Earlier today (yesterday?) I posted about how comments work in Movable Type and how I wanted to let comment authors receive notification of replies to their comments. Feeling somewhat inspired by a suggestion from someone I started looking around at my options. In the end I decided to take a look at the MTThreadedComments plugin and see if I could figure things out from that. In the end it was pretty easy. I was able to cobble together version 0.1 in just a few hours. So, for people who are interested, you can now check out MTThreadMail. You can see the use of it in my comments currently. I’m willing to take comments and suggestions too, as this is my first time trying this. Also, this only works if you are running MTThreadedComments as the patch is based on that.

So I got my webcam set up. It’s still pretty primitive at the moment, but you can see it here. Big thanks to Evological for their help with getting EvoCam working right with AppleScript. If anyone out there runs OS X and needs a webcam I definitely recommend it. I’ll try and keep it running when I think of it. If I’m not there you’ll see Cthulhu instead.

John W. Gardner: “We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” [Quotes of the Day]

I think it is time for me to start learning more about the internals of Movable Type. Now that I have Threaded Comments, there’s something else I want. The ability for a comment author to be notified when someone responds to their comment (if they gave their correct email address). This is one thing that I think would help create more of a community feeling on a blog. It’s something that LiveJournal has that I’ve always thought was really cool.

Of course, now the big question is, how difficult is it. I do have some example code to look at, since the Threaded Comments plugin adds new stuff into the database. Anyone have any suggestions? (Or better yet, pointers to someone who has already done this? I looked around, but couldn’t really find anything). Also, it seems that someone else is looking for something like this too (though I don’t know that I need the first part they want).

Thanks to Colubra for posting a link to the Instant Slash Generator (it’ll start asking you questions when you click on the link). I’ve now completely disturbed myself since I had Shaman King on the brain thanks to someone else’s LJ.

Wow, lots of news coming out of Anime Expo about licensed shows (check out Anime on DVD for more details). Shows I’m interested in that have been licensed: Wolf’s Rain (Bandai), .hack//Legend of Twilight’s Bracelet (Bandai), Narue no Sekai (CPM), Gunparade March (Media Blasters), Azumanga Movie (ADV), Rahxephon Movie (ADV), Nurse Witch Komugi-Chan (ADV) (YAAAAY! We like Komugi-chan), Texhnolyze (Pioneer), and Read or Dream (Pioneer) (What?? It hasn’t even aired yet has it?!). The other thing I’m psyched about is ADV will be publishing manga from the sound of it, with one title interesting me in particular: Azumanga Daioh.

Oh, and the best line from the news on AX over at AOD: “According to some of the information, the upcoming Urotsukidoji OVA series (the new one) is the first hentai to be released in 5.1 sound.” Um, ew?

Yesterday, Emilily and I went to go see Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. As far as sequels go I enjoyed it a lot. It was much more over the top than the first movie, with many of the action sequences being just silly (some of the shots in the motocross scene come to mind). But the movie didn’t try and take itself too seriously at all, and for me that’s what made it work. I’ll be picking it up on DVD when it comes out.

I finally got everything set back up on the new server and hope to be posting more soon. I’ve been trying to catch up on everything coming out. I finished watching Shaman King. I thought the ending was decent, but I’d love to see more story at a later point. I’ve also been enjoying Stellvia, Last Exile, Naruto, and Scrapped Princess quite a bit. More soon!

Emo Phillips: “At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote.” [Quotes of the Day]

There’s a great post over on Radio Free Blogistan about his experiences moving blogs between different blogging systems. I wanted to make note of it since he mentions similar issues with Movable Type to what I posted yesterday.

The big problem is converting the backed up entries to the MT format without breaking permalinks. Also, Radio stores each day as YYYY/MM/DD.html whereas MT by default puts each entry on its own archive page, with my preferred URL being YYYY/MM/DD/entry_title.html. In order not to break old links to the site, I’ll probably end up keeping a duplicate set of all past entries. That may be confusing to some, but it should minimize breakage. [Radio Free Blogistan]

Once you start moving things between different blogging systems you run into a whole bunch of other issues. Since many of the systems seem to use numbers by default to indicate blog post. One thing that might be useful is for them to start having a seperate field in their internal database for permalink. This way when you import posts you can do so and not worry about any other issues.