Who knows where the time goes but my life sounds even more impressive¹ when weeks worth of greatest hits are edited and compressed into an entry. Have I learned my lesson? Will I resume updating daily? Let’s hope so. Hold on as I whisk you back to that magical month of November 2008.

On Halloween, I bade farewell to Inwood and moved into a new one-bedroom apartment in a mostly Caribbean neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I’m on Eastern Parkway a few blocks from the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Prospect Park and various peeps. I can see the Empire State Building from my bed and I’m still trying to get Raul the Lazy Super to fucking install my required apartment-to-front-door intercom/buzzer. Otherwise I’d invite you over in a heartbeat.

On Monday, November 3rd, I happened upon a great New York City stand-up storytelling competition staged by a nonprofit group I’d never heard of before, The Moth. Admission is only $6 and I’ll be attending more of these, for sure. A topic is agreed upon beforehand; at the show I attended, in the crowded basement of Union Hall, it was appropriately “sweat&rdquo). Participants independently develop a five-minute routine mentioning the topic or incorporating it as a subject. The night of the show 10 of them are picked at random from the audience to take the stage and perform; some stories are straight-up personal recollections and most are styled like comedy bits. Judges vote on each participant. Great fun.

The next day, some guy was elected President. I had pizza and beer.

On Thursday, November 6th I waited in an around-the-block line to catch a free Comedy Central “Comedy Hour” taping of a Jo Koy standup routine. His ethnic jokes bored me but I enjoyed immensely the pussy and dick jokes that dominated the second half of his set; they made me laugh those cathartic laughs that purge crankiness and worry from my system.

That weekend, I ate the best jelly donut ever, and you can only get one starting at 8:00 a.m. on weekends at the Trois Pommes patisserie on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, one of Ed Levine’s possibly top-three bakeries in New York City. They go quickly but while they’re available in a small basket on the counter, they’re still warm and filled with a homemade-tasting raspberry jam. They cost $3 each and they’re worth it. I bit into mine with vigor and blasted powdered sugar all over my hooded sweatshirt.

Later the same morning, Saturday, November 8th, I traveled to Edgewater, New Jersey for the annual bluefin tuna carving ceremony at Mitsuwa Marketplace. The crowd there pressed forward around a team of men armed with extremely sharp knives to buy the fattiest cuts of the 400-pound specimen as soon as they were cut. The fish’s head was planted in an ice-filled red plastic bucket to the side where people posed for photos with it. Later I learned that although bluefin is among the world’s finest and exclusive fish for sushi (I ate some at Mitsuwa from a bluefin carved earlier and it was amazing), it’s an imperiled species and that I shouldn’t have enjoyed myself as much as I did. I made amends on our drive back to New York by stopping at the amazing Philippine Bread House in Jersey City and eating an ensaymada, a traditional Filipino slow-death method via five ounces of donut-like pastry that’s fried, sugared and topped with cheese. So bad, yet so good!

On November 10th, I tracked down the small, great and inexpensive Mexican restaurant I knew was somewhere in my neighborhood, Chavella’s.

I now know this about Tony- and Academy Award-winning playwright/screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard, who I heard November 11th in an interview onstage with New Yorker editor David Remnick: if I took a whiskey shot for every time Stoppard said “as it were,” I would be drunk. But: despite being wickedly smart and well-read, he’s funny and self-deprecating, uncomfortable talking about himself, a topic that arose often about his new translation of Chekov’s play, The Cherry Orchard. I plan to see it after it opens at the BAM Harvey Theater on January 2nd. Stoppard said he’s striving to make it conversational and incorporate contributions from the actors to improve its familiarity. But amid talk of great Russian authors and the challenges translating them, I was most excited by Stoppard’s lowbrow revelation that he not only contributed uncredited dialogue for Sean Connery’s and Harrison Ford’s characters in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but that the idea for the “leap of faith” invisible-bridge challenge was his.

On Monday, November 17th, my boss and eight other people in my office got laid off so the company could save money. But I don’t want to detail that here because you never know who reads what on the internet. Which reminds me: my company is swell and I certainly don’t plan on stealing a bunch of office supplies when we move down to 120 Broadway in mid-December.

