If you are looking for help making the transition to CSS layout (that's Cascading Style Sheets), you've come to the right place. I am cataloging here as many useful cross-browser CSS layout techniques as I can find, and some that I made up when I was bored last Thursday. All the examples on this site have been reduced to only their essential code, and you will find the source displayed on each page to hopefully make it quick and easy to understand the inner workings of the CSS. Feel free to steal all the code you find on this site, and consider linking back here on your site or in your source comments.

You will also find below links to various online CSS resources and tutorials, appropriate for both the novice and the seasoned CSS veteran....

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The default Movable Type MT3.2 templates come with a sidebar on the right side of the Main Index page, but not on any of the individual entry, monthly, or category archive pages.

There are two basic ways to add a sidebar to archive pages. The easiest for beginners is just to copy and paste the existing sidebar code into the correct place in the archive templates. The slightly more involved, but much preferable method is to create a separate file with the sidebar code and use a PHP include or an MT include to include the file into the various templates. You can also very easily move a sidebar from the right to the left side of your weblog pages.

Where is the Sidebar Code?

The MT3.2 stylesheets and...

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Updated April 30, 2005

TrackBack is a feature of Movable Type (and Typepad) that allows you to let other sites know that you have linked to them, and lets you know when other sites have linked to you.

If enabled, the TrackBack feature will place a direct link on your Movable Type entry to entries from other sites that are linking to your entry. Conversely, if you place a link on your weblog entry that links to another site's entry, a link to your site will show up on the other site's entry.

Here an example of TrackBack in action. In this entry you can see that 7 other weblogs are referencing this entry.

Clicking on the TrackBack link will show the list of other sites or weblogs...

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Movable Type uses CSS elements defined in your weblog's stylesheet template to control font sizes as well as other style factors. The following graphic indicates which default stylesheet classes correspond to which heading and text elements in the default Gettysburg style.

To change the size of one of the font elements, you need to change the stylesheet. For example in the default Gettysburg stylesheet, you'll find the following:

.content p { color: #666666; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; text-align: left; margin-bottom: 10px; }

Movable Type uses absolute-size keywords for font sizes in the...

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Byrne Reese has released MediaManager beta4... an updated, overhauled, "new and improved" MT32-friendly replacement for BookQueueToo, as well as MTAmazon32v1.0 (repackaged and updated MTAmazon). Very cool! Check out the screenshots for a walk-through and you'll be impressed, too.

Installation (on MT32b2) was not too difficult. First, I edited mt-config.cgi to specify my mt-static path (even though I do have it in the default location). Then I uploaded MTAmazon32.pl and MediaManager into my plugins directory (making sure to CHMOD 755 mmanager.cgi). In System Overview/Plugins I configured MTAmazon32 with my Amazon subscriber ID and cache location. Then I configured MTAmazon32's Amazon...

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Before you install Movable Type there are three fundamental questions you need to ask yourself, 1) should you really be using Movable Type as your blogging software?, 2) do you have everything you need to use Movable Type? and 3) should you do the install yourself or should you pay someone else to do it?

1. Should you really be using Movable Type?

As weblogs gain more public visiblity, more and more people are setting up their own blogs. Many turn to Movable Type as it is one of the more established and powerful tools available. Movable Type however requires much more technical expertise than hosted blog services such as Typepad and Blogger. The first requirement is that you know...

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01.31.2005

BlogBinders: Publish your blog in print

If you're looking for a way to hold your blog in your hands, BlogBinders.com offers a simple and clever service to turn your blog into an attractive, customized book. BlogBinders supports LiveJournal, Movable Type, and TypePad.

Posted by Anil in Web Services at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

01.31.2005

Gawker launches Lifehacker and Gridskipper

Gawker Media's just added two new Movable Type-powered weblogs to its media empire, as announced by Nick Denton. Lifehacker is a friendly geek site and Gridskipper is a travel site aiming for selectivity.

Posted by Anil in New Sites at 10:45 AM | Permalink |...

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The tips in this tutorial are designed around the templates for MT 2.661 and earlier versions.

Once you have set up category archiving, the next step is to customize the category archive display pages. The default Category Archive Template that comes with Movable Type lists the whole entries (not excerpts), doesn't tell the viewer what category she is actually viewing, and has no intuitive link back to the home page. We'll address these issues here.

1. Listing excerpts instead of full entries. You may want to keep the archives as is, with full entries. But if you have few categories and lots of entries you will soon have very large and long category pages. Changing to excerpts...

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Updated. Originally posted April, 2004

Adding a Recent Comments section to your weblog is easy and straightforward. There are two basic approaches. The first is to list the last N number of recent comments; the second the last N most recently commented on entries.

The most recent comments

In this example of Recent Comments the last 10 comments are listed, regardless of how many times there may have been comments to the same entry. The comment authors names are linked to their respective websites, if they have them, and the entry title is linked to the author's comment in the entry.

For most recent comments like shown in the example to the left, add the following code to the...

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Choosing the Right Weblog Platform

Problem

You are trying to determine whether Movable Type or TypePad is right for you.

Solution

Decide what is most important to you: simplicity or control.

Discussion

TypePad is a complement to Movable Type, not a replacement. The two tools share a common core designed to address the needs of users with different requirements and capabilities. So, the question that will often be asked is, which is right the tool to use, Movable Type or TypePad? The answer comes down to simplicity vs. control. TypePad's centralized design and focus on...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for retrieving data in XML format and displaying the data on your MT-generated pages. It's basically a Movable Type interface to the extremely handy XML::Simple Perl module. The plugin will work with any well-formed XML document that can be retrieved via an HTTP GET request.

