If you’re saying “But it looks exactly the same” you’d be right. The look is the same, but the underlying code is different. The old way was a stand alone HTML file that I had to manually edit, now it’s managed from within Movable Type. Adding new links is much easier (there’s a ‘blogroll it’ button in my IE favorites) and they’ll show up in the menu automatically.
The geek in me thinks it’s pretty cool.

One year, 225 posts, 398 comments and 43,346 unique visits ago today I launched this blog (I did back-date some of my QT entries so it looks like I started on January 1st.) To be fair, of the 43,346 ‘unique visits’ tracked by my host, I bet something like 43 were real people over the last year (although evidently only I guess only four of them are brave enough to let the world know they’re here.)
Thanks to all of you who read, and an even bigger thanks to you who comment (hint hint) for putting up with me for the last year.