The idea is pretty simple: returning visitors get to see only new content, not the old stuff. After all, if they're returning, that's probably what they want.

Using a cookie, I can track when you've last visited the front page. If any content is newer than the cookie, it gets published. If not, a "no new entries" message gets displayed. And so I dubbed it "Cookie Publishing."

You'll need to be able to use PHP to implement this feature. Visit danandsherree.com's front page to see it work - first a cookie will be set, then refresh to see it in action - or keep reading for details of how to set this up yourself.

2005/08/02...

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Comments not setting a cookie? See if your "var HOST" setting is correct. Normally it's set to <MTBlogHost> which is whatever is in your "site url" section in weblog configuration. If that's not what you need it to be - or it that conflicts with another site on your domain, you're going to have a problem.

Related Entries:

Posted by Iki at October 22, 2004 09:01 AM

Comments

Posted by: Iki at October 22, 2004 09:47 AM

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In ALA Issue 126, Paul Sowden famously introduced the joys of alternate Style Sheets per W3C specs. Not content to elucidate theory, Sowden devised a compliant Style Sheet Switcher built with a few lines of JavaScript, and presented it to ALA's readers and the entire design / development community as an Open Source gift.

That was cool – really neat actually – and fit perfectly into the vision of an accessible web. When the article broke, I was building a new site and wanted to include this gadget, but I faced two problems: • I'm incapable of directly copying someone else's code. • I had also had the idea rumbling about in my head of writing my...

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So you've got a web page. You've marked it up with structural XHTML. You've also been a good little web developer and used style sheets to control what your document looks like. You've even gone the extra mile and created several alternative style sheets to show how hardcore you are.

Great. But now you need a cross-browser way to dynamically switch between the style sheets.

Styling your site

Style sheets can be associated with documents using a list of link elements in the head. There are three different relationships external style sheets can have with the document: persistent, preferred, and alternate.

Persistent

These style sheets are always...

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Web designers are not programmers, and that can often be a problem when you need to create an active element in your web site using server side scripting. Programming is no light task, it seems, and most designers whimper and cower away when faced with even a small snippet of Perl or C.

Fear not, however, because Active Server Pages and VBScript make it easy to deliver effective server side scripting. This article assumes you know a little bit about how computer programming works, but you don't really need to know anything about VBScript or Visual Basic at all to get started. I'll walk you through two very useful ASP applications, and when you're done with this tutorial,...

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In this article, we'll build a simple, template-driven site that separates style, content, and structure in your website. We'll create a cross-browser stylesheet switcher that remembers the user's preferences, touching on php variables, cookies, if statements, and including pages with require_once.

Separating style, content, and structure

The separation of style from content has become the bugbear of the HTML developer. Traditionally, we've used well-written CSS and XHTML to achieve this separation, and we've seen how much easier it is to update our sites or provide multiple styles when we write our markup this way. By adding some...

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This hack is deprecated in favour of the MT Protect plugin. Please use the plugin instead of this hack!

One of the biggest wants with MT is to password protect individual entries. There are several hacks and bits of code that allow you to password protect entries but many of them are long winded and many involve separate categories. I wanted a simple way to selectively password protect entries no matter what the category, what blog etc.

So I created a new field on the entry screen (click screenshot for a larger view) that would contain the password. For this to work you will need to be using MT 3.1x, mySQL and PHP. To see this in action see the front page on my blog, enter the password "password" and you will be granted access for 10 days....

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I've released an update to MT-Notifier [ Download].

This version fixes the problem with sending multiple email notifications to those subscribed to entry notifications. Please note that the default behavior has not changed. Let me repeat: If you do not change a setting, your installation may send multiple notifications on the same entry. This is by design.

One reason for sending multiple notifications on the same entry is so that if you update an existing entry it will notify your subscribers. Some people may want this functionality, so it is still available - and in fact is the default behavior. If you do not want this to happen, but instead only want to send one notification per...

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This new version introduces inline editing for comments by the commenters. A cookie is set when the person hits the post button on the comment form. The cookie is set to expire in 5 minutes so the person must make any edits within five minutes.

Download MT-InlineEditor_1.1.zip. 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.)

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 used MT Tags in those...

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For your style-sheet-switching pleasure, A List Apart offers the Switcher, a piece of JavaScript that dynamically changes page styles. Functional as it is, it quite unfortunately relies on the user to have both JavaScript and cookies enabled. There's not much we can do about the cookies, but we can sidestep client-side processing with a little help from PHP.