The GetXML plugin is extremely generalized, and to use it you'll have to understand the structure of the XML data you want to work with. There are specific MT plugins available for certain particular types of XML data, such as RSS feeds, Amazon content, and weather forecasts. If there's a specific plugin out there for the XML resource you're interested in, by...

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The default Movable Type styles use color schemes in which certain colors are repeated in different style elements throughout the stylesheet. For example, the Independence style uses the same color red (#B22222) for the banner background color, the link hover color, the content h2, the calendar caption, and the sidebar h2 and border colors. In the comments section of the LMT tutorial Colors - Background, Banner, Headline, and Font, developer Brad Choate remarked that you could easily use the MTSetVar tag to define a color and the top of your stylesheet, and use the MTGetVar tag throughout your stylesheet wherever you wanted that color to be used. This works because the stylesheet is a...

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What do all these folders do?

This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog.

There are several folders in the default distribution of Movable Type. This tutorial will attempt to guide you through them all so that you feel more comfortable with what they do and contain.

extlib/

This directory contains perl libraries and files that support Movable Type. These are the modules that are needed by Movable Type to run (for example those modules listed in mt-check.cgi are normally found here) Some plugins also require some special perl modules to be installed, and normally you can install these perl modules into the extlib/ directory. For example, the BlogTimes plugin requires the GD perl module to be installed. Obviously you can get your host to install it and then that module would be available server wide. However, if you uploaded the files provided on the BlogTimes page into your extlib/ directory, you would have the GD module installed just for your installation without having to go to your host....

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Updated. Originally published Jan 2, 2004

Error messages are the messages that are displayed when a visitor to your site encounters a server error. The most common error messages are 404: File Not Found and 403: Access Forbidden. The 404 error message is displayed when a visitor to your site tries to access a page that does not exist on your server. The 403 message is displayed when a visitor tries to enter an area on your site that is off limits to the public.

You can customize your error messages so that instead of seeing an ugly server message, your visitor sees instead a personalized note from you. The methods are different depending on if you are doing static (the default) or dynamic...

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The first thing you might want to do when customizing your Movable Type blog style is to change the color of the background, banner, headlines, or text. This is pretty easy to do; the adjustments are made in your weblog's stylesheet template.

Before you start, you should have a basic understanding of how colors are coded into a web page. Open up your stylesheet from the templates menu in your MT edit screen. If you scroll down you will see several instances of the word "color" followed by a # sign and six characters comprised of letters and or numbers. These six characters represent a color; the first 2 characters affect the RED tones of RGB, the third and fourth characters...

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When installing Movable Type for the first time, you have a choice of what database to use - MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, or the default - Berkeley DB. The recommended choice is MySQL for many reasons. MySQL is more stable, more powerful, more easily editable than Berkeley DB. With one simple command you can back-up your entire MySQL database (See Backing Up Your Blog). Many web hosts offer a cPanel or phpMyAdmin utility to manage your database, making it easy to make global changes to your weblog.

If you are using Berkeley DB and you change servers, or your host upgrades your server (this has happened to me twice in the last year), the version of Berkeley DB must be exactly the...

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There are several situations in which you might want to combine two or more blogs into one. You might want to create a "Portal" blog which displays the most recent entries or headlines of entries from various blogs. You might want to create a Sideblog or Linkblog (see tutorial). Or you might want to have what looks to be just one blog (such as Learning Movable Type) but is actually a combination of several.

The tools you have at your disposal are David Raynes' MultiBlog plugin, PHP Includes, SSI - Server Side Includes, and RSS, among others. This tutorial will focus on the easiest of these alternatives - how to use the MultiBlog plugin to combine blogs from a single installation of...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog.

Updated Nov 16

The default styles that come with MT are known as 'fixed' styles. This means that size and position of layout elements, such as columns, are fixed and are defined in pixels (px). This also means that no matter what a person's screen resolution, everything will be the same width and in approximately the same position. The alternative to a fixed design is a fluid design. A fluid design uses percentages when defining size and positions, so the sizes of elements on the page are relative to the user's screen resolution. A fluid design also removes the horizontal scroll bar. With a fluid...

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Syndicate this site means that the headlines, a link, and an entry description for each new weblog entry are made available for others to use on their websites or to access through a newsfeed reader program.

What is a "newsfeed reader" program? Rather than manually checking in on each of the weblogs or news sites that you enjoy, you can instead use a newsfeed reader program that will compile all of the latest headlines and excerpts of your favorite sites that have enabled RSS - sometimes known as Really Simple Syndication. With a newsfeed reader you can easily and freely subscribe to content from enabled websites.

For example, say there were several cooking weblogs that interested...

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For those of you with multiple MT weblogs, have you ever wanted to move an entry from one blog to another? or the entries from only one category from one to another weblog? You can copy the entries from the first weblog and paste them into the second, but how to move the associated comments or trackbacks?

Here's one fairly straightforward method.

1. Create a new index template in the weblog that contains the entries you wish to move. Give the template name any name you wish. Call the output file mt.txt. Copy and paste the following code into the new index template:

<MTEntries lastn="1000" sort_order="ascend" category="Your Category Name Goes...

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