Ok, my games index is now live. It's a fairly complete list, although I know there are a bunch of DOS games that aren't on there just because I don't have them with me anymore (they're at home with Mom and Dad collecting dust). Anyway have a peek. If you're geographically nearby let me know if you'd like to borrow something. (While I'm at it, I might as well make this a Movable Type tip-- click the 'more' link for the goods.)

...

continue reading ...

Well, it looks like this weblog is becoming just a Movable Type how-to blog. Well, in keeping with that theme, here's a little "part two" companion piece for Doing your whole site with MT (one of my worst blog titles, ever).

Now that you've got your whole site MT-powered, what about your RSS feed? Chances are you, have one for your weblog, but what about one for everything? I've created one for my site, called sitewide.rss. It lets folks keep track of every update that happens to my site, whether it be part of my weblog or not.

To get it to work, you have to do a little bit of...

continue reading ...

Upgrading Movable Type

Problem

You want to upgrade the Movable Type software.

Solution

Upgrading follows nearly the same steps as installation except that you will want to perform a backup of your system before attempting the upgrade. If you are upgrading from Movable Type 3.1x or before, you will also want to migrate to the new configuration file: mt-config.cgi.

Discussion

If you're on any past version of Movable Type, version 3.2 offers a lot of features and improvements that will make managing your blogs easier. To take advantage of them, you'll need to install the latest...

continue reading ...

04.28.2005

Blogs as a complement to newspapers

Forbes online picked up an Associated Press story about the eleven blogs being published by the editorial staff of the News & Record in North Carolina.

The broad range of Movable Type-powered blogs have earned high praise from others in the journalism business. As Editor & Publisher said:

"When the paper's overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years," wrote the industry-watching magazine Editor & Publisher. "Greensboro will be the first place where this conceptually...

continue reading ...

This plugin has been deprecated. The Santize plugin was incorporated (and extended) into Movable Type 2.6. For more information about this and how you would go about uninstalling this plugin, please read this article.

Sanitize is a Movable Type plugin that allows you to clean HTML and other markup that might exist in an comment entry. Read on for more information about how it works and what it's for. If you're using Movable Type and allow HTML comments on your site, you really need to read this...

...

continue reading ...

Things you probably didn't realize you could do with MT-Textile 2: • Hyperlinks for Amazon, IMDB and Google searches. For example (search term can be placed after the last ‘:', or will default to the hyperlinked text): • "James Bond":imdb:Sean+Connery becomes James Bond • "Tangerine Dream":amazon becomes Tangerine Dream • "Movable Type":google becomes Movable Type • ["MT plugins by Brad Choate":google:movable type plugin choate] becomes MT plugins by Brad Choate • Float images to the left and right; center stuff too: • !>/images/me.jpg! (floats...

continue reading ...

<MTOnThisDay> Movable Type Plugin

The plugin support for Movable Type 2.2 is fantastic! And now we can develop the stuff that Ben just hasn't gotten around to yet. Here's one-- I've created a container tag that lets you pull entries that match the current system/entry month and day.

If you want to read more about it, visit the MT Plugin support forum page I've set up for this plugin.

To download the plugin, click here.

Updated on July 5. See included readme.txt file for details.

...

continue reading ...

After a lot of requests, its finally here. This hack will give you a more powerful listing whilst assigning multiple categories to an entry that includes the category hierarchies. As usual open up lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and around line 2772 find

$cats{ $cat->id } = $cat->label;

(make sure it is in the edit_placements subroutine) and replace it with

my @cats = $cat->parent_categories; @cats = ($cat, @cats); my $glue = " > "; my @res; while (my $c = pop @cats) { my $label = $c->label; push @res, $label; } $cats{ $cat->id } = join $glue, @res;

Finally open up tmpl/edit_placements.tmpl and replace the two occurances of style="width: 175px;" with style="min-width: 175px;"...

continue reading ...

Question

When trying to view my Activity Log, I get a 500 Internal Server Error.

Answer

Note: This information refers only to Movable Type versions below 3.2. In 3.2, the Activity Log display is now paginated.

If you've not reset your Activity Log in a while, it's possible it has grown so large that any request to view it will time out on your server, resulting in an error.

In pre-3.16 versions of Movable Type, you can use the following URL to reset your Activity Log without having to view it first: http://www.example.com/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=reset...

continue reading ...

Movable Type templates aren't too difficult to write, but they can be difficult to read. So I've whipped up another plugin to fix that. Simple Template is a plugin that provides an alternative syntax for Movable Type templates 1.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtsimpletemplate-1_21.zip

Installation

To install, place the ‘simpletemplate.pl' file in your Movable...

continue reading ...

Professional Network member Kevin Shay wrote the following tutorial to introduce the community to his exciting new plugin and its development potential.

The BigPAPI plugin for Movable Type allows you to create plugins that can easily add features to Movable Type's interface. This article explains the background behind the develpment of BigPAPI, and walks through the creation of a simple working plugin.

Why BigPAPI?