That night, I saw Iron & Wine in a sold-out show at Terminal 5. I enjoyed Mr. Beam (and his sister, who sang harmony). He’s a funny guy who’s still in some awe that he can draw such a crowd. He playfully chided the crowd for bursting out into applause as soon as he hit a chord, pausing to say something like, “That’s just one chord! You guys don’t know what song it is!” I was happy he played two of my current favorites, “Resurrection Fern” and “Boy With a Coin,” and he encored on the acoustic with “Trapeze Singer.” I enjoyed his acoustic stuff more than I did the full-band jamboree. Also, I was curious to get to the bottom of the point in his web bio that “[i]n conversations with Sam while mixing The Shepherd’s Dog, he confessed to finding spiritual inspiration in Tom Waits’ pièce de résistance, Swordfishtrombones.” That’s one of my favorite Waits albums but I didn’t notice many connections other than the songs-as-stories and a pleasing amount of marimba.

I organized a Brooklyn bowling outing on Saturday, November 22nd at Melody Lanes in Sunset Park². I like this place and not just because the decor can be summed up by the digit 1989: the music is loud and mostly bad. And there was a young boy at the lane next to ours inexplicably dressed as Indiana Jones. Also, I am happy to report that Al, New York City’s Angriest Bartender, remains just that. At least to me. Here’s what happened when I ordered a pitcher of Bud. Al poured it and set four plastic cups on the bar.

Jason

Thanks. But I’m with a group, so I’ll need eight cups.

Al

[testily] I can’t give you eight cups. You’ll have to order another pitcher and I can give you four more.

Jason

[pause] O.K., I’ll take two pitchers.

Al

Or I can give you these eight smaller cups instead of the four large ones.

Jason

O.K., let’s do that.

Al

So, two pitchers of Bud.

Jason

Well, if I get eight cups, I’ll just take the one pitcher for now.

Al

[exasperated] One pitcher, two pitchers! Make up your mind!

Everyone else in the group who made a drink run reported Al was nothing but pleasant. Short and squat, resplendent in his giant ’80s eyeglasses, red suspenders and slicked-back silver hair. But pleasant, so I guess being surly with me was enough. Later, when I returned to him for another flagon of Bud, he claimed he was out of pitchers and that I’d have to bring him back an empty one.

The next night, I caught the seldom-screened and exceptionally low-budget UK punk documentary from 1982, Rough Cut and Ready Dubbed, which I enjoyed, especially the concert-riot sequences, as well as all of the angst and acne in the talking-head segments featuring Q&A with and concert footage from groups including the U.K. Subs, the Cockney Rejects and the Stiff Little Fingers, and the likes of influential BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel and Factory Records founder Tony Wilson.

On Monday, November 24th, I bought decor and other apartment stuff at the new Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with a pleasant pit stop at LeNell’s, the best liquor store in the city. LeNell Smothers is a charming Southern woman who poured me several wine samples while a Hank Williams song played. I purchased from her a bottle of Four Roses Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey for purposes of making my own bacon-infused bourbon, plus a pricey jar of genuine marasca cherries from Luxardo for assorted cocktail-development purposes.

I had a deliciously extensive Thanksgiving dinner at Jimi and Will’s newish apartment in Washington Heights. I learned I am not so great at playing Mario Kart Wii. I also made a cranberry relish recipe I clipped from the November 12th issue of The New York Times and it was delicious but next time: less onion.

And the next evening, Friday, November 28th, I finally made it into wunderkind chef David Chang’s reservations-difficult, 14-seat East Village restaurant, Momofuku Ko, thanks to the persistence of my dining companion, Sherry. Upon review, I see my notes on this disintegrate because I can’t read Sherry’s handwriting well, or mine, really; we each ordered the wine-pairing option, which amounted to often a full glass of expertly complemented wine, champagne or sake served with each course. All 13 of them.

And I don’t believe I understood a word the sommelier said. For example, describing a red amid a string of incomprehensible adjectives and Spanish and maybe Spanish adjectives, I picked up on the keyword Mendoza and said brightly to Sherry, “That’s in Spain, right?”³ when what I was actually wondering was “Wasn’t that the name of one of the bad guys in Dirty Harry?”⁴ Surely Sherry, the oenophile among us, did a lot of slow, incredulous head shaking.

