If you have a lot of content - entries, categories, sidebar information - sooner or later things may begin to look a little cluttered on your weblog. One way to address this is to make some of your lists expandable and collapsible, as I have done with LMT's Table of Contents. There are probably many different ways to do this. I have found one method, based on Javascript, that is simple to implement and appears to work fine, from Bleeding Ego.

1. Upload listmenu.js to your server.

Copy the following script into a new file with a texteditor. Save the script as "listmenu.js". Upload the script to a location within the public directory of your server using an FTP program. (You can...

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In this tutorial, we'll use the event-handling capabilities of the Document Object Model (DOM) to make some minor improvements to the expanding menu that we developed in a previous tutorial. [Truth in advertising: these improvements are borderline cute; their real purpose is to serve as a vehicle to introduce the concepts of events and nodes.]

In the previous tutorial, we discussed using the CSS display property to make an expanding menu like the one below. In that tutorial, only the small plus or minus sign images were clickable. However, if you try the menu below, you'll see that all the words in the main headings are active and clickable; not just the...

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Anti-Spam

Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist - MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist Birdhouse notes on Comment Spam - Why this web host is forcing comment registration Blacklist to Mod Security - by Peter Wood Brad Choate: SpamLookup - anti-spam plugin Interview with a Comment Spammer - The Register's interview with a blog comment spammer. MT-Approval Plugin - Prevents comment spam from spam bots MT-DSBL Open Proxy Comment Filter - from Brad Choate MT-Moderate - Plugin for moderating trackbacks and comments from Chad Everett Mod Rewrite to Block Bot Spam - Mod Rewrite method to divert comment spam bots to a 403...

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Several users of MTLookup reported that sometimes the result lists' sort order seemed to be strange. Important entries were on position 10, and not so important entries reached top positions.

I analyzed the situation and compared the result lists that were generated by MTLookup with those that were created by Google and Yahoo. Some important facts could be found.

What is most important, the MTLookup ranking could be improved. Now it works consistent - no matter whether the keyphrase contains short or long words, or it contains words that appear often or seldom it the database.

I could even find some situations, where Google and Yahoo produced not so perfect result lists. It was...

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Learning Movable Type now has a Subject Index which will allow you to scan for entries based on keywords, or "tags", the authors have assigned to them. Selecting a subject will not only bring you a list of entries that have been assigned that keyword, but also a list of related keywords.

Creating a subject index like this is not that hard to do; it does require several plugins and that you've assigned keywords to your entries. See this tutorial for details.

The expandable menu list Table of Contents has been moved to a separate page as well, in order to save load times on the tutorials. The list of entries was just getting too long.

I hope these changes make it even easier to find...

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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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