Google recently released some useful tips on how to optimize the use of Google Adsense on one's web pages. No surprise - the hottest "hot spot" for the best click-through returns lies right in the middle of your content.

How does one place a Google Adsense ad (or any other ad, bit of text, or image for that matter) between entries on the main index page of your MT weblog? By using a simple trick of the "lastn" and "offset" attributes outlined in the MT manual here.

Normally on your Main Index template, you would have your MTEntries section laid out like so:

for MT 3.2:

<MTEntries> <$MTEntryTrackbackData$> <MTDateHeader><h2 class="date-header"><$MTEntryDate format="%x"$></h2></MTDateHeader>...

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When I set about re-creating MovaDir, I wanted to create a form that would post directly into MT. I soon discovered that I would need to use the XML-RPC API to really streamline it. This is a tutorial that will guide you through setting up a form that will allow a user to manipulate entry fields and then rebuild the entry. Use of the mySQL database is required.

You will need to create a new index template called Incutio XML-RPC Library, set the output file as IXR_Library.inc.php and copy this file for the template body.

Next create a new index template called IP Tracking with an output file iptracking.php and copy this file into the template body.

This is a very neat script written by...

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Chuck recently asked about adding a blogroll to MT. I pointed him to this tutorial rather than pointing him to Blogrolling.com.

Ever since Blogrolling changed ownership, I've felt that the service has been going downhill. A few months ago, when I removed the blogrolling php code off my site load times drastically decreased. One of my main peeves with blogrolling was that it was located on a remote server. During the transition period that server was often down, and caused load times on my site to shoot up - so high that my site was nearly unaccessible. Another problem with the Blogrolling involves the site Blogshares.com. Some script that were heavily relied on were deleted and caused...

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There are two methods to create a random entry, pulled from your weblog database (if you aren't using dynamic publishing). The easiest is David Raynes' MTRandomEntries plugin. However, MTRandomEntries generates a random entry only when you rebuild the page on which the MTRandomEntry code is located. If you want a random entry to be generated each time the page is refreshed in a browser, you can do that with a PHP script that pulls the data from your MySQL database. For this method to work your blog needs to be PHP enabled and you need to be using a MySQL database.

This tutorial will outline variations of a PHP script you can use to generate random entries, similar to what can be seen...

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Question

When looking at my generated webpages, some of these pages contain characters that really look strange. When looking at the same text in Movable Type, anything looks fine.

Answer

The problem occurs rather often in varying situations. Most of the time it has something to do with the character set. Let us first have a look at the basics...

Character Set

Anything that is stored in electronic form is saved as a series of 0s and 1s. Usually, these are combined to form a string of numbers, ranging from 0 to 255. Even a text, as the one that you are currently reading, is stored as a sequence of numbers.

A charset defines which characters belong to which number. For...

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One measure to guard against spam is to close comments on old blog entries. This is easy enough to do.

At the bottom of your Edit Entry window is the pull-down for none, open, or closed comments. If you don't see this as pictured, click on "Customize the display of this page" link, select "Custom" and select the fields you wish displayed, including "Allow Comments".

You can also set comments to be open, closed or non-existent by default through the weblog config window, Preferences section. Under "Comment Configuration" see "Allow Comments" Default. Note that you can override this default via your selection on the individual entry.

Plugins

There are several plugins that can be...

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Co-authored by Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

Future posting is a convenient new feature in MT3.1x, allowing you to create an entry and have it automatically post at a future time. But before you can use this feature you need to set up a Cron Job on your server.

What is a Cron Job?

Cron is a task scheduler for unix servers. A cron job is a specific task that runs a certain number of times per minute, day, week, or month on your server. For example, you can use a cron job to automate a daily MySQL database backup. The main problem with cron jobs is that if they aren't properly configured they can cause high server loads...

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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...

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In the last post, I called for feature requests and unfortunately didn't get very many. None-the-less, I've been hard at work on the next version of MT Blogroll and due to time constraints can't test out all the new features across all databases and platforms like I used to. As a result, I'm calling for beta testers. If you wish to beta test the next version of MT Blogroll, simply leave a comment (ensure you fill in the email field so that I can contact you) with your specs, specifically I'll need: • Webserver and Operating System (e.g. Apache on Linux) • Movable Type version (I hope everyone's on 3.2!) • Database (e.g. MySQL, PostGreSQL etc. Users that don't use MySQL are highly required!) • MT Blogroll version you've currently got...

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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...

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The hundreds of plugins available for Movable Type are what define its power and flexibility for a lot of users, and we've tried to do justice to the creativity and innovation of our plugin developers in version 3.2.

