Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

Its been awhile since I have blogged and here is the reason why. I've been in a rut about adding a feature to the site. I haven't been able to accomplish it yet and it is driving me up the wall. Its almost like I don't want to do anything else until I solve the problem.

What I am trying to do is add a feature that shows links on the permalink page for the most recent entries in that entry's category. I got the idea from looking at the logs for this site and notice that lots of people enter this site for things like cooking or recipes. It would seem like a nice thing to let people see other things in that same category. With that said, I haven't been able to get this accomplished.

I've tried several approaches. I've generated seperate pages that have the category content and tried to use server side includes to encorpate them into the page. This doesn't work because out of the box Apache is configured to only do SSI with a file extension of *.shtml. I don't want to change all my links again. What a pain in the ass that would be. I also don't want to configure Apache to do SSI on all *.html files. That seems wasteful and inelegant. I've tried using Movable Type's <$MTInclude file="..."$> tag and it doesn't work with files that MT generates itself. I swore up and down that there must be a tag that does this. I came close when I found the catentries by Mark Paschal. Its a beautiful tag and allows people to explictly declare lists of categories to exclude and include. Unfortunately, by default it includes all categories (i.e. it acts just like <$MTEntrie$>). That is what you see on the permalink pages now...recent entries in all categories rather than stuff that is on topic. There are no provisions for telling it to use the primary category of the current entry in scope. I've mucked around the code a bit to see if I could add support for this feature but so far no dice. That's no surprise considering my total lack of Perl experience. I will say this much, the catentries plugin is at least written with the normal Perl obsfucation kept to a minimum. To my virgin Perl eyes it at least appears reasonable. Oh well, I've put in a request to add this feature, so I guess I should get myself back on the posting track.

23-JAN-2004 Update: I have now solved this problem.