Chang’s fixed-price menu, which isn’t printed publicly, changes often, so every day the courses are conceivably unique. We started with some sort of fancy pork rind; a neat cube of moist, peppered biscuit; and a non-jumbo shrimp with tomato chutney. I’m missing some matter in the descriptions there, and some ingredients, but let’s get to the big stuff. The pinnacle was the daikon soup with chunks of lamb belly, fried lily palm and fried purple mustard greens, paired with a Pinot Noir. Sherry said she wanted to lick her bowl after that transcendeliciousness but gave decorum the nod. The most beautiful dish, a smoked hen egg, its yolk broken and burst onto the plate, came garnished with a generous constellation of caviar, fingerling potato chips and sous vide onions and scallions.

Next: hand-torn pasta, cubes of snail sausage and pecorino cheese. Then: monkfish with uni and mitsuba. And: something with pine nuts and lychees topped with finely shaved foie gras which was of velvet-textured tastiness despite me not remembering what it even was.

With the plating of the most pedestrian course—roasted chicken with Brussels sprouts and mushrooms;—we were both very, very full (also: drunk; in retrospect, the stop at Decibel for sake and shochu beforehand was unnecessary). But we had one more entrée to go. It would have top-ranked had we not perceived our corpulence to be approaching that of Henry VIII’s: large shavings of beef cheeks that had been braised for 36 hours, mitake mushrooms and charred jalapeños.

Done? Not yet: two dessert courses arrived with glasses of Muscat champagne and sherry, respectively: mandarin orange sorbet with juniper and segments of bitter orange (mouth-wateringly sweet and sour) and pretzel ice cream (is that correct? or even possible?) with a yogurt-Granny Smith sauce and tiny spheres of deep-fried cheddar cheese. The pleasurable and unusual dining experience flew by and we were at Ko more than two hours; in fact, we literally closed the place.

A few days later I realized the Asian guy behind the counter the whole time whom I’d assumed was David Chang was, in fact, David Chang, which made me wonder whether I should have engaged him in conversation deeper than discussion of Mitchell, one of his chefs, and how he tried to break into the restroom while I was in there.

Update, 3:40 p.m. Hold up: Sherry reports that the guy I thought was David Chang may have been Peter Serpico, shown here. We may never know.

Also: David Chang likes Bob Dylan. The restaurant’s soundtrack is supplied by his personal iPod and I counted no fewer than five Dylan songs amid the shuffle of Joy Division, Public Enemy, Elton John, The Flaming Lips, Neil Young, Jurassic 5, Cake’s cover of “I Will Survive,” and a song named “We Here” from some group from Singapore that Sherry liked.

And that’s not even all I did on my Summer Vacation, I mean, November. But that’s all I’m writing about. Because I don’t tell all. Also, I’m tired. Could I have a more exciting month? Oh, probably. Bring it, December.

Trois Pommes

• 260 Fifth Ave. (near Garfield Place), Brooklyn
• (718) 230-3119
• Meal 45 of 52: a jelly donut ($3) and a coffee ($2).

Chavella’s

• 732 Classon Ave. (between Park Place and Prospect Place), Brooklyn
• (718) 622-3100
• Meal 46 of 52: quesadilla flor de calapaza (cactus flower) ($4.50), a giant bowl of rice pudding ($4.25) and two Pacificos ($4.00 each).

Momofuku Ko

• 163 First Ave. (between 10th and 11th Streets)
• (212) 500-0831
• Meal 47 of 52: a bunch of mind-blowing food and drink ($150)

¹ I know! I didn’t think it was possible, either! [back]
² I am not forgetting my Manhattan-based brethren and will plan an outing with y’all soon. My life is torn; a children’s book written about me would be a tender tale entitled Jason Has Two Boroughs. [back]
³ No. [back]
⁴ No. [back]

I believe that comment spam is god telling me to update my blog already.

Or he is directing me to visit websites for Viagra and pornography.

