When in doubt, reload.

I introduced my idea of MOSe, or Mozilla/Opera/Safari Enhancement about four months ago, with my Zen Garden submission mnemonic. It's time to take it further.

With a strong nod to Eric Meyer's Pure CSS Menus, the latest tweak to mezzoblue adds an opaque CSS-based menu system to the global navigation system. That is, not a line of Javascript was used to construct these. Gecko browsers and Safari love them, Opera 7 has a few issues I may leave as an exercise to Opera Software to resolve, and all browsers that can't handle them (you know I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer) have a fallback.

By logically structuring the bits and...

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{Part I of a two-part series.}

Ask an IT person if they know what Slashdot's tagline is and they'll reply, "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." Slashdot is a very prominent site, but underneath the hood you will find an old jalopy that could benefit from a web standards mechanic.

In this article we will show how an engine overhaul could take place by converting a single Slashdot page from their current HTML 3.2 code, nested tables, and invalid, nonsemantic markup, to a finely tuned web standards racing engine. The goal is not to change Slashdot, but to rebuild it with web standards and show the benefits of the transition.

Before you panic because...

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As will undoubtedly make the rounds everywhere in the blogosphere today, Google has just launched Google Blog Search. Google's perhaps the single company most identitied with search, so their entrance into the blog search space is a big milestone even though the idea of blog search has been around for years.

For the basics of what the Blog Search team has done, you can take a look at the Frequently-Asked Questions list which does a good job of covering the basics. But at a time when everyone will be talking about (and hopefully thinking about) blog search again, it makes sense to review where we've been so far, and what problems need to be solved in the realm of blog search.

First, the new Blog Search...

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03.25.2005

InfoWorld review of Movable Type

InfoWorld has just published a review of Movable Type 3.15, with the ultimate conclusion that "Overall, Movable Type delivers a solid blogging experience." There's a useful overview of the platform's features, along with some legitimate points about what needs improvement, but we're just as glad to see users explaining why Movable Type is the right choice for them as well.

Posted by anildash in Press Mentions at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

03.25.2005

Politicians with Permalinks

The Christian Science Monitor has a broad look at politicians using blogs to better communicate with their...

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Right after having bought Movable Type there were problems. Fact is that the installation description does not contain specific information for the Windows platform. Because of this, it took some time until I finally managed to make it work.

Looking back after having completed the installation successfully, it is not difficult. Until Six Apart gives better installation instructions for Windows users, maybe my description will help.

Introduction

The installation consists of the following parts • Installing the Perl runtime environment • Copying the Movable Type components • Configuration of some Movable Type files • Configuration of MS IIS • Creating the Movable Type Database

All screenshots can be...

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I am glad that you found my website about Movable Type and I hope that you are able to find important information for your own work. In this entry I want to give you some information about my website, so you are able to use my Movable Type Weblog efficiently.

What is next?

After having read this help, you should have a look at the Sitemap. There I have collected all entries and put them in a reasonable structure. You will get a good overview of all entries.

What is a weblog?

Movable Type is a product developed by Six Apart. It is used for creating websites organized as a Weblog.

The name Weblog« is the short form for »Web Logging«. It is a certain way of...

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Over on lj_dev, the LiveJournal developer's community, Brad's put out a request for Windows FotoBilder clients. If you're interested in building clients that talk to FotoBilder services, such as ScrapBook, you'll want to start with the FotoBilder Protocol documentation.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: CNET's Blogging on the job FAQ

Next Entry: Blog Jobs Abound for ProNet Members

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Version 2.0 of Movable Type is now released. This version of Movable Type is still free for personal or non-profit use; note that version 2.0 is not free, however, for commercial or for-profit use. See the FAQ for more details. Existing users of versions 1.0-1.4 should use the upgrade distribution to update their MT installation, and should follow the upgrade instructions. Before upgrading, you will need to back up your MT databases and export your entries and comments, as a precaution.

In addition to bug fixes and improvements to general system stability, this release adds the following features: • Multiple category support: the ability to assign multiple categories per...

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Now that version 2.6 is released, we're pleased to announce that Movable Type Pro is in development for a summer 2003 release. Since our first release of Movable Type in October 2001, we've planned for a more deluxe version of the software -- a version with the features that power users require.

A small sampling of some of the features that will be in Movable Type Pro: • Improved author management • Remote publishing • Custom entry fields • Integrated spellchecker • Registration for comments and posting

For a list of additional features and more information, please read the press release about Movable Type Pro.

Movable Type Pro will be a for-pay version, but as we always stated,...

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Richard MacManus, who's been on a roll lately with his excellent blog, Read/Write Web, presents a look at a Collaborative Feedburner Stats Project. Richard's talked to the team behind the popular XML processing service and convinced them to make individual feed statistics available through a simple REST API.

