Adding a background pattern to your weblog is pretty straightforward in Movable Type, requiring the change of only one line in your stylesheet.

1. Pick a pattern. You can make your own pattern using a tool like Photoshop, or you can pick a pattern from one of the many sites that offer patterns for free (for non-commercial use).

Patterns from Kaliber 10000.

Patterns from Squid Fingers

2. Make a tile.

Patterns are based on tiles, small files of the design that, once repeated, create a full pattern. Once you find a pattern you like, you need to save the gif or jpeg file of the tile upon which the pattern is based. One way to do that is to view the source of the HTML of the...

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Plugins are bits of code that, once installed, extend the functionality of Movable Type. The word plugin is often used by software developers to describe a third party application that "hooks" into a main application to extend its functionality. Movable Type hosts an active plugin developer community whose plugins have greatly enhanced the capabilities of Movable Type. You can find a directory of MT plugins at http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/. To use a plugin, you will need to use an FTP program to load the plugin files to your server. When you upgrade your MT version, you must be careful not to overwrite your plugins file. Either that, or reload the plugins after the...

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In MT versions 3.1x and earlier, you may have noticed in your Movable Type blog archive directory on your web server, a bunch of .xml files beginning with numbers. What are these files and do you need them?

By default, Movable Type generates an individual RSS feed for each entry that lists the TrackBack pings for that entry. This is useful is someone wants to subscribe to your Trackbacks via RSS. How often does that happen? Usually, never. You can safely delete those files from your archive directory on your web server. To unclutter your archive directory and keep from generating the TrackBack .xml files in the future, find the line on your mt.cfg file that says:

# GenerateTrackBackRSS...

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This month's lucky winner of an € 50 gift certificate is Tomas Ahlbeck from Sweden. Tomas is the owner of the weblog "Vad heter hunden?", which means "What's the name of the dog?". You can find it on Vad heter hunden?. Tomas describes his weblog...

...The blog is mainly on daily comments, ironic and satirical reflections and own cartoons. It also contains categories on genealogy which is the main theme of the ahlbeck.net site in general. Since the family has roots on Vorpommern since 1631 some of the contents are also about the two communities in Vorpommern with the name Ahlbeck.

Tomas also runs another weblog (written in English). It is an important weblog...

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If you want your Movable Type entries to be displayed in alphabetical order, substitute the <MTEntries> tag with:

<MTEntries sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend">

Use the same </MTEntries> closing tag.

Links: MT Forum thread on case insensitive sorting - sort_by="title" is case sensitive by default in Movable Type. This thread shows David Phillips' tip on how to adjust the perl code so that your sort_by attribute can be case insensitive.

Copyright © 2004-2005 Elise Bauer. All Rights Reserved (unless otherwise specified).

Has this tutorial been helpful? Please consider linking to Learning Movable Type at...

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Updated

I have found two great services for showing and sharing your photos on your website: Flickr and Photoblox. Of the two, Flickr is by far the easiest to implement, and what you put on your site links back to a larger social networking service based on photo sharing.

1. Flickr Zeitgeist

Flickr Zeitgeist is a fun little flash-based goodie that shows the most recent public photos that people have posted to Flickr, a photo social network. (Note: I had a little bit of trouble gettng this to work; the problem was that the MT entry template automatically put line breaks in the javascript code. I adjusted the code so there are no more line breaks and it seems to work fine.)

It's still in beta, but...

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Hacking Movable Type, the long awaited book by MT experts Jay Allen, Brad Choate, Ben Hammersley, David Raynes and Matt Haughey, is now in print, shipping, and available at Amazon.com.

From the book's back cover:

Ready to push Movable Type to the max?

Movable Type, that amazingly powerful personal publishing application, is the superhero of the Internet age. But when you push, poke, stretch, and otherwise coax it into producing even more, the possibilities for your Web content are simply superlative. Roll up your sleeves and get movinghere's the first book to tell you how.

Discover how to do all this and more

1. Hack the perfect installation 2. Hack the database 3. Play with Atom, Perl, and XML-RPC APIs...

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Has it ever happened that you make a change to your default templates or stylesheet and suddenly your weblog doesn't look right anymore? Panic begins to set in as you quickly try to undo the changes that you just made, but it's still not working? A great tool to use to help troubleshoot problems like this is the W3C Markup Validator.

The W3CWorld-Wide Web Consortiumis the organization responsible for setting the HTML specifications and standards that browser developers use in their web browsers. If your web page "validates" then it should be able to be viewed properly in the major web browsers. If it doesn't validate, then the validator tool will list out all of the errors or...

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Many weblogs have a footer bar running across the bottom of the page with information that pertains to all of the pages of the weblog, such as copyright, XHTML validation, software used to create the weblog, etc.

Adding a footer to your Movable Type weblog is pretty straightforward.