Apologies for the site downtime, true believers. To explain, three things happened at once: my personal IT Guy, Jimi, upgraded the servers on which this blog resides. He also upgraded my blogging software, Movable Type. (I must add that I approved both maneuvers figuring there would be some bugs on my end to iron out. Which proved to be an understatement.) And third, I managed to lose the Flash drive on which I’d stored the drafts of my entries from the past few weeks. So: as you can see, the site’s back up and working. Apparently. Let me know if you come across anything broken or obnoxious, other than this “new” default design, which you’ll just have to live with for now. And given my schedule, I may never get around to posting the back-dated entries from between mid-June and now. Such is life. I’m glad to have you back, at any rate.

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

Some random guy in a parka, waiting for his take-out at my local Chinese/Mexican restaurant, asked me this soon after I’d arrived and ordered my guacamole nachos to-go. I thought, “Good question for New Year’s Day, random guy. Strange but prescient.”

My mind scurried for an answer and when I looked at him to reply, he wasn’t making eye contact but staring just over my head, towards the restaurant’s menu board and the sun-faded photo of the Roast Pork Egg Foo Young.

“You want a big city, you want a small city, you want international?” he said, at which point I realized he was on a hands-free cell phone.

“So you want to stay near Decatur? Georgia?” he continued. After the person on the other end confirmed, he added, “Are they really tying you there?” A pause. “How much?”

I paid and picked up my order. “Well, I wonder how you’d like New York,” the random guy was saying as I walked out the door.

“I like New York just fine,” I thought, stepping into the cold and wind and realizing I needed to buy some salsa. “I can see myself here in five years. But maybe I’d like to make other changes in my life.”

Snow approaching. Change, too, I hope. Time to resolve!

I’m late to the wide world of Chuck Klosterman yet amused to read this sentence from the intro to an article in his book A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. It sums up blogs well (including this one):

This article is a combination of two forms of quasi-journalism: it’s 50 percent a “Look at All These Misplaced Weirdos” story, and it’s 50 percent an “Enjoy My Self-Reflexively Peculiar Personal Experiencere” story.

Friend, is the URL for Jason’s Journal confusing for you to remember? Do the words tumble in your mind so you find yourself blundering to jasonclipart.com, jcavaricci.com, jokeupart.com or an Eastern European porn site?

Well, the porn I can’t help you with. But if you simply can’t recall joeclipart.com, fret not, for I’ve directed my own IT Guy, Jimi, to secure a bonus URL that will redirect you to the site you’re reading and loving right now: www.jasonmania.com. At some time in the future, I may separate joeclipart.com from jasonmania.com with alternate content, but for now they both bring you to the same thrilling destination, chock full of anecdotes on meals eaten, films watched and shenanigans enacted.

For those wondering about the origin of this new name, Jasonmania is an occasional nickname for me invented by my boss’ boss, who, in perhaps typical head-boss fashion, has annoying nicknames for everyone in the office and often shouts them across said office, usually when the employee in question is on the phone. So admittedly the new URL is most convenient for him, but I like the alliteration and that my name’s in there; perhaps you will, too. Give it a try; that’s one smooth URL.

I’m off on vacation to Rome, flying out this afternoon and returning late Tuesday, August 29th. You know the drill: entries here may be delayed, but eventually I aim to post a full daily travelogue. Enjoy the remainder of August!

2005: not bad, considering. Let’s reflect. Great times with family and friends both new and classic. New responsibilities at my job with my company’s real estate conference division. I traveled to Ireland and California for the first time. I got my own apartment. Joe and Andrea visited, and I went back home for the best Thanksgiving with the whole family. I ate much great new BBQ. I survived terror threats, backpack searches and a transit strike.

Thinking about which entries I like best from 2005, they’re clearly ones in which I attempted to write more creatively instead of relating events in flatter journal style. Among the former are the one about the fire drill and the one about the food pyramid and Katie’s cats and the one about the raccoon.

I am engrossed and amazed by this city’s history, architecture and forgotten places, so any of those entries are favorites, particularly the historical review of my previous apartment on the Upper West Side, a brief history of Penn Station, the Marble Cemeteries and the color-coding of the subway system.

I savored writing my Ireland travelogue (scroll down to August 17-24), which you should check out, again or for the first time, because I just filled it out with an additional 15 photos taken on that trip.

