(Note: this tutorial is intended for MT versions 2.661 and earlier.) If you are new to Movable Type, and are using the default style sheets you may have encountered a surprise when viewing your weblog in various browsers. The reasons for this are many. First, different browsers (Internet Explorer, AOL, Netscape, Safari) on different platforms (Windows XP, Windows 2000, MacOSX) render CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in different ways. What looks one way on a Mac running Safari can look way different from a PC running AOL. Second, our dedicated team at Six Apart - Ben and Mena Trott - are Mac-ophiles, assuring that most of their default styles render well on a Mac, but not necessarily so...

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If you spend much time working with JavaScript, there will eventually come a day when you need to know the value of a variable (or an object's field) as the execution of the script progresses, or why a script terminates unexpectedly. In simple scripts, you can accomplish this with JavaScript's alert() function, which instructs the browser to create a dialog box with the argument set as the box's caption. The message can be anything that helps you understand your script's operation.

For example, the statement: alert( "Node #" + i + "'s class is:" + nodes[i].getClass() );

might produce something like the following when executed:

When alert(...

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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 named mt.cgi, although this...

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Drop shadows are cool, but adding them to elements of a web page can be a pain. You can fiddle with background images, tables, pure CSS solutions, Internet Explorer PNG limitations, or fixed single-use shadows tied to an image and a particular background.

The latest release of TypePad has a new popup (or flyout) interface element which presents the user with a set of options or an expanded view of an object when clicked on. The flyouts are similar to the location bubbles used in Google Maps. They have soft alpha-blended drop shadows that scale with the size of the box. The drop shadows are implemented in valid XHTML and CSS, with no CSS hacks or JavaScript. We...

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We're glad to announce an update to the StyleCatcher plugin announced last week. StyleCatcher 1.01 fixes a number of little bugs, offers some helpful documentation in the README file about how to get started, and introduces a cool new feature: The Greasemonkey Style Installer.

StyleCatcher is designed to be able to retrieve styles from any style repository that follows a few simple conventions we've defined, and we'll be publishing documentation for how you can host your own style repository. But to get started, you can test this new functionality with our own Movable Type style library.

Our goal was to make switching styles as automatic as possible. So, if you're using Movable Type...

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Enables one-click publishing of an image-embeded entry. Also in Firefox/Mozilla, you can use right-click context menu.

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Okay, it wasn't a bug in the style after all. It was something in the new FireFox extension I installed causing some problems.

Posted by The Style Monkey at February 19, 2005 07:25 PM

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TypePad users have got two new Halloween-themed photo album styles. Perfect for posting pictures of your trick-or-treaters.

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There is a bug in the new style the site is wearing. FireFox viewers at lower resolutions (about 1280x1024) will only see part of the page. I'm looking to see what the problem is. It was working perfectly earlier today.

Posted by The Style Monkey at February 19, 2005 06:08 PM

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The Advocate offers a good overview of the gay blogging community, covering everything from politics to culture. Some of the bloggers featured include Barb Dybwad, Terrance Heath, and Ernie Hsiung.

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PubSub, the search notification service has relaunched their site with a host of new features. It's simpler than ever to subscribe to a feed of results for a keyword search, you can find blog matches easily from their database of over 6.4 million weblogs, and there's downloadable sidebars available for Internet Explorer and Firefox.

In all, it looks like a great leap forward for the platform.

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Google's just announced their AdWords API beta, letting you access the reporting system for your ad campaigns using a SOAP interface.

There's some terrific potential for adjusting content and campaigns to be even more responsive to results, as well as outputting reporting functions into a weblog format using publishing APIs like Atom and Metaweblog. We'll be on the look out for creative uses of Google's new service.

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Les Orchard's got a cool hack for Movable Type that lets you easily generate in the hCalendar format from right within the application, using Firefox's GreaseMonkey extension. You can check out the whole story on Les' blog, complete with a screencast video showing how it works.

We've covered a lot of the potential for Greasemonkey in some earlier posts on ProNet.

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Stepan Riha's Avoiding Duplicate Comments plugin for Movable Type has been updated to version 3.01, and now includes instructions for playing well with MT-Blacklist. If you're trying to make sure none of your commenters double-post, it's worth checking out.

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Arvind has made a great sidebar for IE, Mozilla, and FireFox that gives you easy access to MT's template tags documentation from right within your browser. Go check out MT Tabs.

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This is an older script, but one that we get asked about a lot: ljcrosspost, a Movable Type plugin to send your entries to your LiveJournal. Now that LiveJournal and Movable Type are both part of the Six Apart family, you'll get extra warm fuzzies when you use the plugin.

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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 email technical support is prompt and friendly and has actually improved over time.

(For the newbie, it's hard to overestimate the importance of accurate, genuinely supportive tech support. Brenna, who responds to most of my help tickets, is the very model of a modern support technician. I've threatened to clone her and send her twin to my cell phone company.)

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The new style sheet and templates in MT3.2 can be daunting to the non CSS expert. Changing the position of the sidebar from the right to the left shouldn't be so difficult. Once understood, it is a bit easier to do.

Changing the Sidebar Position

The MT3.2 stylesheets and templates are designed to have the columns laid out in order, starting with the column named "alpha". The columns, in order are alpha, beta, gamma (if you have a 3-column layout), and delta (a hypothetical fourth column that one could create). If you change sidebar position from right to left, the order of the columns still needs to be the same on your index and any archive templates where you have placed a...

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• Newsgator Toolkit • Updates to the Style Generator • Hurricane Katrina Donation • Movable Type Style Generator • Plugins Forums • Feeds Burned • The IndiBlog Awards • Planet Movable Type • MovaDir, v2 • Preview Release • Vulnerability in Servers Using PHP • Securing your weblog - CGIWrap and SuEXEC • Syndicate This Site • Upgrading • Consulting • Movalog Sideblog • Ask Arvind •

Code Snippets

• Random Banners • Quicktags for Comments • Reset Templates • Iconize • SubCats and Contents • Tweaking Searches • Password Protection • Alphabetizing archives • Relative Dates • Automatic Acronyms •

Dynamic

• Dynamic Publishing - Pros and Cons • Troubleshooting Smarty Errors • PHP Dirification • The DB and Dynamic Publishing • Custom Error Messages • Dynamic Pages & The .htaccess • Breaking Plugins • Smarty. MT. Dynamic...

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Over on LiveJournal news, Brad's announced two cool new features. The first is in-page comment management, which savvy geeks will see is powered by some nifty AJAX wizardry.

The second announcement is of interest to a lot of Professional Network members as well. LiveJournal now supports Nokia's LifeBlog application, which means the Atom API extensions needed for LifeBlog have been added, as documented in the previous ProNet posts on LifeBlog, and the core Atom API support in LiveJournal has been revamped as well.

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