During my second lecture to an XML class at a local community college, I explained how XML lets you define your own markup language with custom tags and attributes. I had finished defining a simple markup language for use with a list of amateur sports clubs, and had displayed a sample document written with that markup. At that point, one student asked:

"Isn't it inefficient to have to type all those tags for every club? What good is this? It looks nice, but what can I do with this document? How can I put this in a web page or use it with other programs? Wouldn't it be easier to just use HTML or a database/word processor/fill-in-the-blank?"

The reason that we use XML...

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This section of the appendix details all configuration directives that can be defined in mt-config.cgi. Through use of these directives, you can control numerous aspects of the system.

Except for those which define things specific to your system (e.g. CGIPath and your database settings), all of them have defaults set by Movable Type. This means that not every directive will appear in mt-config.cgi. If you wish to override the default for a setting which does not appear in the file, simply add it and the desired value to your mt-config.cgi.

...

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A question on automating database population for you server-side experts.

Let's say you have a web site that you've been updating manually for a few years. Let's also say that you're sick to death of doing it this way, have finally taken the steps necessary to automate this thankless task, and now it's finally time to throw all that manually-input data into a database. For the sake of argument, let's also assume that adding the 700+ items by hand just isn't going to happen.

So then my question to you is, can you see any way of taking multiple pages of static, well-formed (and consistent) HTML like, say, this, and getting it to...

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3-Column 404 Error About Page Absolute Pixel Sizes Accessibility Activity Log Add Your Links Here Adding An Author Additional Weblog Adsense Advertising Affiliate Programs Align Attribute Alphabetize Entries Alternative Search Template Amazon Amazon Web Services Archive Pages Archives Ascii Characters and Symbols Ascii Mode Audioblog Author Archives Authors Background Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Backup Banner Banner Images Berkeley DB Binary Mode BinHex Mode Blockquotes Blog Maintenance Bloglet Book Review Bookmarklet BookQueueToo Buttons Captcha Captions Categories Category Category Archive Category Archiving CGIWrap Changing Servers CHMOD Chron Job Clocks Closing Comments...

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What are web documents made of, anyway? Sugar, spice, and everything nice?

In fact, they're nothing more than Source. For all of the inspiration, thought, and sweat that might go into a page, it is merely a mess of characters that happens to contain a lot of brackets.

After five and a half years of actively building pages, it's occurring to me that a lot of developers haven't figured this out.

What I see is not what they get.

Is this the anguished moaning of an old fart? It certainly is.

As with the plaintive cries uttered by all old farts, this one also contains a nugget of wisdom: while at first you may succeed by the power vested in your tools, you...

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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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You should just be able to copy and paste this style sheet into the master style sheet of your blog and you'll get a nice little site refurb, on the house:

 # Waters of the Hudson # CSS distributed by # PlasticMind Design # http://plasticmind.com body { margin: 0px 0px 20px 0px; background-color: #000033; text-align: center; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif; } a { text-decoration: none; } a:link { color: #336699; } a:visited { color: #336699; } a:active { color: #336699; } a:hover { color: #ACBED5; border-bottom-width:...
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Learning Movable Type is now hosted on a new server and now has its own domain name - http://www.learningmovabletype.com. In the process of changing servers and changing URLs, we may have created some broken links or other site hiccups. If you encounter something that just doesn't seem to be working properly, please email me using the contact form.

Humongous thanks to Chad and Arvind for their invaluable assistance with this move.

If you link to Learning Movable Type (and we hope you do) please, please, please change the URL in your link to the new one. That way, Google will find us more easily, and those using Google to find things regarding Movable Type will find us more easily too....

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05.31.2005

Movable Type Cheat Sheet

One of the great things about Movable Type being localized into a number of languages and having such a broad international presence is that we get great contributions from our community around the world. The latest contribution is Jörg Petermann's Movable Type Cheat Sheet, which he's published in both German and English.

The Cheat Sheet, available in both PDF and PNG formats, covers all the standard Movable Type template tags, as well as common attributes for the tags and the date format used for output. Most of these tags also apply to TypePad's advanced templates as well, so it's worth keeping a copy of the Cheat Sheet...

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I've just released an updated version of MT-Notifier. Most of the changes are behind-the-scenes, and you won't see much different about the operation. However, there are a couple of new features, notably an enhanced ability to specify the "from" address on your outgoing notifications.

While versions prior to 1.2.0 had a $SENDER variable defined inside the notifier.pm module, versions 1.2.0 and higher will store this information in the plugindata table, along with the subscription information. This also allows a default address to be set on a per-blog or a per-installation basis.

If you have a version of MT-Notifier prior to 1.2.0 and would like to upgrade, simply copy the contents of...

