One thing about the default Movable Type setup that doesn’t work very well is the way that the index (“main”) page picks entries to display. Specifically, it shows all the entries created in the last 7 days. This is fine if you write at least a few times a week, but what if you lapse for a while? Look what’s happened to Eric! You can set MT to always show the last N entries (e.g., I had mine set to 5 for a while), but that’s no good if you are very verbose occasionally, and want entries to stick around for a few days before they drop off the main page.

I couldn’t figure out a way to solve this with the standard MovableType built-in tags, so I wrote my own. MTIndexEntries is a plugin that lets you show both the last week’s entries and the last 5 entries (only showing each entry once, of course, and in the proper order):

<MTIndexEntries days="7" lastn="5">
<!-- your entry tags -->
</MTIndexEntries>

I don’t feel like writing any documentation today, so all I’ve got is the plugin and the example above. But please feel free to give it a try.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? I sure hope so, because I’ve been very flattering to iChat. First, some background: back in the spring of 2001, Greg Parker and I wrote a Mac client for the Zephyr Notification Service (a Unix-based messaging system developed at MIT and used at, among other places, Stanford) for our senior project. For a couple of months now, I’ve been toying with the idea of porting it to Mac OS X and getting it into shape for public release. The original was written using PowerPlant, but I never could get recent versions of CodeWarrior to compile the thing, so I scrapped the user interface and rewrote it using Cocoa. Now instead of looking like a halfway-decent AOL Instant Messenger clone, it looks like a bad iChat clone. I’d appreciate user interface feedback, by the way.

The SourceForge site docs tell you to “release early, release often,” so I guess I should do that. I’ve haven’t written any documentation yet, but if you’re at a site that uses Zephyr with Kerberos authentication, and have Mac OS X 10.2 or later, go ahead and give zChat 0.1 a try. If you’re at Stanford and want to say hi, I’m akosut.