With each new version, Movable Type has become friendlier to plugin development. The earliest plugins could do little more than add tags to the platform's templating system. Now (as of version 3.2), the Plugin API allows plugins to define not only template tags...

continue reading ...

In the past few weeks I've managed to make MT Blogroll work on a Windows/IIS environment. I have only tested this plugin on one server so I'm not entirely sure how well this works. So Download MT-Blogroll_2.02.zip and follow the installation instructions. The only difference for you Windows users is that the contents of the lib/ folder in the distribution must go into the extlib/ directory hence you get extlib/Blogroll etc.

The only requirement is that you have MT 3.16 installed as important bugs were fixed.

continue reading ...

Page: 1 1 Page.

MT Blogroll 2.11

This is a bug fix release that fixes some major bugs with the dynamic templating tags. A big thank you to all the folks that reported this bug, sorry it took me so long to find the bug! Go grab...

Continue reading "MT Blogroll 2.11"

Posted on 09/15/2005 | Permalink | Comments (4)

MT Blogroll 2.1

MT Blogroll has been updated to be compatible with Movable Type 3.2 and includes some new features too: Improved UI - The UI has been drastically improved to fit in better with 3.2, you can see the new UI elements...

Continue reading "MT Blogroll 2.1"

Posted on 08/28/2005 | Permalink | Comments (6)

MT Blogroll 2.02

...

continue reading ...

While I haven't done a ton of Berkeley DB conversions for Movable Type, I am certain that if you are still on Berkeley, you should get onto a SQL pacakge pronto. This isn't to say that BDB is a bad product. Just that SQL is so much easier to administer when used with MT that it's not worth the effort of sticking with Berkeley.

As I was involved in the most recent of these projects, I ran into the age-old problem of too much data. The conversion just wouldn't run all the way through without losing data. Perhaps there are server tweaks that can make it happen. I don't know.

All I do know is that I could never get all of the entries to convert. Out of 1600 or so entries, I was getting...

continue reading ...

Page: 1 1 Page.

PowerRebuild 1.1

Some of you may remember the RebuildBlogs plugin I had created that allowed you to selectively rebuild multiple blogs at once. Although the plugin worked as is with 3.2, it didn't take advantage of some of its newest features, namely...

Continue reading "PowerRebuild 1.1"

Posted on 08/26/2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

MT RebuildBlogs

UPDATE: I've released v1.01 due to bugs faced with the paths to the plugin being incorrect on pre-3.16 systems. Download MT-RebuildBlogs_1.01.zip and follow the installation instructions. I often need to rebuild many blogs on my system because I make system...

Continue reading "MT RebuildBlogs"...

continue reading ...

Updated March 23, 2005

Once you are uploading images to your MT weblog with ease, you might on occassion want to wrap text on either side of the image, like so:

Placeholder Latin text - Vt enim quidam monumentis suis testati sunt, in Hispania pro consule et a sociis pecunias accepit emendicatas in auxilium aeris alieni et Lusitanorum quaedam oppida, quanquam nec imperata detrectarent et aduenienti portas patefacerent, diripuit hostiliter. Gallia fana templaque deum donis referta expilauit, urbes diruit saepius ob praedam quam ob delictum; unde factum, ut auro abundaret ternisque milibus nummum in libras promercale per Italiam prouinciasque diuenderet. In primo consulatu tria milia...

continue reading ...

Yes, I realize Movable Type is not a general-purpose content management system, but if you're in a pinch it can do wonders. Especially with this plugin, which allows you to associate other bits of data with your entries which can be extracted conviently in your templates. (Click the more link for more information.)

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtkeyvalues-1_53.zip

Installation

To install, place the...

continue reading ...

Well, for no good reason I felt I wanted to have a "Ask Brad" column on my site. I'm getting tired of thinking up subjects to post about so I'm letting my audience do that for me. LazyWeb syndrome I guess. Anyhoo, here's how I set it up with Movable Type. No complicated hacks required, honest.

First of all, I created a new blog for "Ask Brad". Then I created an entry in that blog, titled "Question...

continue reading ...

Since my latest upgrade to 3.16, I haven't bothered to implement my quicktags hack so I was left with the default quicktags. Out of habit, I hit the quicktags to create the necessary HTML then enter my content, however with the default quicktags, you have to first select the text then click the quicktag. I decided to change that. Open up mt.js and find the formatStr function

function formatStr (e, v) {

and on the third line of this function delete this

if (!str) return;

That's it, now when you click the quicktag, it'll create the opening and closing tag.

continue reading ...

Question

Sometimes my commenters don't leave a URL, so I want to show their email address instead. How can I display these?

Answer

The default templates use the <MTCommentAuthorLink> tag to provide a link for each commenter. In version 3.16 of Movable Type, the default behavior for displaying email addresses was changed. Now, the rules for the linking are as follows: • If the author has entered a URL, the author name will be a link to that URL. • If no URL was entered, display the author name without a link.

You can override these rules to also...

continue reading ...