Movable Type

Keeping Computer Books Up-to-Date

Charles Wright in the Sydney Morning Herald: With the number of blogs increasing at a phenomenal rate, more people than ever will find themselves dealing with the market-leading Movable Type. The Movable Type 3 Bible, from Wiley, gives you a thorough grounding in the complexities of a blogging platform that, on the surface, looks relatively easy to master but repays the effort required to learn about its more powerful features. Increasingly, these books are rendered somewhat out of date with ... (read more)

Changing Weblog Software is Drudge Work

I just finished moving the Drudge Retort from Movable Type to Wordzilla, my PHP/MySQL software that runs Workbench, giving all 14,400 weblog entries and 233,000 user comments a new home. The project took 10 days, around eight more than I expected. The Retort is emulating Daily Kos by giving site visitors the tools to create their own blogs. I'm going to choose interesting user blog entries for the main page and home page to run alongside my own blog entries -- I've always wanted to give the ... (read more)

Let's Put Everything on the Table

Of all the insults I received for popesquatting, the ones that stung the most were about my web skills, such as this comment on MetaFilter: Eh, his website needs work. The text overflows the white box and he must've used the nowrap attribute as there is a hideous amount of rightwards scrolling. pls fix ur website b4 u sho it to teh whirled, pls ok tks. Ouch. F U 2. I like three-column designs, so I lay out my sites with HTML tables, often putting ads in the rightmost column. This lends itself ... (read more)David Raynes has released Workflow, a plug-in for Movable Type that adds fine-grained editing capabilities to weblog authors. As Anil Dash explains: Workflow lets you limit control of publshing rights to certain authors in your Movable Type installation, allowing other people on the system to act as editors and review entries before they're published. Administrators can control who has rights to any of these levels of permissions. Plus, authors can transfer ownership of a post to other authors ... (read more)

Avoiding Movable Type's Comment Date Bug

I was reminded today of a nettlesome Movable Type template bug with how comment dates are displayed by the MTCommentDate tag. As noted by Michael Hanscom, if you place an MTCommentDate tag inside an MTCommentEntry container, it displays the date and time the entry was published, not the comment's date and time. A workaround is to place the tag outside the container, even if you have to use two MTCommentEntry containers for the same comment. Here's template code to display the 10 most recently ... (read more)

Linking Plain URLs in Movable Type Comments

I run an active Movable Type-driven site where visitors include hyperlinks in their comments using HTML markup like this: Read more on <a href="http://ekzemplo.com">Ekzemplo</a> A lot of people don't know HTML, so they paste URLs: Read more on http://ekzemplo.com This is less useful and causes presentation problems when a long URL takes up more space than the site's tables can handle, pushing the right margin off the edge. I needed to turn plain URLs into hyperlinks without messing ... (read more)

Weblog Software Priced to Move

A factoid from a Ben and Mena Trott interview for anyone starting a mom-and-pop business selling commercial weblog software: Mena Trott: For the two years that we were just Ben and myself, the donations and commercial licenses supported Ben and myself to run the operation, and we never had to use our savings to pay for our rent or anything; this covered our costs. And we've had a lot of downloads and we've had -- numbers have been really large, but the average price, I mean the average -- Ben ... (read more)Ben Hammersley: "The combination of comment spammers, and the database calls made by mt-comments.cgi and MT-Blacklist, is putting so much load on servers that the admins are having to pull sites down to save the others." I haven't used MT-Blacklist for my Movable Type sites, because I am loathe to trust third parties to provide up-to-date and correct blacklists. I'm having good results so far by simply closing old entries to comments and trackback. ... (read more)

You May Already Be a Winner

I received around 25 entries in the Movable Type Bible Desktop Edition book giveaway. Chosen at random from received comments and trackback, the five winners are Elise Bauer, Richard MacManus, Harrison Brace, Christian Crumlish, and Judi Sohn. I'm also sending one to Hanna for the shameless heart-wrenching tale of hard luck in her contest entry: I could mention that I'm ridiculously poor, being disabled and a ward of the state. But that would be demeaning, wouldn't it? I'll be fighting the ... (read more)Before you install MT-Workbench to close old Movable Type entries to feedback, take a look at Conversation Killer, the plug-in I wish I knew about before I did all of that coding. ... (read more)