3.31-ized the blog

Spending way too much time hacking on the Blog lately. Today, I upgraded to Movable Type version 3.31, which was just recently released. At first glance, it appears that the big upgrades are the inclusion of the Apps.feeds Lite plugin and a widget manager.

The Apps.feeds Lite allows you to include any RSS feed in your blog. For example, I have included links to Thinking Christians and the upcoming events at my church in the right hand column.

The widgets manager allows you create little chunks of code and include them on your website. Most everything in the the right hand menu on the front page is handled by the widget manager. I have a widget that pulls my bloglines blogroll, one that pulls my bookmarks, one that pulls the feeds from my church's website, etc. If I want to re-arrange that menu, I can go into the widget manager and it is as easy ad dragging and dropping the components into the order I want them and republishing.

All in all, it looks pretty slick. Well worth the trouble!