sooyindotcom

*sob sob*…I didn’t manage to install Movable Type version 3.2 because I’m a highly incompetent web non-programmer who only knows how to upload files via FTP but do not know what else to do to them to get them to work.

In short, it failed. So I’ve decided to put it aside to be tested again on a rainy day.

The good news?

I’ve finally got my photo gallery up. I decided to give another shot at installing Doug Bowman’s photo gallery template, and after a few tweaks here and there, I managed to get it up and running! I’ve just spent the last two days trying to customize it a teeny tiny bit, and right now, I’m uploading my photos while typing this entry. I decided to document the problems that I encountered, in case any of you do decide to install and happen to run into the same problems as yours truly.

• Problem 1: Plugin error for MTCollate at line 544. If you encounter this problem, do open up the MTCollate.pl file and do a search for ‘uild‘. What I found was that the ‘build’ command got split into two lines, ie. ‘b‘ on one line, followed by ‘uild‘ on the other. Once I fixed that, the problem went away.
• Problem 2: Another error for another MT plugin: Collect.pl. This time, the error message showed that one of the commands wasn’t closed properly. Since I ain’t a hotshot Perl programmer (not even a non-hotshot one, actually!), I did a search through Google but couldn’t find any versions other than the one I downloaded. I was about to give up when I went back to the website to download the zipped file again and saw that there was another download link for the plugin code. What I did was to copy the plugin code and paste it over the existing one in my server. Once I did that, problem solved!
• Problem 3: Despite following Doug’s clear instructions, some of the templates I created kept on linking to the .php version instead of the .html version. To solve that, simply open the template, copy the source code, and paste it into the Template Body
• Problem 4: If you have a problem with Photon, I think one way of solving it might be to uninstall and reinstall the program, at the same time, delete and recreate your weblog. Highly recommend you make sure Photon is working before setting up your weblog! Once I did that, I was able to ‘autodiscover‘ my weblog and grab the categories, so do give it a try.
• Problem 5: This is actually unrelated to setting up the photo gallery templates, etc. I was trying to create my own header, and for some reason, the background colour I used just couldn’t blend into the photo gallery’s background. I tried using GIF format with a transparent background, but it really degraded the graphic. Surfing around, I discovered that I could use the PNG format and the graphic still remained pristine. I was really really happy until I viewed my website on Internet Explorer. *Argh* All the graphics had gray backgrounds instead of the transparent one that I created. Wtf?!? Googled ‘PNG Internet Explorer transparent‘ and found that Internet Explorer doesn’t support transparent backgrounds for PNG format images. Apparently, there’s a workaround but I didn’t bother to even try it. I switched all my graphics back to GIF, after all, a little degradation in quality won’t kill anyone! *grin*

And that’s about it…=) Do drop by in a few days time to view my spanking new photo gallery right here.