Writ of Mainprize

I like to tweak my website quite a bit. Basic settings are never quite how you like them and things don’t always conform exactly to specified standards. The following sections look at modifying WP-reCaptcha, Smart Youtube, Youtube Thumbnailer, The Excerpt Re-Reloaded, and Now Reading Reloaded.
XHTML and ReCaptcha
My site should be XHTML compliant, but adding the recaptcha plugin made it fail. Luckily people have worked out the problem. Check out the fix which requires a change to the plugin and modification to your theme templates.
Smart YouTube Thumbnails
Thumbnails …

Well, I think the experiment with a self controlled web-box has run its course. For a long while, there was really nothing better. But recently, commercial webhosting has become advanced, reliable, flexible and, most importantly, cheap!
So I made the switch to HostGator, for only a few dollars more than I was paying to maintain our old system. Without a doubt, my favourite thing is the significantly increased cpu speed needed for processing dynamic websites.
I’m currently in the process of transferring my old site to the new one, …

I’ve rewritten the original Gallery Link plugin to be compatible with Movable Type 4 and with Gallery 2 (Sorry, Gallery 1 users, my plugin is not compatible. The old one should still work for you.)
I’m still working out the bugs. Watch this space, I will release the plugin shortly. After switching to WordPress, my enthusiasm for Movable Type has wained. Sorry. Send me a line if you are interested in the code set.

The template module system is much more refined in MT4 compared to MT3.x, but the navigation in the Dashboard is a little bit cumbersome. The navigation in MT4.2 is much better, (phew!). There is also a dashboard plugin called Template Shelf that might be useful. I tried it in MT4.1 and it made it much easier to jump between various modules and templates. I’m not sure it is compatible with MT4.2, and its benefit may only be incremental over the new navigation layout.

It all began a few weeks ago. I had decided that I wanted to make my website more uniform in its look-and-feel. I was pleased with how my Mainprize Gallery looked. It is powered by Gallery 2 and uses a Carbon theme which has a very clean layout and a dark background that is very good for viewing photos. Even though a dark background isn’t generally ideal for a weblog, I thought that it would be neat to see if I could make a Movable Type blog look like my …