Over at the Professional Network Weblog, we've been running a series called Behind the Scenes where Six Apart staff introduce themselves and explain what tools they use:

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.

So far, Walt, Brenna, Paul, Ezra have been profiled. It's a neat series to get acquainted with people at the company.

A brief look at the applications I use on a daily basis: Entourage, Photoshop CS, NetNewsWire 2.0 (beta), Firefox & Safari, iChat, Instiki, SubEthaEdit and Acrobat. Oddly, I do almost all my work in Entourage -- including writing weblog posts and any sort of document or...

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Zoundry has just announced a new beta release of Blog Writer, their WYSIWYG posting editor for posting to weblogs on Windows machines. The new version features drag-and-drop editing, Firefox compatibility, and a product placement engine to insert affiliate links.

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David Raynes' award-winning Movable Type plugin MultiBlog has been updated with some great fixes to version 1.1.

If you downloaded the version in the Contest Plugin Pack, you'll want to upgrade, and if you're looking for some inspiration on how to use the plugin, you can check out Arvind's merging your blogs post on Movalog.

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CNET's News.com has a nice roundup of articles celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Netscape browser. One of the highlights is an interview with Ben Goodger, the lead engineer for Mozilla Firefox. Ben gives some great insights into how he and his team made the terrific application, and there's some good discussion prompted by posts on Ben's Movable Type-powered blog.

Congratulations to the current Mozilla team and to all those who made Netscape such a milestone 10 years ago.

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Picostation's just released PicoBlogger, a blog client for Symbian Series 60 phones that lets you post to a Movable Type or TypePad blog via the Metaweblog API or Atom API.

Though you can post to TypePad from any mobile phone right now, a dedicated client offers the potential to smooth out the user experience and share your photos even more simply than many current phones allow. Cool stuff.

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There is a bug in the 3 column version of Panes so I'm taking it down until I get it sorted out. The links in the left sidebar show up as links in Firefox but aren't active for some reason. It works perfectly in IE, which is a first for me. The 2 column versions are not affected.

UPDATE : Fixed it, and the corrected files have been uploaded.

Posted by The Style Monkey at January 11, 2005 02:42 PM

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Many generous people have created and shared web-based and desktop color utilities. I have used a number of these tools for web design and graphic imaging and found a couple I just can't live without.

The color tool I depend on most is ColorCache from Technology Lighthouse. ColorCache is a color picker, color schemer, scheme previewer, palette manager and more. Currently in version 3.x, it is free to download and use for 15 days, after which paid registration (worthwhile, IMHO) is required.

My second tool of choice is a brilliant Firefox extension, ColorZilla color picker, DOM inspector and all-around groovin' color gizmo. I love this (along with WebDev for FF) for working on MT...

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What's up with heading order? Tomas Jogin wants to know. A " Web Standards Solutions" Q&A session if there ever was one.

Ironically using author Dan Cederholm's SimpleBits as a test case, Tomas points to the W3C Outliner version of the site and reasons that perhaps there's a more logical way.

And after seeing it visualized, Tomas seems to have a strong point. Without the outliner view though, in authoring mode it's hard to make these sorts of choices correctly. Best intentions don't always lead to proper choices, as evident by the case studies he links (including this site).

What's particularly frustrating is that the spec itself doesn't offer clear guidance on semantic issues like this; we are given overly simple usage guidelines, and actual implementation is left to author discretion. And that leads to confusion and individual interpretation of the specs by those who didn't write them. We'd be hot and fast on the case of a browser vendor who took liberties in implementing the specs; why should content authors be any less accountable?...

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Question

How do I use the formatting buttons and keyboard shortcuts when editing my entries on the Create New Entry or Edit Entry screen?

Answer

To use the formatting buttons and keyboard shortcuts, you must first highlight the text you wish to format, and then either click the appropriate button, or press the appropriate keyboard shortcut combination.

Formatting buttons are not available in all browsers. Please see Formatting buttons are missing for more information.

Keyboard shortcuts work in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. • Bold - Ctrl-Shift-b...

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Brad's been active with a cool little LiveJournal hack, inspired by the buzz around tags at this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, where he displays LiveJournal's interests in a new variable-sized tag-style display, instead of the years-old sorted list. Pretty.

Another cool little work-in-progress is the AJAX whiteboard Brad's put together. As Brad mentions, it only works in Mozilla-based browsers like Firefox, and it tends to die after a little while. But if you want to see why it's so cool, have someone else edit the drawing at the same time as you, and you can watch their updates in realtime.

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Mike Davidson has just announced the release of sIFR 2.0. This popular combination of slick javascript and smart use of Flash lets you choose custom fonts to display headlines on a website, for situations where the presentation of your page makes these considerations important. You can see an older version of sIFR in action on sixapart.com, and the new release improves the way the technique behaves when people have disabled or blocked Flash, while still providing very accessible content on your page.

