With fame comes Subversion

Last week I was mostly:

  1. Working out how to introduce scientists to the concept of narrative, without them running a mile, and:
  2. Building a little blog in Movable Type.

In the course of the latter, I posted here a few times and also left some comments and queries on the Movable Type forums. They’re basically deserted, to the extent that I’ve had a post brewing titled ‘Where are all the Movable Type users?’ Seriously – where are they? Apart from people building entire newspaper sites in MT, it’s rather hard to find anyone talking about it. Which is… worrying.

So anyway, I posted about stuff here, and since I accidentally deleted the comments sidebar widget the other day you probably don’t know that people showed up and told me helpful things. People like Byrne Reese and Tim Appnel, respectively Product Manager for Movable Type and MT community developer/documenter. Rrrrright. OK. Then, off the back of that, I had a couple of emails asking me for help and advice on MT, since I apparently know what I’m talking about. Uhh… I’m sorry, what?

In the back of my mind through all this has been what I might do with The Daily Grind here. And what I might do, currently, goes like this:

  1. Reimplement the MT default templates using the Blueprint-CSS grid framework.
  2. Apply some of the stuff from here. In particular, some of this stuff I tried to do in the old Daily Grind typography, but manifestly failed, perhaps because browsers didn’t implement the crucial bits at the time. The sibling selector stuff is very close to magic, if you ask me. Which perhaps reveals how little I truly know.
  3. Sprinkle comments through the template code and CSS so people can actually hack on this.
  4. Build the new Daily Grind off that basis.

Trouble is, if I do all this I’m rather concerned I might have a useful little open source project on my hands. And I’m really not ready for CVS/Subversion/Git/Google Code/etc. Dang.

Perhaps I should explore Habari instead…

6 thoughts on “With fame comes Subversion”

  1. Well, see… thing is, my slides alone aren’t going to make any sense, because they’re just waypoints. The presentation is what I say, not what’s on the Keynote screens. Old-school, I know.
    At some point I might polish everything up and make that (comprehensible) version available. On the other hand, I might also get paid to do that, if everything goes to plan.

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