Some site updates to enjoy

A couple of weeks ago Six Apart released Movable Type v3.31. Shortly after that I updated Secular Left to the new version. Once everything was working I wanted to find out how to use some of the new stuff included in the new version.

The newest thing is the addition of native support for Tags. Tags are one or two words that describe an entry or theme of an entry.

In the previous version, tag support was achived through the use of a plugin called mt-tagslite and another called Compare that allowed me to use my entry keywords as tags with links to Technorati.

The same author who created mt-tagslite also contributed the Tag feature in Movable Type v3.31. Except for a minor technical issue in the beginning I converted the keywords I used to actual tags.

I thought about presenting the tags in a tag cloud but in the end I decided to use the tip on the Learning Movable Type website (described in the post How to Make a Subject Index Using Tags) to create an index of tags with the number of entries each tag has, linked to a search for those entries that takes you another new bit – a Tag search result page.

My Tag index page is still a work in progress. I noticed I needed to merge some tags due to inconsistant capitalization and usage. It can be accessed using the Tag link in the Navbar at the top of the page.

I also added a bunch more Feed subscription options to the right side bar including MultiRSS, R-Mail, and the ability to create a Yahoo Alert for the blog or particular tag. The other new Feed item is the ability to get the feed in a PDF file using Rss2Pdf.

Speaking of feeds: Also using a tip from Learning Movable Type, I tweaked my feeds to show only an excerpt and adding a theme subject to my Atom feed.

More tweaking is in the future and I haven’t even touched my other Blog Doug’s Views.