Question

Are there any third-party clients which I can use to post to my Movable Type weblog?

Answer

The following list is provided merely as a resource to our licensees. Six Apart is not liable for any damages arising from the use of these third-party clients, nor can our support staff cannot provide assistance with using them. If you have any questions about a particular client, please direct those to its developer. Desktop - Windows • blogBuddy • BlogJet • ecto • Frequency • MozBlog • MTClient • SharpMT • Slug • w.bloggar • Zempt Desktop - Mac • blogApp • ecto • EspressoBlog...

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For those of you who have been trying to read my site in a Mozilla-based browser, you'll be happy to know that I'll probably be keeping up on the compliance now that I'm using one on a regular basis.

The first problem I ran into? Seems the sidebar had dropped below the entries. I'm not really sure when it happened, I only noticed it today. The fix was to add a single line to the CSS: position:absolute;

Strangely, I didn't actually have to specify an absolute position, yet it worked. I've removed the addition and it goes back to the funkiness displayed earlier. I'm not going to worry about it. At least it works.

The second problem was a little more challenging. The new...

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Although not directly related to Movable Type, many bloggers I know have been asking for such a tool. The Newsgator Toolkit is an extension for Mozilla Firefox that will eventually provide you with a series of complex and powerful tools that will make it even easier to use Newsgator.

For the moment, however, it simply sits in your statusbar and acts as a notifier displaying the number of unread posts and giving you a detailed view of which feeds have been updated.

More information is available on my personal blog.

Note: This version is completely unsupported, please do not email me any bug reports or support requests (something many people have taken the liberty of doing the past few...

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Today we are releasing Movable Type 3.17. This release addresses four issues that do not affect the majority of installations, but are critical for users with certain configurations.

Version 3.17 is not a required upgrade if your Movable Type installation is not affected by these issues.

Changes in this release include: • Installation at the root of a domain no longer continually logs out the user. • Fixed URL-encoding of uploaded file paths (e.g. images%2fbeach-pic.jpeg) • Fixed a bug in the nofollow plugin which causes HTML sanitization of everything within an <MTPings> block. • Fixed a bug in mt-db2sql.cgi which caused it to fail in certain situations when subcategories...

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The New Themes - Making Sense of it all

Tutorial cross posted on Learning Movable Type and Movalog. With Movable Type 3.2, Six Apart launched a new markup and stylesheet structure that has also unified their three platforms. These new templates and stylesheets (from now on referred to as...

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Posted on 09/04/2005 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Extending the Sidebar

Matthew writes I am trying to make the side bar in Movable type to extend to the bottom of the page. I have gotten it to work in IE but not firefox. You can take a look at my site...

Continue reading "Extending the Sidebar"...

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08.31.2004

Dynamic Template Tutorials

If you're working with Movable Type 3.1's new support for dynamic templates, you'll want to check out some of the great tutorials created by community members during the beta. Gregory Blake has a good overview and tbuddy digs into the details of updating your .htaccess, if necessary. Nice work, guys!

Posted by Anil in at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

08.30.2004

Plugins Directory Relaunches

The Movable Type Plugins Directory has relaunched as an official Six Apart website, featuring a whole new look, a simpler organization, and a list of plugins which have been tested with Movable Type 3.0.

Take a look through the new...

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Question

Visitors who are trying to comment on my weblog with some browsers (Internet Explorer, Safari) aren't able to do so; they still see the sign in link, instead of the comment posting form. If they use another browser (Firefox, Netscape), they don't have this problem.

Answer

There are several reasons why this might occur in some browsers but not others:

Caching issues

The browser is caching the page; have your visitors refresh the page after signing in to force the page to update.

Your pages are encoded with UTF-8.

Some browsers are more likely...

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PNG files would make transparency effects a snap, except for one tiny little quirk: support for the format is great in every browser but one. Unless, of course, you resort to using some of the hacks and workarounds now available.

A List Apart ran Cross-Browser Variable Opacity with PNG: A Real Solution almost two years ago, and since that time other methods have come to light offering similar solutions of varying stripes to work around Windows IE's lack of Alpha transparency support. ( 1, 2)

Since I'm a fan of valid code, I generally haven't bothered messing around with the proprietary solutions, and the extra weight of an .htc behavior file is a bit more than my...

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3.2 (2005.08.25)

• The auto-expiration of Junk feedback items only occurs when a user visits the main menu for that weblog. In future versions, auto-expiration of junk items will be triggered system-wide when a new junk feedback item is received. • When an entry is saved from the Preview screen, duplicate TrackBack pings may be sent out • When an entry is saved from the Preview screen, the entry basename may be incremented or, if the title was changed, altered to fit the new title. • Subcategories are not alphabetically sorted in the category assignment listings on the entry editing...

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I really need to learn Perl. I can look at some code and stumble through it to figure out what's happening, and I can hack it with minor changes - but I really don't know what I'm doing. And once I learn Perl I can learn to write some MT plugins.

I've had ideas for a few plugins floating around in my head: • A plugin to change the file upload behavior. I've hacked the file upload template and CMS.pm to add a Photo Gallery option that formats the URI as I need it and insert it into a new entry; I think this could be made into a plugin with BigPAPI. Done: Better File Uploader. • A file management plugin. It doesn't need to be terribly...

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Research shows that low-vision people need dramatically different web design. CSS lets you give them what they need.