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Though most of us have moved from table-based layouts to CSS for positioning, there's a good reason column-based layouts have been used in print publications for hundreds of years: They work. With that in mind, it's worth reviewing Dave Shea's look at Columns & Grids, an exhaustive study of the variations that designers are using to breathe new life into designs with one, two, three, or even eight columns providing the structure.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Making Blogs Accessible to the Visually Impaired

Next Entry: TimesSelect as a blog business opportunity?

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I've been working on a new plugin for Movable Type. At least for the moment, and barring any unforeseen circumstances, it shall be called MT-Notifier.

The idea is to provide a similar type of functionality as is found in other subscription functions, notably that of the scriptygoddess subscribe to comments script.

I've been moving along on it, and think I have at least a working model ready. Some more work needs to be done, but I'm in need of some testing at this point. Everything seems okay on my system, but I know my system isn't the largest or most complex around.

Some qualifiers: The plugin uses the PluginData table, so you will require the Storable Perl module on your server. I...

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Question

I've just installed Movable Type. How do I integrate my current site design into the system, so that the pages will now be updated with my Movable Type data whenever I publish a new entry?

Answer

Because each person's site is unique, there's not really a "one size fits all" way of integration with Movable Type; it's a process that differs according to your own preferences and needs. Overall, the best way to familiarize yourself with how the system works is to set up a test blog in a separate area of your site, and then make...

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Thanks to the astute comments of Bob and Iki, I became aware of an issue in MT-Notifier for the display for the site-wide configuration - specifically in setting the type of notifications to be sent. The value would be set correctly, but the display would not reflect that setting. It's fixed in version 2.4.2, available now.

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We waited a while for it, but it's finally here. *much rejoicing*

The beta testing went on for a while, but really it was worth the wait. I'm rarely opposed to waiting for a program to get better; and I wasn't disappointed. The end product is a versatile program that adds both strength and flexibility to it's already powerful core.

And functionality! Some of my personal favorites: • Plugin Central: Plugins add a great deal of functionality to Movable Type's already powerful core. But installing plugins to previous versions would sometimes go forgotten because once the files were copied over, you'd never have any indication that they were there (like Scripturizer or...

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07.27.2005

Dynamic Publishing support for PostgreSQL and SQLite

It's a common refrain for us to talk about Movable Type's wide platform support, but we really are committed to making sure Movable Type's full power is available on the widest variety of platforms. It's an investment that takes a lot of care and attention, but we think it's well worth the effort.

For example, take databases. Movable Type has long supported multiple databases, with MySQL and Berkeley DB being among the most popular. But two mature, popular open-source database technologies that a lot of our users have requested have also part of our platform support for over two years: PostgreSQL and...

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Textile is a ‘Humane Web Text Generator,' created by Dean Allen of Textism. After seeing Textile in action, I decided that I must create a Movable Type plugin that does the same thing.

I came to that decision before Movable Type 2.6 and the custom text filter thing were announced. In fact, seeing Textile spurred me to write to Ben about a way for MT users to have more text formatting choices and the option to select them on a per-entry basis. To my delight, he replied that "it's already in the works."

So here we are a couple of months later. MT 2.6 is in beta (and very near to release)...

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Sometimes it's nice to get a lot for a little. Macros let you do that. Instead of typing laborious HTML as you write your entries, a macro can do all the work for you so you can concentrate on writing. Perhaps you want to use a set of icons within your posts but don't care to write <img> tags all day long. Or maybe you'd like to link up to Google queries without having to type out the full URL. This plugin allows you to do that and much more.

...

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09.29.2004

Behind the Scenes - Brenna Koch

Behind The Scenes is a new series where we here at Six Apart discuss what tools (software, technology, etc.) we use to do our work.

I'm Brenna Koch and I work in technical support for Six Apart. If you're curious, "Cook" is how you pronounce my last name. I usually hear "Cotch" since that's how it is said in some areas and I also hear more ah... interesting variations. But now you know.

We have many browsers around in the support department but my favorite is Safari. I utilize keyboard commands with my bookmarks bar for fast access on the sites I use all the time like my test weblogs and pages in the help system...

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Everyone talks about testing, but there's precious little information about what specifically to do. There's Julia Hayden's ALA article, (May 1999), Matthew Haughey's ALA article (September 1999), and this evolt.org item from November 1999, but I haven't seen any nuts–and–bolts descriptions of how to set up a cross-browser, cross-platform testing station.

In this article, I describe how to set up a G3 (or faster) Macintosh to enable you to: • test your web pages in multiple Windows95 browsers from your Macintosh • test your web pages in multiple Macintosh browsers without confounding your personal browser's preferences with those...

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