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6 Love Notes

damn

I couldn't have remembered 300 dreams in my entire lifetime. The moment I wake, it's all a haze. Not only remembering but recording 300 is a notable achievement.

OT: A few of your permalinks seem to be groofed by virtue of titlelessness. The link for the Mozilla bug post opens the tide table post (which is currently in the seat of honor as the most recent title-deprived post, obviously). Why don't you have MT assign your links UIDs instead of title-based URLs?

bah.

its a way of future-proofing my permalinks. if i link them with a uid, the uid could change if i move servers because of the way mt assigns them ids (if a post is deleted, for instance, that id does not get reassigned to the next post. the id ceases to exists. but if i import my entries into another mt interface, the ids get assigned in a chronological manner by the order in which i import them.)

also, since i have multiple weblogs running under this one mt installation, they share a same series of uids: 00732 could be in one weblog and 00733 in another.

this way, if i link to the post tide_tables.php, the idea is that it will always point to the same page. i could go a bit further and remove the file extension in case i ever want to switch to .asp (highly unlikely) or back to .html or something new.

however, in my three years of blogging, i have never used the title field on this site. im getting better with using it (the two posts you mentioned are currently the only two posts without titles), but it will take time before i do it as a habit.

to make matters worse, within the mt interface, lists of posts are always given a 'title': if the field is left blank, it assigns a random title consisting of the first few words of each post. this makes it increasingly more difficult for me to find which posts on which i forgot to fill in the title.

which is why you mentioning it was very helpful. thank you.

That's just bad design. It's super-easy to assign another database field to hold a UID that designates one and only one post, in a clean way that will migrate. Supporting multiple weblogs requires only one more field. Once an ID is assigned, it should be locked forever, especially if you're just moving them around within MT.

Then again, does MT actually use a database at all? By the directory structure, it almost looks like it just splats down files and then modifies them as necessary. However, even in that case the problem is solvable.

Also, if MT shows you an auto-generated title, then that title should be used for the permalink instead of ".php" if you forget to type one of your own. In fact, I suspect that it's a bug, that it was intended to function this way. (Maybe there's a third-party fix, since a lot of people write extensions for MT?)

By the way, I meant that *MT* was guilty of bad design. Your choice is perfectly understandable under the circumstances. :)

mt can use either berkley db or a mysql db - the choice is up to the user. im using a berkley db because i couldnt figure out the sql db thing, setting up tables and blah blah blah. ive heard a lot about the limitations of the berkley db.

ill look into some possible extensions - there are just so many of them to wade through.