recursion

A lot of people, myself included, hate the media's exit polls. This is especially annoying in the presidential races, where winners are often called before the polls close on the West coast (and in states that cross time zones, the state is often called before the polls close in part of the state, as happened in Florida in 2000).

So some people want to forbid calling of elections before the polls close.

Today, I had another idea. What if voting results were posted from all states in real time (or near-real time)? That would take the crystal ball out of the media's hands, democratize the data. Campaigns could make last-minute pushes in their strongholds to drive up turn out. With a known universe of registered voters (not possible in all states), victors could be predicted with confidence.

Migrating between two Movable Type blogs is deceptively easy. I say it's deceptively easy because it seems easy, but doesn't work the way you'd expect.

You export your entries from the one MT blog to a file, then import them into the new system by placing it in a special directory. Surprisingly, MT does not support web-based importing, and it does not clean up the imports file after it has finished with it, nor does it support restricting imports to a single blog (the import directory is MT-install wide).

But all seems well after you do the import. Except for one tiny detail: your custom templates are not included in the export file! D'oh! There goes your cool custom look...there goes any MT hackery you've done. That really sucks. I wish exporting the templates was an option in the software.

My suggestion is to always link your custom templates to files, then copy all those files to the new install when you move (you have to do this for your image files anyway). After you import your entries, edit the templates in the new install to link them to the files.

I just learned this the hard way.