As for my New Year’s resolution from a year ago, by the letter of the law, I failed. The count is 32 meals, which, even if you count the stray reviews I didn’t include when I was adhering to the one-place-per-week rule (such as Cafe Yaffa and the first of what was to be many trips to Celeste), isn’t 52. Someone pointed out to me that the whole point of the 52 Meals Project was to get out to try new foods at new places in places of the city I’d never been, and in that respect, the exercise was a success. And I must admit, by far the greatest number of questions and verbal comments about my blog this year concerned the 52 Meals Project. I’ll give it another try. Bear with me. And good fortune to you in 2006.

This is just a nerd post to remind myself of a solution to a Movable Type problem I was having. Hey, if you use MT, maybe it’ll help you, too.

You know how when you’re editing your blog and you click the “Entries” button and only the 20 most-recent entries are listed by default? Well, as I go through my phase of correctly categorizing my entries, I want all entries listed by default, so I don’t have to keep manually selecting the “all entries” option from the pull-down menu at the bottom of the entries-list screen.

To do this, at least in Movable Type version 3.15, go to your MT directory and download the file named CMS.pm located in the lib/MT/App/ folder. (CMS, by the way, stands for Content Management System.) Fire up your trusty text editor (I swear by BBEdit) and change line 2361 from

my $limit = $q->param('limit') || 20;

to

my $limit = $q->param('limit') || 'none';

If you’re using a different but recent version of Movable Type, you should be able open that same file and do a find for the line

my $limit = $q->param('limit') || 20;

until you come across the one that’s nested in a code-block named “sub list_entries,” then change it to

my $limit = $q->param('limit') || 'none';

Save the file, upload and replace, and relaunch MT. There you have it. Why Movable Type can’t simply make this a preference, I have no idea.

I’m a-leavin’ on a jet plane. And I do know when I’ll be back again: next Thursday. I’m flying out of New York tonight to visit my sister in Ireland, so blog entries might be slow coming, sketchy or non-existent, depending on internet access and my free time. If nothing gets posted in the next seven days, however, don’t fret, because I’ll be keeping notes of my exploits and will eventually crank out full-fledged, post-dated entries when I return.

I spent an hour this afternoon fixing another bug in my blog that only occured under Internet Explorer (and that you probably didn’t notice anyway, but stuff like this drives me nuts). Believe you me, it is with great nerdy trembling that I received the news of Bill’s imminent release of Internet Explorer 7, which will either be a godsend of CSS compliance or yet another steaming curl of crap from a company that can issue whatever it pleases because it has a corner on the browser market.

Then Katie called and saved me from a frittered-away day by inviting me to the Angelika Film Center to see In My Country at 7:30. The movie deals with the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was assembled in the mid-1990s in post-Apartheid South Africa. Anybody who felt they had been a victim of violence could come forward to be heard and face the person who inflicted that violence, who in turn could be given amnesty if he apologized and was able to prove his actions had been ordered by a superior; in fact, it seemed as if a lot of oppressors were set free on the time-honored “just following orders” defense. I didn’t know much about these events and it was enlightening to see them reproduced in the film.

Samuel L. Jackson as a journalist for the Washington Post and Juliette Binoche as an Afrikaans covering the hearings for South African radio turn in some decent performances, but the movie is marred by pathetic editing. Many scenes ended abruptly and the scenes that followed either didn’t follow or were jarring. A long scene in which Jackson’s character interviews a sadistic South African police colonel is chopped up and confusingly interspersed throughout the latter half of the movie. As for the plot, the idea of showing a wave of Africans telling heartbreaking stories of relatives lost or murdered under Apartheid was numbing, but ultimately not as effective or memorable for the movie as a tight focus on one family or an individual person would have been.

Oh, it is no fun at all to return to work after having been gone for what seems like a month. And then the cold, cold rain. And the $25 our greedy landlord just charged us for the radon detectors he was required by New York law to install. The rest of 2005 better be better than today or I’m firing up the Delorean to the tune of 1.21 gigawatts.

All writers—and I’m not just talking about guys like Shakespeare and Joyce—should be submitted to a concordance, preferably while they’re still alive, to help prune meaningless and repetitive words and phrases from their works. I gave it a try on my own blog, manually using the “Search” feature. Doing it this way ensures the results won’t be comprehensive or even wholly accurate, but I already had a clear idea of the words I overuse, so this only confirmed my suspicions.

