Linkblog changes

You may have already noticed that the linkblog is back, in the left sidebar. Instead of using my old homegrown system (involving PHP and MySQL), I'm using the multi-blog features of Movable Type 4.0. There's now a separate linkblog blog, and I'm displaying the five most recent entries on the home page and Newsgator page of BatesLine proper. When I add a new linkblog entry, the index pages for BatesLine are rebuilt.

Because this is a separate MT blog, these linkblog entries have the same attributes as normal blog entries, including permalinks, trackbacks, and comments. If you click on the date and time stamp, it will take you to the individual entry archive page, where you can leave or read comments. Eventually there will be categories, and I'll be importing the old linkblog entries. I'll be trying to work out the same kind of interface that I had with the old linkblog that made it quick and painless to post something.

The biggest advantage the new way has over the old method is that this version builds files once, rather than dynamically generating them with a database query. The old system would issue a DB query every time the home page was loaded, which made my hosting provider unhappy, and resulted in the CPU Exceeded errors people would see from time to time.