Okay, is this looking right now? If this worked correctly, the sentence you're now reading should be showing up right after the paragraph above, as if it were all one big entry. But it's not - it's two little entries I've posted separately to my website, just being displayed as one big one on the page. Explanation and instructions in my next update - for now, though, here is the rest of the entry I wasn't able to post this morning...

Other things I did yesterday afternoon at home that have not yet gone live include more cosmetic changes to the mobile version. Here's a tip for designers doing mobile-friendly pages; at least the palmOne "Blazer" browser, if not all mobile browsers, tends to ignore the "padding" attributes in your CSS but recognizes the "margin" ones. So "margin" is the way to go if you want to actually indent some of your text away from the outside walls of the mobile device's screen edges, because it's probably going to ignore whatever "padding" attribute you put in there. I've also added an "Email this entry" sidebox, where you can type in a "To" email address and a "From" and a supplemental message if you want, and have whatever entry showing up on that page (new or archived) emailed to whoever you specified. Yeah, muthafucka, just like the New York Times. Ah, I love MovableType, and I especially love their Pronet section of their website devoted to full-on geeky MT developers, where so many of my questions have already been answered in tutorial form and just ready for me to read and implement.

<geekalert> (Warning: the next text is only of interest to very serious design and web development geeks, and will be boring and tedious to everyone else! I will put in a closing "geekalert" bold tag when the discussion is finished; go ahead and skip down to it now if you don't want to read an extended discussion about MT, RSS, specialized plug-ins and the like.) And here's exciting news - Jimi set up my second blog yesterday, which means the Jason Pettus Instant Locator (TM) is officially live as of this moment, although you're not seeing anything live displayed on this page (desktop or mobile) yet. Here is an official explanation of everything I'm going through, as far as setting up a second blog off my original account, and getting it ready to be published in various different ways, just because I think there are some MT/CSS geeks out there who would like to know.

For installation procedures you'll have to turn elsewhere; my server host (Jimi Sweet) does that for me, bless his wonderful soul. Let's start with the place on the web where you log in to your account and use your control panel. (This address for any MT user is "http://www.yourwebsite.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi.") If the installation of the second blog has gone well, at the top of this page you'll see a pull-down menu with one of your blogs highlighted. If you click on this, you should get options for both blogs you now run; you can then just click from one to the other and have the full, customizable, proprietary control panel for each blog. Nothing could be simpler, really.

And now, of course, I have a live web page running as well where Jimi installed that second blog, which is at jasonpettus.com/jpil/index.html. (It's just running the factory-installed minimalist template right now, so there's nothing really to see.) The important thing, though, is that the correct and permanent RSS address is now running live as well, which means I can start publicly promoting it - it's jasonpettus.com/jpil/index.xml. I've got it configured for U*Blog on my palmOne Treo as well, which means that I've already started sending updates to it in real time, so anyone who subscribes now will technically be getting live entries starting the moment they subscribe. What I want the web page at that folder to eventually be is the place where people go to subscribe and unsubscribe from the email/SMS notification list (which will reprint the 25-word entries I'll be posting at the JPIL); and since they'll be there already, I thought it'd be fun to do an especially cool-looking trendy version of the JPIL on the page as well, just as eye candy. (Hey, it's not often I get to work with something with only a teeny amount of content - I want the chance to do something that will make people go, "Oh, man, that looks cool.") So that's what I'm designing tonight and tomorrow, and will hopefully be live soon.

Meanwhile, I've learned that one of the plug-ins Jimi has already installed for me on my MT build is MultiBlog, which was expressly designed to let MT users post material from multiple blogs onto one page. So this afternoon I read the documentation and inserted the right tags into my template here at home, so the next time I'm on a desktop with an internet connection, the JPIL box you see either on the side of the page (desktops) or at the bottom (mobile) will be live and displaying real-time automated information. Yeehaw! And then I've got to get into the guts of the installation and get the notification list configured, just like I still need to do with the list here at the main journal. So that's great - some intense semipro out there had the same idea as me, and has already automated half the process via writing a plug-in. And now I'm doing the other half of the process manually, by posting only entries there that are 25 words or less, with titles that look like date stamps ("June 9, 8:11 pm:").

MT plug-ins are the best, man. For those who don't understand, a lot of these programs you see on the web now come with public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as well, which is basically a free explanation of how you too can directly communicate with the pieces of data this program gives off. That's what lets someone sit down and write a program like U*Blog, for example, which lets me transmit this data directly from my Treo to my website without needing a browser, and what lets companies like Bloglines pick up RSS data and display it to you in a web page. If someone then knows this and also knows Perl, a more difficult computer language to learn but which does more powerful things, they can write what's known as plug-ins, Perl modules that let them define their own tags for your MT build and what they do. Perl is harder to learn than, say, MT template tags, but less difficult than a full-blown language like C++, which means there are tons of amateur programmers out there, and hundreds of cool plug-ins which do all kinds of amazing things when you install them in your MT build. You can start at SixApart's Pronet for a list of the most popular, most amazing, and most stable ones.

</geekalert> Whew!

Okay - that, I think, is finally it. Oh, no, wait, one more thing I accomplished yesterday afternoon, that's extremely geeky but really important to fellow web developers. I figured out that I am not going to be able to build special mobile versions of search results, archive results - any call for a page older than the most current entry, in other words. So, mobile readers will get the desktop template instead when they need to call up something older - which for the most part is fine, because I'm a usability nutso like I said, so made sure for the most part that even the desktop version loads elegantly in mobile devices, even if it lacks the fine-tuning and bells and whistles of the special mobile version. The only problem was the actual body of the entry, which of course takes up like 90 percent of the page so was a big problem. I had the width attribute of my "blogbody" class set to 60 percent, to give it that nice little strip of white space along the right side you're currently seeing, which will automatically adjust itself relatively no matter what the width of your browser. But mobile browsers pick up that "width" attribute as well, so my Treo screen (impossibly narrow to begin with) was displaying the entry body at only 60 percent of the screen's width as well. Argh! 100-page entries!

So I did a run-around that now not only lets the entry body on the desktop version show up full-screen on mobile devices, but actually loads even better and more elegantly into desktop versions than the width attribute did before (especially on MSIE, which is notoriously fussy when it comes to this subject). Solution: I took out the width attribute altogether and accomplished the whole thing with the "padding" attribute. (In my case: { padding: 10px 40% 10px 0px; }, although of course you can set that to any number and any style of measurement you want.) This then still gives me the white space on the right, and an entry body that is 60 percent the width of the entire column, and with a nice little 10-pixel gutter between it and the other elements on the screen. And this is also all relative, so will automatically reflow to fit whatever width at which your browser is set. But since it's all done in padding, and since mobile browsers (most, anyway) ignore padding attributes when parsing pages, it will display the text from the very left edge of the mobile device's screen to the very right edge. Ah-hah, ah-hah! I'm so glad I was able to work out a runaround to this problem, man - it means my desktop template is now fully and elegantly translatable on mobile devices as well, which means a lot to me in particular.

That's it for now. This update, by the way, is now officially the first entry in my six years of the personal journal to be completely written, edited and posted to my website from home, via my Treo. Ah, how I love the cutting-edge technology so!