I intend to set up a secondary Movable Type weblog for short links I want to share (such as the previous post--it and the one after this one were actually one three-part entry until I broke it up), rather than the relatively long posts I've been posting lately. (I should also offer an even more full! RSS feed with an On this day and those selfsame recent links.) You can see by comparing the new posts and the posts that come up in the "On this day" box that I used to write short items just linking somewhere.
For the change I blame Radio and Movable Type, or rather, weblog tools and their design. Radio has an aggregator with a "Post" button hooked right up to the weblog tool, so people use that. That's why you get some confusing Radio weblogs that only parrot items from the aggregator, and don't actually have any (or at least much) original comment by the author. They're just a filtered copy of the author's aggregator--which can be useful, but a lot of weblog-nature is lost when the author isn't actually speaking. (Radio could at least wrap things in a blockquote by default, to show you shouldn't parrot without making it obvious you're doing so, but that's not up to me.)
Movable Type, on the other hand, is kind of a bear to invoke. Go to your site, login if you were decookied, click the right "New entry" link. Well, that's not really true--there's a "Blog this" bookmarklet that pops up a small window with a minimal entry form (though at the moment I'm typing this egregiously long item in said pop-up, which really means I might lose it, so would you mind waiting a moment while I save it as a draft? Thanks), which for a while I wasn't using. It copies whatever you have selected on the current web page into your form, though, so it's just as good if not better than the Radio thing. (There's an add-on for Radio that does the same, but I never used it--though now I see today's On this day post tells me I should look at Jeremy Bowers' Custom Weblog Post, which seems to be it. What a coincidence!) I also set up mt and mtnew bookmark shortcuts in my browsers to skip right to the main page and the page to add a new blank post to markpasc.org.
But besides the invocation issue, MT feels designed for long posts. There's an "Entry body" box that takes more content than Radio's (through being in a smaller font, which is sometimes annoying), and if that's not enough, you can fill up the "Extended entry" box instead and have a "Read more" link in the item. Plus you get to write an excerpt to be used as kind of a subtitle (like in the floaty blue box to the right, and as the item description in the RSS feed). Plus you can post an item as a draft, because of course it'll take you more than one session to write the one post!
Anyhow, I should set up the quick links weblog. I can include it with David Raynes' other blog plugin, as I understand it. (At least, I don't see anywhere it says it's only for MySQL sites.) But then, I've not configured neologasm.org at all yet, even though I've posted a few times. And I'm already using a lot of space (like 56MB!) on my Cornerhost account--I'm not sure where it's all going. Maybe I should do something about that.