Once you've got stats for your burned feed, you can parse the XHTML or XML and start to use the data in your applications or plugins. Richard is leading an effort to publish individual web stats in order to determine trends and collaboratively analyze the results.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Making AJAX work for everyone

Next Entry: CNET's Blogging on the job FAQ...

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03.11.2002

2.0 Release Dates

The release of version 2.0 of Movable Type is around the corner. Progress has been slowed down as of late, because we moved, and we are now in Austin, TX for SXSW. But on our return--or shortly thereafter--we plan to launch version 2.0. Specifically, the release will be sometime between March 15 and March 20.

If you have a question to us pending at the moment, please bear with us, as we don't have a lot of time to check email.

Posted by Benjamin Trott at 08:15 AM | Permalink

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Movable Type 2.2 is now available for download.

Amongst the small fixes and improvements documented in the changelog, there are two very large new features with this release. • TrackBack is a framework for peer-to-peer communication between weblogs; it can track cross-weblog discussions, it can provide remote content repositories, it can emulate guest authoring, etc. A more detailed introduction to TrackBack is available here. Please read through the documentation to learn how to set up TrackBack on your blog. • The system can now use a MySQL database for backend data storage, as an alternative to the Berkeley DB storage. If you are installing Movable Type for the first...

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Well, for no good reason I felt I wanted to have a "Ask Brad" column on my site. I'm getting tired of thinking up subjects to post about so I'm letting my audience do that for me. LazyWeb syndrome I guess. Anyhoo, here's how I set it up with Movable Type. No complicated hacks required, honest.

First of all, I created a new blog for "Ask Brad". Then I created an entry in that blog, titled "Question...

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Module Aggregation

David Raynes' MultiBlog is a must have plugin for anyone interested in content aggregation, but it's uses are far greater than just sharing text.

Take for instance storing a master stylesheet in your main blog and sharing it with other blogs (i.e. a FAQ blog) on your system to keep your look consistent. You could also share template modules across an installation, giving you the freedom to structure different parts of your site uniquely while still being able to share common elements (header, search box, category list) painlessly.

Consider this example, where I've shared the header modules from blog 2 with the blog I'm currently working...

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{Ed. Note: The version of Omniweb reviewed in this old article predates the current Omniweb browser, rebuilt from the ground up using the KHTML/Webcore rendering engine to deliver excellent standards compliance.}

Alongside the slew of existing browsers available for Mac OS X {see Mac Browser Roundup – Ed.} is a relative newcomer, developed from the ground up to take advantage of the new Operating System. Its name? Omniweb.

But how does Omniweb fare when it comes to web standards? Earlier versions, while highly praised for an elegant user interface and strong support of international character sets, fell drastically short in CSS and W3C DOM support.

According to...

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06.26.2002

Version 2.2 Released

Movable Type 2.2 is now available for download.

Amongst the small fixes and improvements documented in the changelog, there are two very large new features with this release. • TrackBack is a framework for peer-to-peer communication between weblogs; it can track cross-weblog discussions, it can provide remote content repositories, it can emulate guest authoring, etc. A more detailed introduction to TrackBack is available here. Please read through the documentation to learn how to set up TrackBack on your blog. • The system can now use a MySQL database for backend data storage, as an alternative to the Berkeley DB...

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Nine days ago was the one year anniversary of our incorporation of Six Apart (prior to that we were a LLC). In this last year, we went from two people working out of our apartment to a company of twenty-four including a Japanese subsidiary ( announcement) and a team in Europe working as our exclusive agent.

It's been, and continues to be, a good year.

Ten days ago, when we announced TypeKey, much of the initial criticisms we read could have been answered with more information. After reading most everything that people had to say about the service, Ben and I worked on an FAQ that addressed almost all of the objections we saw.

And oddly enough, providing more information about TypeKey...

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It's a thrilling experience to see your words translated into a foreign tongue, even more so when the language is completely unrecognizable to you. With the first Zen Garden translation (Greek, thanks to Akis Apostoliadis) just about ready for prime–time, and the second one (French, thanks to Nic Steenhout) under way, I've had to start thinking about foreign characters.

French is a snap, since all non–English entities like â, ç, ö and so forth have well–supported character entity codes, as well as even better–supported numeric equivalents. Most of the Germanic and other European languages are built in to modern operating systems...

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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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In Christian theology, it doesn't matter exactly when you accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour. As long as you do it before you croak and ask forgiveness for your sins, you're in like Flynn.

This, apparently, is the Macromedia philosophy when it comes to accessibility.

The company's flagship product, Flash, is intrinsically inaccessible to anyone who cannot see properly and is very often inaccessible to a deaf or hard-of-hearing person. It's also completely inaccessible on slow computers or any machine that lacks the Flash plug-in, rendering those viewers more functionally disabled than they actually are.

Macromedia has, however, undergone a kind...

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