I’ve listed the words I looked up and the number of entries (not necessarily the number of times) that word appears in my blog. The asterisk indicates I looked-up multiple word forms: “seem,” for example, includes seem, seems, seemed and seemingly, while “turns out” also includes “turned out.”

Some “repeat offenders,” I have avoided listing. Other than the usual suspects (a, the, in, with, etc.), some words come with the territory of blog-style writing and would prove nearly impossible to excise. “Today” occurs 45 times, while “tonight” gets about half as many hits (23). “New York,” 39. “Boggle,” I’m not even going there.

But a lot of the ones I’ve listed stem in part from laziness and an unfortunate “routine” in the way I write. Gotta diversify my sentence structure and vocab, and keep a sharper eye out for these buggers in aught-five!

This was inspired by Tom Coates, who combined five years worth of his blog entries into one downloadable text file for people (or should I say “nerds”) to do with what they pleased. One of these resourceful readers generated a line graph illustrating how many posts Tom began with the word “so” (the short answer: many of them). Illuminating!

I think you’ll agree with me when I say that we need more blogs today written in the style and content of James Boswell‘s journals. This man was born to blog!

12 January 1763 A more voluptous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa was madly fond of me; she declared I was a prodigy, and asked me if this was not extraordinary for human nature. I said twice as much might be, but this was not, although in my own mind I was somewhat proud of my performance. She said it was what there was no just reason to be proud of. But I told her I could not help it. She said it was what we had in common with the beasts. I said no. For we had it highly improved by the pleasures of sentiment. I asked her what she thought enough. She gently chid me for asking such questions, but said two times.

19 January 1763 We were in high glee, and after summer threw out so many excellent sallies of humour and wit and satire on Malloch and his play that we determined to have a joint sixpenny cut [satirical pamphlet], and fixed next day for throwing our sallies into order. The evening was passed most cheerfully. When I got home, though, then came sorrow. Too, too plain was Signor Gonorrhoea.

Every so often, I must vent my nerd frustrations with programming my site. Posts of this nature are more for me than you, to remind me about ways I puzzled through problems. Move along here; there’s nothing to see.

OK, so I wanted the five most-recently posted comments to be listed in the Template Module sidebar of my blog, which appears, most pertinently for this demonstration, on the Main Index and all Individual Entry Archive pages. Here’s how I want it to look, with posts listed from top to bottom/newest to oldest:

Recent Comments

• Joe on Sunday With Joe
• Jason on Saturday With Joe
• Joe on Saturday With Joe
• Andrea on Joe Visits
• mom on Jason Attends Another Reception

That should be easy to accomplish using Movable Type, right? Wrong. Early on, I thought this would work:

<h2>Recent Comments</h2> <ul> <MTComments lastn="5" sort_order="descend"> <li> <MTCommentAuthor default="Anonymous"> on <MTCommentEntry> <a href="<$MTEntryLink$> #<$MTCommentID$>"> <$MTEntryTitle$> </a> </MTCommentEntry> </li> </MTComments> </ul>

Here’s what this produced on my Main Index page:

Recent Comments

• Joe on Sunday With Joe
• Jason on Saturday With Joe
• Joe on Saturday With Joe
• Andrea on Joe Visits
• mom on Jason Attends Another Reception

Perfect! But things sour when I click one of the “Saturday With Joe” links, which directs me to an Individual Entry Archive page, where the list is truncated:

Recent Comments

• Jason on Saturday With Joe
• Joe on Saturday With Joe

Hey, where’d most of the comments go? What’s happening here is Movable Type is now (correctly) listing the five most recent comments on the “Saturday With Joe” entry—and there’s only two.

Forget that; I want the five most recent comments from the whole blog listed on every Individual Entry Archive page. I imagine that a user might want to jump from comment-link to comment-link to check out all the newest comments on the blog; returning to the Main Index each time to do this would be annoying and belay the whole purpose of a sidebar.