Readers of A List Apart will by now be quite familiar with screen-reader users, the largest group of disabled web surfers whom standards compliance actually helps. In a previous article, for example, I examined how well image-replacement techniques work in screen readers (not very).

But - surprise! - most people with impaired vision can still see something, and a large but unquantified segment of this group sees well enough to use a computer with a magnified or zoomed display. We have not done a good job of catering to...

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It was bound to happen. Microsoft's Internet Explorer finally just broke. Nothing fancy, no bells, whistles or fireworks. It just died. For some unknown reason, cookies are no longer working. There are a handful that are set, and more are accepted because they keep piling up. But the ones I want to work ( Observer login, Bloglines login) don't.

So I'm done. I had installed Mozilla's Firefox 0.8, and with a simple "set as default" click, Internet Explorer is no more. Sure, it's there and all. But it's not the default, and if I can help it, I'm not even going to fire it up. So far, I'm pleased. The browsing speed is much faster than IE as far as I can tell, and I'm supporting an...

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Matthew writes

I am trying to make the side bar in Movable type to extend to the bottom of the page. I have gotten it to work in IE but not firefox. You can take a look at my site

Quite a few people ask me this question (you can see the problem in the screenshot -- click for larger view), and this problem was fixed in the default templates. It can be combatted in two ways.

CSS

Add the following to your stylesheet

#container:after, .content:after { content: "."; display: block; height: 0; clear: both; overflow: hidden; }

HTML

Alternatively, on every template that you have a sidebar, add the following code just before the end tag of the #container div

<div style="clear:...

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There are nice tools out there to help you optimize your weblog not only for speed but usability. Here are some •

Web Page Analyzer - a tool that will check how long it takes your site to load depending on the connection speeds. It will also show you what objects on your site are the biggest and most expensive. It also provides some useful tips on how to better optimize your site. •

Online CSS Optimizer - a tool that will basically optimize your css by combining a lot of the definitions. •

W3C Link Checker - a validator from W3C that will check all your links and highlight those that need to be changed/removed etc.

If you use Firefox, install the Web Developer Extension that has all of...

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UPDATE The beta blog is live. Read all the entries and download 3.2, there's plenty to play with!

Jay's just posted an announcement to ProNet with some juicy details. Movable Type 3.2 will be going into a beta sometime tomorrow in the afternoon. Here comes the best part of the announcement, its a public beta, what this means is that the beta blog will be an open environment and anyone will be able to download a copy and use it.

I've managed to get my hands on some early test builds and the new release is just staggering. So much has changed that 32 posts simply don't do it justice. Almost every single hack I've ever posted onto Movalog has found its way into this release in one way or...

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(Cross Posted: Chinwags)

Calling Javascript Writers

I'm struggling, struggling. Let me lay out what I wish to do and you Javascript writers tell me whether it is possible. For browsers that don't support content loading in sidebars (eg Opera or Safari) I have created a frames version of MT/WP Tabs. Now I wish to take it to the next level. When someone clicks the bookmarklet for the frames version, I want the current page to appear in the main (right hand side) content with the MT/WP Tabs appearing in the left "sidebar" If you manage to figure out how to do this I will credit you with it on all files that contain your code also I will give you a GMail Invite. If you manage to figure it...

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Upgrading or installing Movable Type can be rather intimidating. There are few things I have screwed up so badly attempting, even when they say it is super easy, idiot-proof. I always seem to be the idiot who still can't make it work. I have now upgraded two separate MT installs to MT 3.2 and thought I would share my notes with you. Please note that Jay Allen (Product Manager of Movable Type), Chad Everett (of Don't Back Down and Everitz Consulting), and Arvind Satyanarayan ( Movalog) have all helped me at various stages in upgrading, and if I didn't have friends who knew what they were doing, honestly I just wouldn't attempt this on my own. But that's me, and I have over 20 blogs...

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3.2 (2005.08.25)

Major Features

• New dead-simple AJAX-powered installation/upgrade process (see screencast demo) which replaces mt-load.cgi and all mt-upgrade* scripts. Also eliminated the upgrade distribution since only the config file would be different. • Combined mt.cfg and mt-db-pass.cgi into mt-config.cgi. Shipping as mt-config.cgi-original so as to prevent overwriting when upgrading. • Introduced the new System Overview section which allows administrators to configure and manage aspects of the system across all weblogs • Introduced a plugin-based feedback rating framework which scores comments and TrackBacks upon submission on a scale from -10 (least desirable) to 10 (most desirable)...

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Movable Type is the premier weblog publishing platform for businesses, organizations, developers, and web designers. Powerful customization gives you control over everything you publish and the elegant interface keeps things simple and clear.

Features

• Unlimited Blogging

Movable Type offers the ability to publish an unlimited number of blogs quickly and easily through a single installation of the application. And the platform supports posting by as many authors as you need, with no limit on the numbers of entries, comments, or TrackBacks the system supports. • Powerful management...

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07.27.2005

Dynamic Publishing support for PostgreSQL and SQLite

It's a common refrain for us to talk about Movable Type's wide platform support, but we really are committed to making sure Movable Type's full power is available on the widest variety of platforms. It's an investment that takes a lot of care and attention, but we think it's well worth the effort.

For example, take databases. Movable Type has long supported multiple databases, with MySQL and Berkeley DB being among the most popular. But two mature, popular open-source database technologies that a lot of our users have requested have also part of our platform support for over two years: PostgreSQL and...

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