Moving your Movable Type blog to a new server or to a new host is much more perilous than you might think. If not done properly, you could lose all of your entries. I recently went through this exercise and what saved me was a set of instructions from MT user Russcam. What I've done here is reworked Russcam's instructions for what worked for me with moving a site with multiple MT blogs. In some cases in this document I copy his words, word for word. I may get skewered for plagarism here, but I hate PDFs and need a web-findable record of what I did. This is essentially Russ's work, with my tweeks and ammendments. Please leave comments, questions, or proposed amendments in the...

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UPDATE: I had pulled out the functionality to check spelling with this toolbar, well I've put back the functionality. Just download the quicktags.js file that coressponds to your version of MT again and re-upload it. A new button called "Dict." will appear that will query a highlighted word to dictionary.com !

Please go to the MT 2.x instructions to fix a problem with the Quicktags not aligning properly.

This tutorial will allow you to have the Quicktags I described in my previous entry but is not restricted to MT 3.01D.

The files you will need:

Quicktags.js

The MT 2.x Version | The MT 3.x Version

Upload the quicktags js file to your staticwebpath - ie the same folder than...

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Currently many people refer to an MT community but I feel there isn't a proper place where this community can get together. Yes there are the forums and ProNet but the first isn't for real socializing (for lack of a better word) and the latter is geared up for devs or pros. I want a place where people will be comfortable expressing their newbiness, talking about Movable type, tips tricks, tutorial request etc. A preview is available here

Also I've been thinking about adding a type of directory service for people to list their Movable type sites for added publicity. This would be a place where people could list their blogs yet find new ones to read (this is a great way to fine new blogs...

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3.17 (2005.06.02)

• 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...

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I don't have a complete knowledge on IRI. So below contents might have some misunderstandings. If you find one, please feedback to me.

* At first, this post was written in part of Cool IRI for a permalink. So in this post, you'll often see the words, "this plugin". "This plugin" means that a plugin for a Movable Type bloggin tool, which enables you to create a Cool IRI for blog archives.

You may be stunned by comparatively long page. I swear this content is not deeply technical and is just common knowledge. If you have no time to read it, just see some pictures. Perhaps it will do a little for you.

What means a "Cool" ?

If you've never heard of Cool URI, I...

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Displaying a Calendar Layout

Problem

You want to create a calendar layout in your template.

Solution

Use the template tags prefixed with MTCalendar.

Discussion

Movable Type includes a collection of template tags prefixed with MTCalendar; these can be used for creating calendar layouts that serve either navigational or display purposes. MTCalendar tags are sufficiently generic to create calendars in many different formats; however, HTML tables are the most common, • MTCalendar

MTCalendar is a container tag representing a calendar month that lists a single calendar "cell" in...

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I would categorize a BLOG content into mainly two groups. One for Broadcasting my opinion, which can be one about a social, political, technical, or entertainmental stuffs, to the world. I want as many people as possible to listen my voice. And the other is wholly for LOGging my personal affairs. I don't care who would see it or not.

Then, what means do I have in order to broadcate my post? How can I provide more opportunity for the world to take something from my posts? It can be possible by using meta blog sites, various syndication feeds, trackback pings or so. Are you satisfied?

...

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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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Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic publishing over static publishing?

Elise Bauer, editor of Learning Movable Type, and Arvind Satyanarayan, author of Movalog, discuss some of the pros and cons of dynamic publishing. Non-techie luddite-wannabe Elise shies away from anything that seems like it might not be worth the effort and so far hasn't even tried dynamic publishing. Plugin creator and MT hack-master Arvind has embraced dynamic publishing with his usual boundless...

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Lead-ins are an eye-catching mechanism usually found in print publications. Recreating that effect for the web is easy to do, but it could be easier. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a 'leadin' tag that you could use to identify the word or phrase you want to style like that? Well...

MT-Macro to the rescue! Actually, the technique described here utilizes 3 of my Movable Type plugins. All functioning...

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The development community, the independent content community, and especially webloggers, are familiar with Six Apart's Movable Type, a robust and popular publishing tool designed to faciliate the creation of blogs. Lately the community has been buzzing about a soon-to-be-released Six Apart product intended to deliver the power of personal publishing to an even wider, non-expert user base.

What has not been told until now is that TypePad has been designed to generate standards-compliant sites, and that the application itself is built with web standards. A List Apart's publisher and creative director Jeffrey Zeldman caught up with Six Apart's Anil Dash to find out more....

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Random Banners

In my recent re-design on Movalog, I had three banners and unfortunately I liked them all and couldn't figure out which one I liked best. As a result, I decided to use them all. First I moved all the images...

