The utility of MTAmazon or ArchiveYear is obvious (guess what “Countdown” does?). But what about all these other, weirder MT plugins that are floating around?
- CategoryFaceted enables facet-based structures; FilterCategories allows us to exclude category when listing the categories. What this is used for is listing the categories of a certain type (facet!) and not others. For example, I have a “Link” category, which I use for my Daily Links bar, and a number (5? 6?) of Amazon categories. Now I can reduce them to combinations of facets and have them archived in a more organised manner.
- I have ranted a lot about trying to make different look & feels for postings of different categories. I have implemented a crazy CSS hack to solve this… CategoryOfArchive makes this process much much easier, and without the crazy use of CSS. To take it one step further, I can now have Topic Icons for each posting, like they do on Slashdot, and even change the whole format of the individual postings on the main index pages themselves with the use of CategoryHeaderFooter which lets you define different macros depending on the category of the entry. BWAHAHAHA!
- I needed Regex to complete my “future-proofing“, but I’m sure it will come in handy later. I added in the EntryNumber plugin for those on my system who just want vanilla, medium-grade future-proofing.
- I am sick to death of MTAmazon breaking my damn build process every time the Amazon site is a little slow. So now we have Exception to catch any problems and save the build.
- …and speaking of things like MTAmazon, finally I can use MT tags insde the damn entry body that I’m typing with the Process Tags plugin. Actually you could put anything in an entry with this thing… including an entire additional generated blog. But that would be dumb. A more practical but no less insane idea would be to use this with the above-mentioned category filtering to generate meta-templates that would generate clusters of like postings, or in conjunction with the RSS templates to publish mini newspapers with self-changing content. With enough of my friends’ feeds I could have a giant blog and never write another article myself!
- We just installed AWStatsReferers for the hell of it. I seriously doubt I’ll be getting so many incoming links that I could make a dynamic list of the most recent ones, but sheeyah why not.