Movable Type

New Movable Type Tool: MT-Workbench

I have released beta version 0.1 of MT-Workbench, a PHP class library that can close all weblog entries to comments and trackback after they become one week old. The open source library was written for a Movable Type weblog that uses a MySQL database. The library's closefeedback.php script can be run daily as a cronjob, closing old discussions so they can't be abused by comment spammers trying to boost their Google PageRank. So far, the results have been heartening on the Drudge Retort, which ... (read more)

2004/12/03

Rebuilding Movable Type Entries by Cronjob

Thanks to a tip from Richard Eriksson, I've completed the Movable Type utility to close comments and trackback on all weblog entries after they become a week old. I will be releasing it tomorrow under the GPL, assuming it runs properly as a cronjob and closes these seven-day-old entries to new feedback. I couldn't get the script to work until I used Timothy Appnel's mt-rebuild utility to republish individual entries after they have been closed. I tried to use Ed Dumbill's excellent XML-RPC for ... (read more)

2004/12/02

New: Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition

Hot off the presses: Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition, my new 410-page book on the current edition of the weblog publishing software. I wrote the book to encourage Movable Type webloggers to get into the advanced publishing capabilities of the software, such as template design, plug-in programming, and XML syndication with Atom and RSS. For the book, I spent six months combing over the Movable Type documentation, support forums, source code, and database. I stalked several coders who use ... (read more)

2004/11/30

Closing Movable Type Comments

I'm winning the war on comment spam on Wordzilla, my homebrew weblog software, thanks to PHP code that rejects link-heavy comments and submissions from banned IP addresses. I'm losing on Movable Type and Manila. Both programs are being flooded with spam that has to be hand-deleted, a chore that's miserably time consuming in each. Six Apart enhanced Movable Type's comment-management features in version 3.1, but it can take up to five minutes to delete a group of spam comments on the Drudge ... (read more)

2004/11/30

Handling 18.5 Janets of Web Traffic

The Drudge Retort was hammered yesterday, serving 10 gigabytes of traffic as thousands of people looked for exit polls and early election returns. The unit of measurement for traffic here is Janet Jackson's right breast, the exposure of which maxed out the shared SDSL connection on my old server. For seventeen straight hours, it served 144 kilobytes per second of traffic (1 Janet) to people on a fruitless search for celebrity mammary. Since that time, I have moved to dedicated server hosting ... (read more)

2004/11/03

Turning Off the Radio

Because I wrote the book on Radio UserLand, my decision to stop using the software on Workbench has raised a few eyebrows.By tradition, the first thing a weblogger must do with new software is publish a vicious excoriation of the old software, warning others to keep away, like a courageous relief worker marking a land mine.Textbook example: When Mark Pilgrim concluded that a Movable Type licensing change would have cost him $535, he declared the software a dead end, switched to WordPress, and ... (read more)

2004/10/07

Encoding XML in Movable Type Templates

Last week, I helped Jessamyn West fix a problem with the XML encoding of the RSS 2.0 feed on the Movable Type weblog she ran during the Democratic National Convention. West's feed couldn't be read successfully by the Convention Bloggers aggregator because of the following line: [more] This line produced output of this form: some entry text]]> [more] The block that begins with and ends with ]]> is character data in XML. The encode_xml attribute causes this encoding to take place, which ensures ... (read more)

2004/08/03

Squashing Link Spammers in Movable Type

I'm finishing a new book, Movable Type Bible Desktop Edition, by covering the subject I've been most eager to cover: plug-in programming. As you can do with UserTalk scripts in Radio UserLand, you can write scripts that enhance the functionality of Movable Type. The software can be extended with Perl scripts that are executed by placing HTML-style tags and attributes in templates, the same technique employed by the software itself. The script output appears in the rendered file. Plug-ins also ... (read more)

2004/07/22

Obscure Problem on TypePad

I'm helping James Romenesko move one of my favorite weblogs, Obscure Store and Reading Room, to Movable Type hosting on TypePad. He's been hand-editing with HTML for years and decided to make things easier with a content-management system. The weblog offers two kinds of daily content, full entries with descriptions and a "plus" section of headline-only items, and presents six days on the home page. I haven't found a way using Movable Type's standard template tags to accomplish this layout. The ... (read more)

2004/07/04

I Am Not Eligible to Win

Movable Type 3.0 enhances the software's support for plugins, components written in Perl that add functionality such as weather information, author credits, and even direct MySQL access. With version 3.0, Movable Type can manage plugins, adding links to documentation and configuration pages on the Main Menu page. There's also a new callback system that enables plugins to be called when data is loaded or stored, a feature that sounds a lot like the hooks I've been using to extend the ... (read more)

2004/06/28

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