If you want it done right, sometimes you have to do it yourself

I'm starting to wind down on my new plugin for Movable Type. Most of the features are in place now, and have proven to be stable. It is not quite as pretty as I might have liked it, but it serves a purpose that Google Reader has not done for me: integrate news reading into my blogging software. Now, whenever I log into Movable Type, I can get a status update on all of the blogs that I read, and can directly import text from their posts into my next posts.

Throughout this whole process, I have come to gain an even greater disgust for Internet Explorer. As a development platform, it is a joke compared to Firefox. Microsoft may have some tools for debugging web page errors that you can download, but it doesn't include them by default in every standard installation of Internet Explorer the way that the same sort of thing gets put into Firefox. All Internet Explorer gives you is an error dialog showing you the message, line and character numbers. Did I mention that Internet Explorer also has a really bad habit of not supporting standard JavaScript?

Getting most of this done was a lot easier because of how powerful and robust Movable Type is as a development platform. While you might not have as much control over things because you cannot directly access the underlying database, the built-in object-relational-mapping capabilities and template system more than make up for that. As I've said before, the only thing that needs to be changed here is that there needs to be a lot more documentation written for some of these things because not all of them are intuitive. The worst offender I can think of there was I had to specify two parameters in order to override one parameter when creating a new listing view. I thought that just passing it a parameter for limit (a SQL command that limits the number of result sets a query returns) would override the built-in default. Hah. I should be so lucky.