An
early description of my using the Movable Type blogging platform as a
content management system (CMS) for an entire website. I’ve used these
techniques to build websites which clients can easily manipulate and
update.
Inspired by Doing Your Whole Site with MT on Brad Choate’s site, I started experimenting today with putting the whole Nonviolence.org site into Movable Type. At first I thought it was just a trial experiment but I’m hooked. I especially love how much cleaner the entry for the links page now looks and I might actually be inspired to keep it up to date more now. (I’ve also integrated Choate’s MT-Textile which makes a big difference in keeping entries clean of HMTL garbage, and the semi-related SmartyPants which makes the site more typographically elegant with easy M‑dashes and curly quotes).
So here’s what I’m doing: there are three Movable Type blogs interacting with one another (not including this personal blog):
One is the more-or-less standard one that is powering the main homepage blog of Nonviolence.org.
The second I call “NV:Static” which holds my static pages, much as Brad outlines. I put my desired URL path into the Title field (i.e., “info/index”) and then put the page’s real title into the Keywords field (i.e., “About Nonviolence.org”) and have that give the data for the title field and the first headline of the page. It might seem backwards to use Title for URL and then use Keywords for Title, but this means that when I’m in MT looking to edit a particular file, it will be the URL paths that are listed.
The third blog is my “NV:Design Elements.” This contains the block of graphics on the top and left of every page. I know I’ll have to redesign this all soon and I can do it from wherever. This blog outputs to HTML. All the other pages on the site are PHP and its a simple include to pull the top and left bars into each PHP page.
Oh yes, I’m also thinking of incorporating guest blogs in the near future and all of these elements should make that much easier.
I recently read a New York Times article on the resurging phenomenon of nurse-ins, designed to highlight the lack of laws giving mothers the right to nurse in public. Little did I realize a plain dressing Quaker near Grand Rapids Michigan was at the center of its nurse-in! From the local (link-unfriendly) newspaper:
As a Quaker woman, Jennifer Seif lives a modest and simple life. Breastfeeding is natural to her, and she has nursed her children while in the grocery store, the doctor’s office and during Quaker meetings without a problem. So the Grand Rapids woman was shocked and embarrassed in April when Kent County Clerk Mary Beth Hollinrake approached her while she was breastfeeding her infant son, Micah…“It’s shocking to me that anyone would be offended.” The mother of three said she was wearing a cape dress — a garment designed for discreet nursing…
I’ve always promised that I wouldn’t let this blog get so serious that I couldn’t share the ephemera of life. In that vein, here’s a caution for any would-be urban plain-dress hipster: it’s really hard to keep to the proper sidewalk demeanor when your MP3 player queues up the Yardbird’s “For Your Love.” Especially when the bongos kick in. This I know experientially.
The Baby Theo blog got a mention in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, It’s almost as good as being there, by Kathy Boccella. They missed out on a huge ratings bonanza by not picking Theo for their pictures. Stranger was that two interviews produced only one off-topic substantive line: “Martin Kelly [sic] experienced the worst of it when someone threatened his infant son on his Baby Theo Web page [via Archive.org, as it appeared around the time this article was written].
The Baby Theo site has been a lot of fun and it’s had great comments and emails of support. It’s really a shame that the article only used it to strike that tired old refrain about the possible danger lurking on the internet.
The threat had nothing to do with Theo or with the baby blog. I’ve run a prominent antiwar website (closed, was at nonviolence.org) through two wars now, and in the nine years of its existence I’ve amassed quite a collection of abusive emails. I try not to take them too seriously: most come from soldiers or from the families of soliders, people desparately afraid of the future and surely torn by the acts they’re being asked to commit. The internet provides the psychological distance for otherwise good people to demonize the “commie Saddam-loving peacenik coward.” You could get mad at a President that actively misleads the country into war but it’s easier to turn your anger on some schmuck who runs an antiwar website in his spare time. Sending threatening emails is itself cowardly and anti-democratic, of course, and as I’ve written on Nonviolence.org, it’s terribly inappropriate for “military personnel to use government computers to threaten the free speech” of a dissenting American citizen. But it happens. And because it happens and because South Jersey has its share of pro-war hotheads, you won’t see our specific town mentioned anywhere on the site. When I asked the Inquirer reporter if they could not mention our town, she asked why, which led to the threatening emails, which led to the question whether Theo specifically had been threatened.
