Here’s a quick look at the second round of changes (first round here) to Straight to the Bar.
Performance
This site (and cousins on 99shadesofgrey.com) has been growing organically for several years now, and was starting to show signs of age. This had become particularly noticeable in the painfully slow rebuilds; whether from leaving a comment or posting a new entry.
The solution involved a fair bit of pruning, and the cumulative affect of several minor tweaks wasn’t bad at all. These included :

• Modifying the way category archives are displayed, as per this article on underscorebleach.net
• Use of the Ping-O-Matic service instead of individually notifying sites each time I added a post
• Simplifying the archive templates. Several items which were previously incorporated into each page via the MTInclude tag are now part of the template. Slightly longer maintenance times; much faster rebuilds.

However, the change which made an enormous difference to the comment posting speed was this fix by Brandon Fuller. According to Brandon, it’s a bug in MT 3.2; already fixed for the next release.
Live Comment Preview
Whilst reconfiguring the archival and commenting templates, I figured it was finally time to instate something which has been subtly suggested on a number of occasions : comment previewing. Looking at a few implementations of this on other sites, I soon realised that the most effective appeared to be those that offered a realtime preview of your input text (as well as the usual option to make changes).
Twisted Technology provided a simple bit of javascript for this purpose (even wrapping it up in the default MT 3.2x templates – unfortunately mine no longer resemble these, but it was a good start), which appears to be working fine.
Videos
It’s been a while since I shot any video (I’m using a couple of DSLRs for most things currently; and there just isn’t any video feature available). That will most likely change once I set things up in Australia.
For now, a list of older entries (which contain video) has made its way to the sidebar. Code is similar to the Category and monthly Archive listings.
Quicktags for Comments
Thanks to Alex King for this one. The magic of javascript controls the row of buttons immediately above the comment input area – these enable a bit of basic html formatting to be easily applied to comments. Links, bold and italic type, lists; the usual suspects.
Giving TrackBacks some love
The TrackBack seems to be Six Apart’s forgotten child. For several years now it’s been available for use in Movable Type, but never quite on the same level as commenting. This quickly becomes apparent when incorporating tags such as

(to count the comments in a particular blog) – there simply isn’t an equivalent tag for TrackBacks. For just this purpose (counting TrackBacks) I’m using David Raynes’ MTBlogPings plugin.
Tagging
When it comes to tracking things down using meta-data, nothing beats the humble tag. In fact, users of MAC OSX have had this at their disposal for quite some time (and a recent article on Lifehacker discussed the power of it as a filing system).
For this site I’m using the MTKeywords plugin to automatically generate a list of tags for each entry; based on the entry’s content and title. These tags are then linked to search results (again for this site) using the technique on Al-Muhajabah’s Movable Type Tips. The tags appear below the archived copy of each entry.