As an added bonus, if you use the technique on any web page that displays comments, you can get a free debate about the relative merits of Flash, HTML, CSS and other presentation and...

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A couple of days ago I had problems with the generation of the HTML files, because there were strange characters in the generated files. These characters were not from the usual code range. And both MS Internet Explorer and Firefox were not able to show the generated pages correctly.

Test Scenario

After some tests the problem could be narrowed down very well. In the end, the test scenario just consisted of an index template including a module template. Exactly at the position where the MTInclude was coded, the characters appeared in the output files. Moreover, I realized that those characters were not inserted in each and every case. Sometimes they appeared and caused problems,...

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A few months ago LMT conducted a survey of web hosts. As part of that survey, I asked a few demographic questions regarding age, gender, and educational level. Here are the survey results of those questions, along with some data from the LMT stats tracker regarding browser and OS used.

Age

Around half of LMT readers are under thirty, and half thirty and over.

Gender

One third women, two-thirds men.

Educational Level

Most have four-year or higher degree level.

Browser Used

If only the rest of the world used Firefox the way MT users do...

Operating System Used

I love seeing those Mac stats.

Links: Survey Monkey SiteMeter's tracking of LMT Have you found the...

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Question

When I create a new entry, sometimes I see buttons for bold, italic, underline, and links. I logged in today in a different browser and they are missing! What happened?

Answer

Formatting buttons appear only in browsers which are able to use them. The browser you are using may not support the functions at this time.

Currently, the browsers in which the buttons are available are: • Firefox • Mozilla 1.3+ • Netscape 7.1+ • Internet Explorer 5.5+ on Windows • Opera 8 on Windows • Camino for Mac

Safari does not properly support the Javascript for rich text...

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Introduction

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...

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We'd noted recently that GeoURL had relaunched, and if you're still hungry for more blog-mapping fun, you'll want to check out feedmap, which has a clean RESTful API and looks like a good basis for building location-aware blog applications.

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- another use for ICBM - April 14, 2005 02:55 AMpeople that like the Nearby firefox extension for flickr photos will like feedmap, check it out.

Knowledge Jolt with Jack - Only 74 NeighBlogs? - May 19, 2005 02:09 PMSome blog fun. Chandu Thota's feedmap lists only 74 blogs near me today. I know for a fact that there is a blogger who lives right around the corner that doesn't happen to be listed here.

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I've installed the new release. I've had beta versions installed for a while now, and decided I'd install the new release as it doesn't seem to differ a whole lot from the latest release candidates.

I will not be using the dynamic publishing feature at the moment. For one, I had some problems with it during the beta testing. For another, I'm working on some redesigns anyway. Since I'll have to rebuild at least once, I'll hold off for now.

This also serves as a test post to see if everything is working correctly. If you see any problems, they will hopefully be temporary. If they don't go away after a reasonable amount of time, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Update: The saving of...

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I finally took the plunge and installed Movable Type version 3 on the site. I've been toying with it since the early alpha, but didn't have the motivation to really get it installed and working until now. Why now? That's a very interesting question.

The answer is that I just don't know. It probably doesn't have anything to do with the recent clarifications to the licensing that caused such a furor over the last few days (and no, I'm not going to link to that mess). Truth be told, it is probably more to do with the contest than anything else. The new plugin architecture looks cool, and at least for the next month or so, I think I'll be trying it out.

It also seems to me that MT-Notifier can benefit greatly from the new design. I may even have some other ideas - both for my existing plugins and for some new ones. Not to mention that the new licensing allows me to perform consulting services for MT 3.0 and collect a fee. Which I'm happy to do, in case you're interested. Just let me know....

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When I got my new phone last year, one of the first things I did was ask 'how does my page look?' Perhaps unsurprisingly for those who know about this sort of thing, it did not 'look' like anything as it didn't even load.

I did a little research today, and following a google search I found nicely toasted. Some editing yielded a movable type template for this site. The output file is here, but will only be readable on a mobile device (or firefox, with a wml plugin).

I have been trying to get a redirect for wml browsers to automatically go to this page, but I haven't been able to make it work without changing the url for THIS page. I didn't want to do it with...

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Question

In Internet Explorer, I see odd errors at the top of the login screen regarding Pragma no-cache, and after signing in, I keep getting returned to the login screen. In Firefox, I'm unable to log in at all, because I see the HTML for the login screen.

Answer

The appearance of these messages on the screens usually means the CGI handler on the server is not set up to deal properly with Pragma no-cache headers. So you'll need to check with your host to see if their CGI handler is configured properly for these headers.

For those running under...

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