OK, so I’ve been working for months on nifty new design changes for the blog, testing it off line on a test blog. It all worked great and I just rolled them out over the weekend. Two column layout with a wider main column, categories and archives moved to separate pages for a cleaner look. I’m psyched.
Then I realized that I never tested it on Internet Explorer (IE), only on Firefox. Of course, IE totally hoses the layout, my second column disappears to the bottom and the the page isn’t even centered anymore!
Oops.
Sorry IE users, I’m going to try to figure it out, but that may take some time. The image above is how it’s supposed to look. In the mean time, why not try Firefox?
Curse you Microsoft!

Phase one of the tweaks to the Mid Century Template Set. Added a banner image, moved the nav bar down to make room, added the blog description, shifted the search and feed links to the nav bar, shifted the nav links to the left and changed the Home link to red.
It’s beginning to look more like home.
What do you think?
If you’re interested, all my changes are in a separate css file, here.

Edit 2010-04-20: A year and a half after implementing Mid Century, while playing with Byrne Reese’s Mid Century 2.0 I was having these same issues. I let him know and he tells me that the Mid Century AJAX requires the option “Use Comment Confirmation Page” to be turned on under commenting preferences. Bingo! Now everything works. Probably would have fixed it here too, so if you’re having commenting issues with Mid Century, try that first.
Edit 2008-11-26: I added a download file to make it easier and clarified the instructions.
When I changed over to Mid-Century, I had some goofy things happening with commenting. It seemed related to the AJAX that powered commenting in Mid-Century.
In theory, the AJAX is pretty cool. When a comment is posted, the entire page doesn’t get rebuilt, only the comment section. The new comment is then highlighted in yellow, which is neat. In practice, it didn’t work at all on my site and adding my Google Analytics code really messed it up. I decided the AJAX magic wasn’t worth it, so I went looking for ways to de-AJAX.
Help wasn’t very forthcoming from the MT Forums or Jim Ramsey, the developer of Mid-Century (hey, people are busy), so I did some detective work.
I created a test blog and loaded the Classic Blog template set to compare Mid-Century to the default templates. I found that the two template sets to be very similar, with Mid-Century having a few more template modules and an additional javascript index template. Of course, the template content is very different, but the template listings are similar. The problem was in the ‘Comments’ template module.
I loaded each into EditPad Pro and hitting ‘compare files’ I found a lot of differences. Digging further, I found that most were due to Mid-Century using old syntax for some MT tags and Mid-Century having an ‘Individual Comment’ module that was included into the ‘Comments’ module. Reconciling those differences revealed a couple additional div tags and two script tag differences. The script tags was what I was looking for.
Mid-Century has a long additional script tag just after the ‘Comment Greeting’ div and before the form tag. It’s also missing the script from the end of the Classic Blog ‘Comments’ template, just before the closing ‘mt:IfCommentsAccepted’ tag. Fixing this removed the AJAX and made commenting worked as expected again.
While that worked, commenting was fine and the page loaded fine, I did notice that it generated a JavaScript error related to the ‘mtEntryOnUnload’ function. The JavaScript is generated by an index template named, cleverly, ‘JavaScript’. After comparing the Mid-Century JavaScript template to the Classic Blog JavaScript template, I found several variations (the template is 800+ lines), at least one relating to the ‘mtEntryOnUnload’ function. I don’t know JavaScript, but I figured I could replace the Mid-Centurry file with the lassic Blog file and see what happens, backing up the original first. I gave it a shot and it worked, no more JavaScript errors.
So, removing AJAX is fairly easy. I made a duplicate of my original JavaScript & Comments templates in MT before I started, just in case. Here are the changes you need to make:

1. In your Mid-Century ‘Comments’ template module, comment or delete the long script tag just before the form tag.
2. Also in your Mid-Century ‘Comments’ template module, add the short, 6 line script tag from the Classic Blog ‘Comments’ template module, just before the closing ‘mt:IfCommentsAccepted’ tag.
3. Swap out the contents of the MidCentury JavaScript template for the contents of the Classic Blog JavaScript template.

So you don’t have to create a new blog to get the Classic Blog template content, you can find the added content in this text file.
That’s it, now your Mid-Century comment system is de-AJAX’ed.

OK, after some template detective work, I think I figured out how to strip the AJAX magic that wasn’t so magical from the templates. Comments should be back to normal, but please let me know if things still aren’t working for you.
Also, you may have noticed that I changed the icon in the upper page header. My sister mentioned that she missed seeing a car across the top of the page when she visited. I do to and plan to do something more substantial to personalize the look, but changing the logo/icon in Mid-Century is pretty easy and documented on Jim Ramsey’s blog here.
Now that I’ve sorted the commenting wonkiness, I’m planning to make some other changes to this theme to make it my own. Yes, I plan on figuring out how to bring the commenting preview and formatting buttons back as well.

If the MT-Twitter plug in works as I think it does, this post will show up on Twitter which in turn will make it show up on Facebook. If you found your way here via either of those tools, leave me a comment and tell me where you saw this.

Welcome to the refreshed salguod.net, again. After doing a little digging, I’m trying again with the new template set. I found a way to work around the change in URLs, more on that later. Comments are still broken, but I’ll work on that soon, but maybe not until Monday. They’re working again, but I’m trying a new anti-spam plugin. We’ll see how it goes.
One of the neat things about MT4 is there are finally some neat template sets available. There were some in MT 3.x, but the Stylecatcher plugin was, for me anyway, impossible to get to work. Then, all the styles relied on you having pretty much the default templates, meaning your layout was pretty standard. Not that I broke any ground here stylistically, but I did want to play with the layout some.
With MT4, there’s now something called template sets which you can apply to you blog. These include both style and layout, giving a lot more flexibility. This one is called Mid Century, and it’s pretty popular on MT4 blogs right now. There are others as well, and I may give them a try later. I like this clean look.
If you’re reading right after its application,there are likely some things a little broken, the big one being comments. I’ve got to add in my anti-spam code to the template to re-enable them. I’ve got to figure out where to do that first.

Subtitle this post “Undo”. Those of you who came by these parts over the weekend saw a fresh new look for salguod.net. Today, we’re back to the old.
I like that template set and will likely return to it, but not only did it break my favorite anti-spam plugin, and with it, commenting, but it reset my archive mapping. What does that mean? That means every page on my site, every entry and every archive (monthly, category, etc) was published to a new location. That meant that every page had a new URL.
Oops.
I don’t get a lot of traffic nor do I suspect there are a lot of links out there to my site, but I certainly don’t want to break the ones that are. I had not expected that to happen, but looking at the way archive mappings are tied to the archive templates, I guess it should have been expected. One of the things that I looked forward to in MT4.21 was template sets that allow you to change the look and layout of you blog in one simple step. I think that’s problematic if in changing that template set also can potentially change every URL in your site.
I actually plan on changing my page URLs. My site is built with the old style links using the entry ID, the new standard (as used by that template set) uses what’s called the entry basename adn produces a more human readable URL. That takes some planning to make sure that Google and other outside links know how to find the new URL from the old.
So, I had the old database backup from Friday (I use dbsender to get DB backups emailed to me daily) loaded and it’s like the weekend never happened. I’ll try it again later.
I think the DB restore went fine. I also had to delete the new files that the theme create, so it’s possible that I deleted something I needed. Let me know if you find something broken.

I’m posting this from BlogIt on Facebook. If this works, it’ll appear on Facebook, Twitter, Vox and salguod.net.