And yes, there was a retired Lieutenant Colonel who sent a particularly creepy set of emails (more on him below). The first email didn’t mention Theo. It was just one of those everyday emails wishing that my family would be gang-raped, tortured and executed in front of me. I usually ignore these but responded to him, upon which I received a second email explaining that he was making a point with his threat (“You, your organization and others like you represent the ‘flabby soft white underbelly’ of our Nation. This is the tissue of an animal that is the target of predators.” Etc., etc., blah, blah, blah). This time he searched the Nonviolence.org site more thoroughly and specifically mentioned Theo in his what-if scenario. This was one email out of the thousands I receive every month. It was an inappropriate rhetorical argument against a political/religious stance I’ve taken as a public witness. It was not a credible threat to my son.
Still, precaution is in order. I mentioned this story to the Inquirer reporter only to explain why I didn’t want the town listed. When I talked about the blog, I talked about old friends and distant relatives keeping up with us and sharing our joys via the website. I talked about how the act of putting together entries helped Julie & I see Theo’s changes. I told Kathy how it was fun that friends who we had met via the internet were able to see something beyond the Quaker essays or political essays. None of that made it through to the article, which is a shame. A request to not publish our home town became a sensationalist cautionary tale that is now being repeated as a reason not to blog. How stupid.
The cautionary lesson is only applicable for those who both run a baby blog and a heavily used political website. When your website tops 50,000 visitors a day, you might want to switch to a P.O. Box. End of lesson.
Fortunately with the internet we don’t have to rely on the filter of a mainstream press reporters. Visitors from the Inquirer article have been looking around the site and presumably seeing it’s not all about internet dangers. Since the Inquirer article went up I’ve had twice as many visits from Google as I have from Philly.com. Viva the web!
More: For those interested, the freaky retired Lieutenant Colonel is the chief executive officer of a private aviation company based in Florida, with contracts in three African nations that just happen to be of particular interest to the U.S. State Department. Although the company is named after him, his full name has been carefully excised from his website. I don’t suspect that he really is retired from U.S.-sponsored military service, if you know what I mean… Here’s your tax dollars at work.
A few newspaper websites have republished up the Inky article and two blogging news sites have picked up on it:
Yet Another Baby Blogging story uncovers danger — but it’s not true ran in BloggingBaby.com: “When someone threatened his son on his Baby Theo Web page, he took the site down; but left up a pic on his home page. Well, that is, according to the article, which somehow managed to not check its facts (maybe, ummm – go to the link you included in your article?) and discover that, in fact, Baby Theo’s page is alive and well. We’re glad, Theo’s a cutie.”
Baby bloggers ran in Netfamilynews. “The $64,000 question(s) is: Is this a shift of thinking and behavior or, basically, a mistake?.. Martin Kelly, whose baby was threatened by someone who visited his baby page, would lean toward the mistake side of the question.” (No I wouldn’t, as I explained to the webmaster later)
Well, I don’t really have a “Site of the Week” feature. But if I did, I’d highlight Dave Gross’ blog, The Picket Line, which is perhaps the first blog I’ve seen actually connected to one of the historic Nonviolence.org groups (in this case the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee). Dave describes it as “a running account of my experience with war tax resistance and what I’m learning along the way.” Here’s a a good recent post to whet your appetite:
A friend asks: “How can you break bread with taxpayers in the evening after spending the morning posting a rant that says that taxpayers are willingly complicit in the government’s evil deeds?”
A little bit of housekeeping: There have been a few behind-the-scene changes on the Nonviolence.org homepage this weekend. I’ve switched the blogging software over to Moveabletype. The hard-core blog readers will appreciate that Nonviolence.org now has an syndicated news feed. That means that you can now read the homepage with software like Sharpreader, Newsgator, etc. even the more-casual readers will appreciate that you can now comment directly on every article. There will be other subtler features added over time. Let me know if there are any problems.
“In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out.