PHP is a scripting language available on many, many servers. It's fast, it's free, it's open source and it handles everything on the server side, so there's no need to worry about users who have disabled client-side scripting in their browsers. If you're not sure if your host...

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With the most difficult part of running Movable Type -- the installation -- behind you, it is time to get started using MT.

It all begins with The Movable Type Content Management System (CMS). This script is the heart and soul of what makes powerful weblog publishing possible.

The CMS contains the majority of the intelligence and work flow that makes Movable Type what it is. Whether it involves posting an entry, adding a colleague as an author, or publishing your content with a whole new style, it is the CMS that is doing the heavy lifting.

By default the CMS script is named mt.cgi, although this...

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Question

Visitors who are trying to comment on my weblog with some browsers (Internet Explorer, Safari) aren't able to do so; they still see the sign in link, instead of the comment posting form. If they use another browser (Firefox, Netscape), they don't have this problem.

Answer

There are several reasons why this might occur in some browsers but not others:

Caching issues

The browser is caching the page; have your visitors refresh the page after signing in to force the page to update.

Your pages are encoded with UTF-8.

Some browsers are more likely...

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Question

I've logged in to Movable Type, but everything I click takes me back to the Login page again.

Answer

This is related to the cookie Movable Type must set to keep you logged in during your session.

Note: There is a Known Issue in version 3.16 which prevents the login cookie from being set correctly when Movable Type is installed in the root folder of a domain. This issue was resolved in version 3.17 (released on June 2, 2005), so you should upgrade in order to correct this particular type of login problem.

If the Known Issue above does not...

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Some days ago, a new version of MTLookup was released. Please read Second version of MTLookup released for the announcement. I will describe the new features in several posts, which will be published here in the Movable Type Weblog.

Today, I want to tell you about persistent user data.

The problem

Today, an MTLookup query is defined by several settings. For example, in addition to the search phrase, you choose which websites should be included, and whether just the titles or also the excerpts are to be shown.

Most of these settings will not be changed from one query to the next. For example, I will always select "Title, Summary, and Excerpt", as this is my preferred...

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Signing In to Movable Type

Problem

You need to sign in to Movable Type.

Solution

Point your browser to the Movable Type Content Management System script (typically mt.cgi) and enter your username and password.

Discussion

Before using the system, each author must identify themselves by signing in. The purpose of this exercise is not only to secure the contents of the system, but also to provide customizations based on user preferences.

Begin by entering your username and password. (If you are the first person to log into this system your username will be "Melody" and...

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<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.

...

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Signing Out

Problem

You want to sign out of the system.

Solution

Click the Logout link in the Primary Navigation. In some cases simply shutting down your browser will do.

Discussion

Explicitly signing out of Movable Type is only mandatory in certain instances. MT's sign in system uses a cookie that acts a transparent means of verifying access to the system as discussed in "Signing In to Movable Type". Typically this cookie will expire as soon as your browser is shut down, thereby signing you out of the system. This is not the case for those who opted to be signed...

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Every so often I'm reminded of how the simplicity of the web is belying of the underlying power.

Generally speaking, the web provides a simple user interface that has the ability to power increasingly complex back-end interactions. The more I delve into the nuts and bolts of how things like HTTP work, the more I realize that the implicit transparency of it all creates prime opportunities for even know-nothing coders like myself to build more and more sophisticated interfaces and applications.

Once the data hits the server it's mostly smoke and mirrors to me. But the data that hits the client side is quite transparent, and easy to tweak at will. The web is built on...

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Question

I'm getting an Invalid Login message when trying to sign in to Movable Type.

Answer

First Login?

• Is this your first login attempt after installing Movable Type? If so, did the installation script run successfully? Until it reports success, you will not be able to log in. • Are you entering the default username (Melody) and password (Nelson) correctly? These are case sensitive.

Changed Hosts or Servers?

Are you trying to log in after moving servers, and you are using the Berkeley database?

When you change hosting providers (or just move...

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Since it was first released in 2001, Paul Sowden's Style Sheet Switcher has been downloaded and used by thousands of designers and developers and has spawned many client-side and server-side adaptations.

Having used Paul's script on numerous projects, I began to wonder how style-sheet switching could be extended to give users even more choices or accessibility enhancements, so I turned to my good friend Brothercake to make my ideas a reality and Invasion of the Body Switchers was born.

Looking back at the original Style Sheet Switcher

Fantastically simple in its implementation, Paul's original script was not without its woes.

Anchors which trigger the switching functions are...

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