Scratching my own itch

Open source software is unique in that if there’s a feature you want added to an application you have everything you need (except maybe the skill) to add it yourself. That probably isn’t news to anybody reading this entry. Of course, “unique” may not be the right word… there are applications that aren’t really open source, per se, but still come with the source code that can be modified. MovableType is one of those applications. You may have noticed that the past couple days I’ve had my SETI@home stats on the left side of this page. That was done using MovableType’s plug-in architecture and really doesn’t rely on the fact that MovableType comes with the source code. I’ll probably submit the very-simple code for that to MT’s plug-in database in the near future. Slightly more difficult and less noticeable was the change from “Recent Entries” to “Recently Archived” over on the left (of the main index). It never made sense to me that there were links on the left side for entries that were right there on the front page. I wanted instead to have links to the entries that just recently moved off the front page. As I started digging into it I realized that it would require some code changes. Once I figured out exactly what to change, it wasn’t all that difficult and I now have links to items that are 15-23 days old (and therefore recently moved off the index for which the threshold is 14 days).

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