I Googled the web for a solution. Several sites recommend code incorporating an <MTComments> block inside an <MTEntries> block that has a recently_commented_on="5" tag attached; this has the added benefit of working on Individual Entry Archive pages. I found examples at Learning Movable Type and KadyelleBee. Here’s a codeblock that’s an adaptation of those two:

<h2> Recent Comments </h2> <ul> <MTEntries recently_commented_on="5" sort_order="descend"> <MTComments lastn="1"> <li> <MTCommentAuthor default="Anonymous"> on <a href="<$MTEntryLink$> #<$MTCommentID$>"> <$MTEntryTitle$> </a> </li> </MTComments> </MTEntries> </ul>

“This will show the 5 most recent comments in any category,” KadyelleBee notes. But KadyelleBee is wrong, and here’s why: that lastn="1" will limit only one comment per recently commented-upon entry. If two people commented on the same entry recently, only one comment will be listed. Here’s what the above code produces:

Recent Comments

• Joe on Sunday With Joe
• Jason on Saturday With Joe
• Andrea on Joe Visits
• mom on Jason Attends Another Reception
• mom on Mango Chutney

Meh! Where’d Joe’s comment on “Saturday With Joe” go? It’s that pesky lastn="1". Since my comment on the same entry was more recent than Joe’s, his got cut. That’s no good.

But this does reveal why these coders added the lastn="1". Without it, the number of comments listed won’t necessarily be 5. Removing the lastn="1" results in this:

Recent Comments

• Joe on Sunday With Joe
• Jason on Saturday With Joe
• Joe on Saturday With Joe
• Andrea on Joe Visits
• mom on Jason Attends Another Reception
• mom on Mango Chutney

Now instead of five comments, six are listed, because both comments on one entry (“Saturday With Joe”) are included, plus four other comments, each on a different entry. Yeah, I know the header says “Recent Comments,” not “Five Most Recent Comments,” but I want five, dammit; it shouldn’t be this difficult.

My solution is to add a bit of PHP to the codeblock that generated the six-item list above (the Learning Movable Type/KadyelleBee example without the lastn="1" tag). It lists the five most-recent comments and renders properly on both the Main Index and the Individual Entry Archive pages.

How’s it work? Each time an <li> is generated (that is, for every comment listed by the MT code), a counter is incremented. As long as the counter hasn’t topped 5, the comment is printed per normal; once the counter hits six, the remaining comments are “swallowed” by the PHP’s curly brackets and not added to the HTML.

<h2>Recent Comments</h2> <?php $commentcount=0; ?> <ul> <MTEntries recently_commented_on="5" sort_order="descend"> <MTComments sort_order="descend"> <?php $commentcount++; if ($commentcount<6) { ?> <li> <MTCommentAuthor default="Anonymous"> on <a href="<$MTEntryLink$> #<$MTCommentID$>"> <$MTEntryTitle$> </a> </li> <?php echo "\r"; } ?> </MTComments> </MTEntries> </ul>

The echo "\r" paired with precisely spaced lines in the actual sourcecode (not shown in the compressed codeblock above) are present strictly to generate tidy html. It’s a bit kludgy, but it works. Who needs a drink?

I’ve finally opened the video archive section of the site. If you have a high-speed internet connection and QuickTime installed on your computer, click the “Video” link above to check them out. Just as timely as half-priced Halloween candy and only slightly better for your health.

Update: Some of this stuff I’ve since added or changed, which accounts for the struck-through text.

Welcome to the redesigned Jason’s Journal. As you can see, it’s stark, but I’m still considering whether I want to add back any divider lines, grids or other graphical elements. The chief reason I changed the design was to integrate display of my digital photos, which are accessible by clicking the “Photos” tab above.

I’ve only posted one set so far, from my trip to Paris earlier this year, in order for you to let me know if you like/dislike the design, navigation, image sizing, etc. In general, I’m satisfied with it, but I wouldn’t be adverse to implementing suggestions you may have or, particularly for you Internet Explorer users, squashing any bugs you may come across.

I improved the navigation from my old photo site by increasing the thumbnail size by 33% so you actually have an inkling of what the full-size photo will look like. In addition to clicking on the thumbnails, there are two other ways to navigate: click the “previous/next” links or hit the space bar to advance to the next photo in the album. I also added the ability to select any of my photo albums at any time (from the pull-down menu above the thumbnails), instead of having to return to a separate menu each time you want to view a new album.

This photo section is only the first of several planned subsections of Jason’s Journal; eventually, I want to add access to audio samples, historical documents of interest and my infamous mini-movies. Stay tuned.