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Posted on 06/23/2005 | Permalink | Comments (5)

Quicktags for Comments

Many people wanted to know how I implemented these guicktags into my comments form. So here's a quick tutorial for that. In your comments form find Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style) and replace it with Comments:...

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Posted on 01/21/2005 | Permalink |...

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One way to set up a private, password-protected weblog is by adding a .htaccess file to the directory in which the weblog resides. htaccess files can give you extra control over your server, allowing you to password protect directories, enable server side includes, generate custom error messages, and block users by IP address among other things. I've already described the fundamentals of .htaccess in another tutorial, see What is .htaccess? If you are setting up .htaccess for the first time, be sure to read this tutorial thoroughly.

1. Create .htpasswd

The first thing you need to do, before creating your .htaccess file, is to create a file called .htpasswd, which will hold the user...

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UPDATE: EnhancedEntryEditing has been bumped up to v1.01 to fix a bug where popup windows wouldn't disappear after you were done with them. Grab the update, you only need to upload EnhancedEntryEditing.pl

Ajaxify is a series of BigPAPI plugins that adds various javascript and AJAX widgets into Movable Type's interface. It has, of course, been built for Movable Type 3.2. The first of which is EnhancedEntryEditing. This plugin adds two widgets into the entry screen: • Resizable Textareas - I personally find the textareas on the entry screen too small and find it annoying to hack the stylesheet everytime I upgrade Movable Type. This plugin now adds "Increase Size" and...

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The Touch of Hope web site is powered by Movable Type. It's more than your average blog site though. Don't let it's blogging slant fool you-- MT is a budding CMS!

The architecture is like this: • 1 blog for the site's basic content: welcome page, about page, Art for Hope page, request a site page, make a donation page, contact us page and the news and updates content. All of this is in...

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1.1 (2001.10.22)

• Made <$MTDate$> work as a ``system date'', or the current date/time at which the page is being rebuilt. • Added Pragma: no-cache header to keep Opera from caching pages. (Jay) • Changed default templates to use iso-8859-1 (Latin 1) encoding instead of utf-8. • Added Blog Configuration option for the number of words in an auto-generated excerpt. • Added comment previewing, using the new Comment Preview template. Default templates now ship with comment previewing enabled, and the comments links on the main index...

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1.2 (2001.11.04)

• Fixed bug when system's crypt implementation uses MD5 passwords (MT was not picking up the proper salt). (Monica Reyes) • Added form-validity checking to mt-comments.cgi for checking email address and URL. (Aaron Straup Cope) • Set $CGI::POST_MAX to 1MB, which means that uploads must be 1MB or less, to prevent denial of service attacks. (Aaron Straup Cope) • Added mt-export.cgi, which will export all of your MT entries into a format that can be suitably re-imported through the import mechanism. It is also useful for keeping backups...

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For a few months, I had deliberated adding a WYSIWYG Editor into the Movable Type entry screen and when Typepad implemented an editor into its interface I got jealous. So, here's a way to implement the very powerful HTMLArea into Movable Type (currently only Internet Explorer, Mozilla browsers and other Gecko based browsers supported)

1. Download HTMLArea 3.0 rc-1 and upzip it 2. Upload the files to a folder called htmlarea in your StaticWebPath 3. Open up tmpl/cms/header.tmpl and add the following in <head>...</head> tags

<script type="text/javascript"> _editor_url = "<TMPL_VAR NAME=STATIC_URI>htmlarea/"; _editor_lang = "en"; </script>...

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Introduction

Weblogs are not just a one-way medium for publishing. With the use of a singular, often conversational voice, enhanced by the loosely coupled nature of the Internet and lightweight syndication formats, weblogs are akin to conversations, regardless of the size and makeup of the audience. "A" writes about something on their mind -- an experience, the news, or a project's status. "B" reads it and expresses their take. "C" finds both posts interesting and notes something A and B has not mentioned and so on.

Not everyone has a weblog (sadly) and not everyone wants to make...

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Multiblog is an indespensible plugin that allows you to display content from other blogs. Unfortunately, in its current version it doesn't work with dynamic publishing. A few days ago I was investigating the best way to duplicate MultiBlog's functions in the dynamic templating system. As it turns out, Movable Type's powerful dynamic templating system makes it easy to include content from other blogs.

With dynamic publishing all you need to do to pull content from other blogs is to change the blog context of the page. Every tag is parsed within a context which affects the content it outputs. For example, with the MTEntries tag the correct entries are outputted because Movable Type...

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