1. Create a Footer Id in your stylesheet. Include elements for how you want the links in your footer to appear. For example:

#footer { font-family: Trebuchet MS; font-size: x-small; padding:2px; margin:0px; background-color:#CBE3F6; color:#fff; border-bottom: 1px solid #9EC4E2; border-top: 1px solid #9EC4E2; ...

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When one decides to scrap the traditional hacks and kludges in creating an HTML page, and opts to instead format in CSS, the effects can be rather dramatic.

A certain Mr. Z. linked an interesting tool last night, the GetContentSize analysis utility. Stripping all extraneous CSS and Javascript, it will report the signal to noise ratio of your HTML.

mezzoblue, for example, sits at about 45% (which will inevitably change as new articles get posted and old ones removed), while Zeldman is a higher 60%. Both are CSS–only layouts that don't use table hacks. Let's look at a few examples of old–school HTML tabling to compare.

As tipped off in September, Microsoft...

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Upgrading or installing Movable Type can be rather intimidating. There are few things I have screwed up so badly attempting, even when they say it is super easy, idiot-proof. I always seem to be the idiot who still can't make it work. I have now upgraded two separate MT installs to MT 3.2 and thought I would share my notes with you. Please note that Jay Allen (Product Manager of Movable Type), Chad Everett (of Don't Back Down and Everitz Consulting), and Arvind Satyanarayan ( Movalog) have all helped me at various stages in upgrading, and if I didn't have friends who knew what they were doing, honestly I just wouldn't attempt this on my own. But that's me, and I have over 20 blogs...

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Looking for a way to incorporate a Photo Gallery into your MT blog? Check out Photo Gallery Templates from StopDesign.com.

There are many ways to create a web-based photo album or photoblog in Movable Type. This tutorial addresses just one method for creating a photo album, and is based on the steps I took to create my MT-based photo album. This tutorial is for experienced MT users and assumes familiarity with plugins, CSS, creating a new weblog, category archiving, and uploading images. Although long, the tutorial is easier than it looks, especially if you want a photo album that works just like mine. It's always the customizations that take time. In this tutorial I will give...

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Update April 9, 2005: Brad Choate has released a new anti-spam plugin called SpamLookup. Jay Allen, the creator of MT-Blacklist recommends SpamLookup over MT-Blacklist.

Spammers have discovered Trackback and have recently been leaving their trail of unwelcome links all over the blogosphere. To get a sense of what we are up against, read The Register's interview with a link spammer. Listed here are some defensive measures you can take.

MT-Blacklist

As with comment spam, your first recourse is Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist. The blacklist will help you delete the trackbacks and ban the URLs the spammers leave. Note that if you are using MT2.661 and MT-Blacklist 1.65, Jay has special instructions for deleting trackback spam pings....

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11.30.2004

Interview with Nick Bradbury

A good interview with Nick Bradbury of TopStyle and FeedDemon fame, with tips on becoming an independent software vendor:

If you plan to do this for a living, focus on building tools that make peoples lives easier or more interesting, and chances are youll last longer and find your work more fulfilling.

Posted by Anil in Blog Strategy at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

11.30.2004

More on the MT3 Bible

Rogers Cadenhead talks a bit more about the newly-released Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition, and is very generously giving away five author's copies to people who comment on, or link to, his post...

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06.30.2005

New in Movable Type 3.2: A home for administrators

One of Movable Type's biggest strengths is the platform's support for an unlimited number of weblogs. Once you've got a thriving community of bloggers creating entries and publishing their thoughts, though, it quickly becomes necessary to manage the weblogs on your system.

To meet this need, we've introduced an entire new area of functionality in Movable Type 3.2: The System Overview. We've chosen the System Overview as the first feature to highlight in this new release because it represents a single home for administrators. It's one place to go to oversee everything that's happening across your...

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We believe in total empowerment of the user to decide what content they want to look at. – Microsoft Product Manager Shawn Sanford, as quoted by NewsBytes

Microsoft thinks they can improve my writing. This makes me want to get a gun and go to war. – Dave Winer, Scripting.com

Smart Tags can be developed by anybody, are completely under the user's control, and can do some very useful things. – Executive Editor David Coursey, writing for ZDNet AnchorDesk

This is exactly like what Microsoft did in the past...leveraging what they have on the desktop into another market... – Gartner analyst Michael Silver, as quoted by News.com

The dustup surrounding...

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Movable Type is the premier weblog publishing platform for businesses, organizations, developers, and web designers. Powerful customization gives you control over everything you publish and the elegant interface keeps things simple and clear.

Features

• Unlimited Blogging

Movable Type offers the ability to publish an unlimited number of blogs quickly and easily through a single installation of the application. And the platform supports posting by as many authors as you need, with no limit on the numbers of entries, comments, or TrackBacks the system supports. • Powerful management...

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