Up and Down On a Learning Curve

I've made a few changes to the theme, and noticed a couple of things that happened when I transferred this blog rather than just updating the templates to use the new theme.

Using the current Mid-Century theme required installing a new template set. Rather than editing every template, I created a new blog and imported all the entries and assets across. The only change is the blog id number.

First, the assets had to be imported and the ID's are probably different. I wouldn't recommend my approach if you had lots of images in your posts. Luckily I had very few to fix up.

Something else I just noticed is the feeds. All my posts are out of order because the feed must look at the created on date instead of the publish date, and so it looks as if I haven't posted for 2 months. The older posts are being read first, because the create dates are all the same. All created on the day I imported the entries. This isn't something I considered when I created a new blog. I would have been better off copying all the new templates over to the old blog.


reCaptcha

My comment forms weren't working and when I fixed them I think I discovered a sure-fire way to get the reCaptcha plugin working. This has been a problem from day 1 for many people, and I've always used 2 recaptcha plugins at the same time to make it work. The MT plugin from recaptcha.net doesn't work in MT on it's own, and MT's own recaptcha plugin has had its problems. Using the two together, with the <MTRecaptchaBox> tag guarantees the captures will work. You'll also be providing a community service by helping in the process of digitizing books that send words that can't be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA.

2 Comments

Wait. You created a new blog in order to apply the new template set? (This is unclear to me, as it's in a blockquote yet isn't part of Jim's post.)

If so, why did you feel the need to do that? You know you can switch them as part of the template refresh process, right?


Hi Su,

Sorry, I quoted part of my previous post where I talked about why I did that. I had quite a few custom templates, and MT doesn't refresh those templates. I thought it would be the quicker option, but had it's pitfalls.


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