Comments Elsewhere

Hey Ampersand,

<p>Thanks for the kind words and for the blogrolling! Given how much I enjoy and admire what you do here at Alas, I&#8217;m more than a little flattered.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s no great trick to the &#8220;Older Posts&#8221; section. (I stole the idea from <a href="http://www.diveintomark.org/">Mark Pilgrim</a>; he actually just has one full post visible at any given time and the rest in abbreviated form. This makes more sense if, like Mark, you usually write a mid-length entry once every three or four days.)</p>

<p>It may be bad manners to show your templates in public, but here I go anyway. The MovableType template code I use is this:</p>
<blockquote><p>

<MTEntries lastn=”10″>
[… full entry template …]
</MTEntries>

<p>&lt;h2&gt;Older Posts&lt;/h2&gt;<br /></p>

<MTEntries offset=”10″ lastn=”10″>
<p id=”n<$MTEntryID page=”1″$>”><strong><a href=”<$MTEntryPermalink$>”><$MTEntryDate format=”GT %m/%d/%Y”$> :: <$MTEntryTitle$></a></strong> &raquo; <$MTEntryExcerpt$>

<MTEntryIfAllowComments><em>(<$MTSimpleCommentCount$> comments)</em></MTEntryIfAllowComments></p>
</MTEntries>

<p>(The MTSimpleCommentCount tag is from <a href="http://kalsey.com/2003/02/simplecomments/">an unrelated plugin</a> that I use; the rest is standard MovableType template tags.)</p></p>

<p>The lastn="N&#8221; flag makes MTEntries loop through the last N entries (inventively enough); the offset="M&#8221; flag makes it start M entries from the most recent (note that the most recent post is offset 0, <em>not</em> offset 1. That&#8217;s why offset="10&Prime; starts my &#8220;Older Posts&#8221; section off at the 11th most recent post.</p>
<p>The one downside is that the trick won&#8217;t work cleanly if you want the number posts that are shown in full to be determined by a <em>date range</em> (past 14 days or whatever) rather than by a fixed number of posts. There is probably some kind of MT-voodoo that will do this, but I don&#8217;t know it off the top of my head. (Maybe it will be fixed MovableType 3.0&#8211;and, who knows, maybe MovableType 3.0 will even be released within our lifetimes&#8230;)