Movable Type's plugin architecture dates back three years to version 2.2. In that version, we added the ability to create custom template tags, and version 2.6 built on that framework by adding custom text formatting plugins and the ability to store data for use by plugins.

In version 3.0, we radically revamped the plugin architecture to support the creation of full applications on top of the Movable Type platform. And version 3.1 extended this power with...

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You've seen it before. An article gets hot and soon you have 50 to 60 comments attached to it. Getting in on the tail end of the conversation can be annoying with that many posts to wade through. So we create a handy little convention that will highlight (change the class of) the comments posted by the author of the post.

There are many, many ways this can be done (plugins, php, etc.) and even more ways to implement it (mutliple author highlighting, specific images for certain commenters, etc.), but we're going to look at two important facets: static and dynamic.

Static vs. Dynamic

This is a debate which we will leave to the professionals. I will only...

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UPDATE files are bundled in an archive.

I was very impressed with the WordPress Suggest plugin and wanted to port it over to MT. The porting was easy but the query was very slow and pulled some bad results from the database. Chad helped me last night and we had almost cleaned it up until v0.2 was released which seems to have fixed the problems I had. Try it using the search form on the sidebar.

This plugin is similar to LiveSearch (and the MT implementation) however the difference is it lets you keep the mt-search.cgi functionality which I liked. Also this plugin works slightly differently to LiveSearch, I prefer this!

Implementing it with MT is very easy, you need to have PHP and be...

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Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

If you move from static publishing to dynamic publishing in Movable Type, you may encounter a variety of confusing error messages in Smarty, the system MT uses to create its dynamic pages. This tutorial will explore several of the errors you may experience, explain what they mean, and show you how to solve them. This is by no means a complete guide to every error you may experience; I will continue to add to this tutorial as I come by more of them.

The Basics

Many of the error messages you may see will take the format: Smarty Error: [in mt:## line:##]

This error message provides useful information that can help you...

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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.)

...

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Seeing the flurry of activity around Inline Editing on Wordpress ever since Jay Allen mentioned it on his panel at SXSW, I thought it was time us MT'ers had something similar. Download the plugin. This animation better highlights what this plugin does (600kb)

Preserve the directories in the zip starting from your root MT directory (therefore files in the extlib/ folder in the zip go into MT's extlib/ directory and mt-ie-cookiecheck.php goes into your root mt directory etc.)

I'll need to talk you through installing this. For every blog you want this enabled on, you will need to create two index templates of the two text files in the zip (mt-inlineeditor.php and mt-inlineeditor.js) I've...

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With Movable Type 3.2's focus on enabling community, we wanted to make sure that a blog administrator can recognize the people who build the community around a weblog. And if you're keeping a personal blog, you want to make sure your friends feel welcome when they visit your site.

TypeKey Authentication

Last year, we released the TypeKey authentication service to allow commenters to identify themselves in a consistent manner. This lets site owners assign persistent rules to an individual that act every time that person visits a blog. Since then, over a million people have signed in with the service, and a thriving community has sprung up around the TypeKey service and protocol.

The TypeKey authentication...

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Warning: main(/home/elise/public_html/mt/mt32badge.inc): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/eliseb/public_html/archives/001012multiple_authors.php on line 90 Warning: main(): Failed opening '/home/elise/public_html/mt/mt32badge.inc' for inclusion (include_path='') in /home/eliseb/public_html/archives/001012multiple_authors.php on line 90

With MT you can have multiple authors on the same weblog, making it easy to have a friend contribute to your blog as a "guest author" or to create a group weblog to which many people contribute. You can even customize to a small degree, aspects of the author-specific Individual Entry pages.

Adding an Author

To add an author in MT 3.2...

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This tutorial is written by LMT author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog. Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and LMT.

With Movable Type 3.2, Six Apart launched a new markup and stylesheet structure that has also unified their three platforms. These new templates and stylesheets (from now on referred to as themes) have been called tag soup due to the sheer number of <div>s and indents.

What a mess - why did they do it?

The new themes can be quite intimidating the first time you come across them, however Six Apart created these new themes for several reasons: • First of all, Typepad, LiveJournal and Movable Type now share exactly the same markup. This means that a theme will work on...

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• Once an entry or category has been set to receive TrackBack pings, disabling pings for it through the UI will not actually refuse pings to that item but will suppress display of those pings. • Rebuilds will fail silently after saving an entry if a problem exists in your templates (for example, mismatched tags or a missing include module). An error will be shown, however, upon manual rebuild using the "Rebuild Site" functionality. • The nofollow plugin will cause a spurious warning for users with older versions of Perl upon running mt-check.cgi, mt-testbg.cgi or any of the...

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