Ann-alog, a Pixel Remix, where Ann Torrence blogs about photographing for a book on U.S. Highway 89, the greatest road trip route in America. Photography tips, locations, trip reports, and real life.

Thanks to Bryan Jones for the image. The three probes used in the analysis are Signature Immunologics products.

First, the picture. Here's what Bryan says about it: A multispectral image of a mouse eye revealing the diversity and complexity of the mammalian retina. The retina is a specialized tissue that captures light and processes initial form and movement making up the initial components of vision. This particular image is rendered by probing the tissue with detectors for three molecules important for metabolic function, taurine, glutamine and glutamate. The colors that emerge come from assigning each small molecular label to a color; red, green or blue.

Oddly, I've never mentioned in my blog that I happen to own 50% of one of the world's smallest highly profitable biotechnology companies. R and I started Signature Immunologics in 1996, long before we were married. If you need a way to detect neurotransmitters in your tissue samples, we've got the products for you.

I did the original website for the company, R changed it a few years later, and then we did nothing to the site for a very long time. We've also been having a big think about where we want to take the company in the next few years. Then I made the trade, and in the worst case of mission creep I have ever gotten myself into, I have now designed and implemented not one, but two new websites, and I still have to the do the one I originally promised.

Upgrading the Signature Immunologics site gave me a good playground to work my way through the new templates in MT4. I've been using MovableType since 2003, but the new version has completely redesigned templates (good) and minimal documentation (bad, a deplorable Six Apart trend since they released MT3.3). I have a few observations on transitioning to MT4 that might be useful.

(The rest of this post is about the guts of MT4, really boring unless you are an MT user).

First the rants: I'm not upgrading the MT3.3 install that runs at.com and this blog until the MTBlogroll plug-in is done. I'm actually surprised Six Apart didn't incorporate this one into the basic install. Many many people use it, and lots of us are sitting on the fence until Arvind the plug-in writer completes his fall semester finals or whatever. No complaints against Arvind; Six Apart dropped the ball here.

The documentation for the new features is appalling (guess they've been busy counting their winnings instead. Come on people, at least list the attributes of the new tags. For example the entire content of the docs on the new tag, <Multiblog> is:

<mt:MultiBlog>
   <!-- do something -->
</mt:MultiBlog>


Now I guess users can tappity tap and consult Google-Giver-of-All until we figure out that in the MT3.3 plug-in from which this tag seems to have originated, [include_blogs="blog#"] or [exclude_blogs="blog#"] was the syntax for the attribute and give that a try, but doesn't it belong in the docs? Jeez Louise. Extra points if SixApart would output a system level table that cross-walks blog id number to blog name. Otherwise, you can hunt for it by logging into MT, navigating to that blog's tab, and then running your cursor across a url in your browser until you find "&blog_id=[some#]". How convenient.

I bought a new licensed install for MT4, since Signature Immunologics and at.com are separating their webhosting (which is about as complicated as splitting conjoined twins). The new installation process is an awesome improvement, well thought out. So is the nested module approach to templating. It's going to be a project to bust apart my old templates for at.com and recast them in MT4 templates, but for a new site, it was delightfully easy to work with.

I appreciated a new sidebar feature, which lists all the included modules in a particular template. I ended up making a number of new template modules, so I could corral my content and make changes easily. Hint: MT's default template modules all begin with a capital letter, so I started all of mine with lower-case, which makes them easy to visually sort on the template module list.

Here's an example of the templates in action. I wanted a horizontal navigation menu for the main SII site on every page, so I created a new template module called "nav-links". Then I put this code into the header module, just above the <div id="content"> line

There are a couple interesting things to note about the nav-list. The class ".last" lets me apply a css style to the <a> tags with a right border, then override the last element so it is borderless. The <MTUnless> tag is new, and simplifies the coding for one of my pet peeves: a [Home] link on the home page of a site. The templates assign the home page a name, "main_index"; the <MTUnless> tag changes the nav-list for all the lower level pages on the site. CSS styling makes them seem static (jumping navs being another pet peeve).

I used the <MTIf> tag in my header customization too. The next lines in header are:

There are lots of ways to accomplish the same end. The <MTIf> is easy to understand at a glance, six months from now when I want to change my template. The module "home-page-alpha" contains all the content in the white, right-hand side of the home page. I could have put that content in the header template itself, but I plan to change it often, and keeping it separate makes it easy to find. Very handy.

That, in a nutshell, has taken up my spare moments since Thanksgiving, in between photowalking, Highway 89 and a major holiday coming up. We still have content to add, especially to Molecule of the Month, but that's not my department. It's a fifty-fifty split, and I'm looking forward to receving my half of the trade. I think my readers will like it too.