I’ve just spent a wild half-hour battling with Dreamweaver – I’d created myself some library items for the right and left-hand blocks of a blog page so that I could change the code at will and have it update the Moveable Type templates on the fly (OK, I know purists would use server-side includes, but library items are quicker, ok?)
The problem was that everytime I inserted the code into the page, it transformed some of the tags – so what started out as
<a href=”Library/<$MTArchiveLink$>” class=”rightbar”>
was being inserted into the code as
<a href=”Library/%3C$MTArchiveLink$%3E” class=”rightbar”>
Needless to say, the link was broken once the page was built and posted.
Much wailing and gnashing of teeth and googling (or should that be wailing and googling of teeth and gnashing?) ensued, until inspiration struck. The cause of the problem is Dreamweaver rewriting the code as it hits the page, so that it translates the URL encoding on the fly. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but if the URLS are Moveable Type tags, it does.
The solution is to check the Code Rewriting section in the Dreamweaver preferences – chances are, it’ll be set to ‘Encode special characters using &#’. Change this to ‘Do not encode special characters’, and all will be well once more.
