All roads in weblogging lead to posting entries, for without posted entries there is no weblog. It should come as no surprise that the Entries Listing and New/Edit Entry screens are where most users will find themselves when working with Movable Type.

In these screens a user can view what entries are in a weblog, filter them based on certain criteria, make new posts and edit existing ones.

Entries Listing

The Entries Listing screen displays either all the entries for the weblog or just the entries made by you. What gets displayed depends on whether or not you have been granted Edit All Posts access.

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Ben Goodger, a leader of the Mozilla Firefox project, took some time on his weblog to explain in more depth the idea behind the Live Bookmarks feature in current versions of Firefox.

The XML feed-reading functions in Live Bookmarks have been taking some flack lately for their implementation, and this overview of the concepts that inspired the feature gives a good perspective on what the Forefox team was trying to accomplish.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Wil Wheaton's not *just* a geek

Next Entry: Why bloggers are good for profits

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A number of tools have recently launched that can extend the capabilities of the websites you use today, while making it simpler to test their functionality.

The first one that caught our eye is Piggy Bank, an effort from the Simile project being jointly conducted by the W3C, HP, and MIT.

Piggy Bank is a Firefox extension that extends the browser to allow it to navigate semantic content. Despite all the praise and critcisms for Semantic Web ideas, very few practical implementations have been created by which average developers can find out the potential of these technologies for themselves. Piggy Bank is a good way to combine and work with information from a large number of websites,...

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• 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 mt-check.cgi, mt-testbg.cgi or any of the...

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With the newest addition to our collection of Power Tools, we've made some interesting new functionality available for Movable Type users. The Tags plugin lets you easily add tags to your Movable Type entries, by modifying the Keyword entry field to allow you to enter tags, and automatically creating categories for each of the tags you submit. Creating archives for tags or including the tags in your XML feeds then becomes simple.

The Tags plugin also makes use of Movable Type's alternate application template functionality.

Brad Choate is one of our developers on the Movable Type team, and long before that he was a member of the Movable Type development community. Brad created Tags both in response to demand for a better user experience for labeling content and to show off some of the newly-polished features in Movable Type....

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Someone coming to this site today would probably look at the homepage and think 'Geekfest Techie site'. Someone looking at it a little while ago might think 'Bad Art', at another time, 'Politics', or even 'General Ramblings'

The truth is that this site is all of these things, and none of these things.

There will be phases of all of the above, and indeed, I may go off in another direction entirely. This site is all about 'whatever interests me at the time'.

The RSS feed for this site, obviously, reflects this - but I have provided RSS Feeds within each category so that people can focus on just their interest. The more specific the category, the less often...

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As many of you know, there are hundreds of plugins in the Movable Type plugin directory through which you can completely customize and modify the way that the application works. This has always been a great strength of the Movable Type platform and we put great effort in every release to give plugins even more ways to enhance the system.

What you may not know is that since the launch of Movable Type 3.2, dozens of plugins built specifically for v3.2 have been created. Some of the new capabilities of these plugins include plugin actions for acting on checked items in a listing screen, UI enhancements thanks to BigPAPI, feedback scoring and Junk processing.

We're happy to announce...

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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 to a subfolder called banner and renamed the images to 1.jpg, 2.jpg and 3.jpg. Finally I used PHP's mt_rand function to randomly print a number from 1 to 3 (mt_rand works better than the plain rand function function), like so

<?php echo mt_rand(1,3); ?>

Hence my banner image code looks like this

<img src="http://www.movalog.com/images/banner/<?php echo mt_rand(1,3); ?>.jpg" alt="Movalog - All Things Movable Type" />

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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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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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I'm quite pleased to announce MT Tabs. MT Tabs is a sidebar with quick links to nearly every MT tag. Clicking on these links will take you to the corresponding section in the MT manual to show you how to use the tag and extra syntax.

A few days ago when I was tinkering around with the design, I heavily used CSS and HTML reference sidebars found here. Then Aine - a friend from IRC - said how nice it would be if there was something similar for Movable Type, well now there is !

MT Tabs is compatible with Internet Explorer 5+ for the PC, The Mozilla/Netscape family - including Firefox ! Suggestions, advice and improvements would be greatly appreciated ! I've only managed to get it to...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Chris Vannoy of Circadian Rhythm.

Movable Type's default templates have always been intimidating things to those new to the system, and with Six Apart's decision to standardize their template structure across all three of their blogging platforms, TypePad and LiveJournal being the other two, they've become a lot more intimidating in version 3.2 of Movable Type.

This standardization is a great idea if you are a web designer already familiar with the intricacies of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The standardization means that, assuming users stick to the default templates, you could design one stylesheet that would work on sites on all three...

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Introduction

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...

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After one too many times wistfully wishing I could scale fixed-size elements according to their content in a cross-browser friendly way, I did something about it. Presenting min-height, without the min-height.

If I had a penny for every time I've run into a situation where I really needed a block of content with a specific height, but decided not to due to the issues involved… well, I'd have a few bucks anyway.

There's no reliable way to place elements inside a parent and then have it expand gracefully along with the elements, if the parent has a starting height value. This is precisely the problem min-height solves, but it's frustrating that...

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3.16 (2005.04.13)

Security

• Made several important improvements with regards to application authentication and security.

Notifications

• Fixed ``Send Notifications'' feature for multiple recipients. • Fixed a bug where comment notifications weren't being sent for some moderated comments.

Error checking

• Improved validation of user input in many places. Leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed from author names, category names, and blog names. None of these can be left blank except for a known issue with editing the...

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01.31.2005

BlogBinders: Publish your blog in print

If you're looking for a way to hold your blog in your hands, BlogBinders.com offers a simple and clever service to turn your blog into an attractive, customized book. BlogBinders supports LiveJournal, Movable Type, and TypePad.

Posted by Anil in Web Services at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

01.31.2005

Gawker launches Lifehacker and Gridskipper

Gawker Media's just added two new Movable Type-powered weblogs to its media empire, as announced by Nick Denton. Lifehacker is a friendly geek site and Gridskipper is a travel site aiming for selectivity.

Posted by Anil in New Sites at 10:45 AM | Permalink |...

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UPDATE: Make your own

With Movable Type 3.12, Six Apart built in a more powerful set of quicktags and on the whole they worked pretty well and looked quite nice too. I didn't really want to go back to the clunky Quicktags of before. So here are a few hacks to port some of the most useful features (in my opinion) from the old quicktags, to the new. You will need the following files • edit_entry.tmpl, this is found in MTDIR/tmpl/cms • mt.js, this is found in your StaticWebPath (or if you have none in your root MTDIR folder)

I have decided to port over four functions, Spell Check, Encoding HTML and Insert Image

Spell Check

Add the following to the end of your mt.js file

function Spell(myField)...

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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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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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10.29.2004

Firefox on the March

Red Herring's got an interview with Rob Davis, the man behind the campaign to advertise Firefox in the New York Times. It's especially good timing for promoting every geek's favorite browser, since the updated roadmap shows the browser scheduled for release on November 9th.

Posted by Anil in at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

10.29.2004

Advice to the bloglorn

Metaforix President Lois C. Ambash has some advice for those afraid of business blogging. It's a solid set of guidelines, but we also loved the praise for TypePad:

As a novice blogger, I chose TypePad for my own blog, and I couldn't be happier. The...

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