Microloaning on Memorial Day 2006

What to do on a relaxing day off? Catch up on various paperwork and email inbox items, get my fiscal ducks in a row, listen to the new music I got when I sold old CDs at Green Apple, and enjoy the view from my picture window.

One of the fun things I finally got around to doing was making a microloan through Kiva. I'm helping George Bomboko in Banda-Kireka, Uganda, set up a groundnut business at which his brother will work to help support their family. He's still looking for an additional $300, so if you have $25 sitting gathering dust in your PayPal account, why not give George or one of the other small businesspeople on Kiva's site a hand?

Here's a neat set of photos of a recent group of folks receiving their loan funds after having their business plans approved by their peers.

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Woot! It's Tuesday midday and George only needs $50 more to launch his new business. Yay, microlenders!

Advanced Templates in TypePad & a nice new conditional from Movable Type 2006

Not sure when it happened, but I noticed the other day that my clever hack for conditional behavior with regard to display was no longer working in my individual entry archives.

You have probably noticed I have two types of posts, ones like this, and quick little links or quotations which appear in a more compact form indented & with a border. I style these automatically.

In TypePad and Movable Type each entry has a main Body field and an Extended field. This allows you to do the "Read more..." approach and keep a big long essay off your front page. I personally don't mind having a big long essay up there - I trust your ability to scroll, dear reader - so I never used the Extended field for its intended purpose. Instead, I put my compact entries in that field, with nothing in the Body field.

This allowed me to use a conditional tag in TypePad advanced templates (which is the same in Movable Type), <MTEntryIfExtended> and <MTElse>.

I've just learned about a new tag (added in Movable Type 3.2, I think) and not yet reflected in the TypePad knowledge base, <MTIfNonEmpty>. It requires an attribute to identify the field to be examined, for example:
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="MTEntryMore">
This adds a huge amount of flexibility and I suspect it was greeted with much rejoicing in the Movable Type forums.

I've switched over my <MTEntryIfExtended> tags to use this approach instead and this resolved the problem I was having where the archive pages were not reacting conditionally. I rather suspect they are about to deprecate the older tag in favor of this new improved approach.

As ever, drop me a note if you notice something weird and I'll eventually find time to fix it.

Warning: TypePad now case sensitive for login names 2006

I really hope this will revert because I think it is a bad change, but TypePad now requires you to enter your user name in a case sensitive way.

This meant that all the tabs in my browser which were set up with posts in draft form, list views, etc., today switched over to logging me in not to the account I've had since TypePad was in beta (or was it alpha?), but to some test account with none of my hard work in it; metagrrrl instead of MetaGrrrl.

It still knew that it was me - "Welcome, Dinah!" - but it said I had no weblogs. Since I have more than a wee bit of content accumulated, that was unnerving to say the least.

Unfortunately, the "Create your first weblog" page that was displaying for anything I clicked around to didn't have a logout button to allow me to get out of metagrrrl and into MetaGrrrl.

Finally by chopping off the end of URLs randomly I was able to get to a page that did have a logout. That was a relief since I need to write tomorrow's Discardian post tonight.

This change makes absolutely no sense to me and was particularly annoying because there was no warning and I don't see the value in having both a MetaGrrrl and a metagrrrl as separate users on a system. That sounds like a recipe for help desk confusion and user annoyance to me. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think that a database table got a setting switched wrong and that this didn't receive the business oversight it should have had.

Anyhow, long story short, I'm back in, but cranky. Also I either have allergies or a head cold.

There's a lot of grrr in the grrrl tonight.

Changed plans. 2006

Oh yeah, regarding holding the date for a big webgeek fun thing on July 3rd?
Never mind. Maybe later.

Plotting and planning 2006

This is that coy "I'm up to something" post to act as a placeholder for the big announcement and link to all the details.

For now, I'll just say if you're a weblogger, journal writer, photoblogger, podcaster, citizen journalist, video blogger, mashup artist, linker, coder and/or random web geek and you can get to the San Francisco bay area on Monday July 3rd, just mark that day off now in your calendar.

We're going to have a great time...