When installing Movable Type for the first time, you have a choice of what database to use - MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, or the default - Berkeley DB. The recommended choice is MySQL for many reasons. MySQL is more stable, more powerful, more easily editable than Berkeley DB. With one simple command you can back-up your entire MySQL database (See Backing Up Your Blog). Many web hosts offer a cPanel or phpMyAdmin utility to manage your database, making it easy to make global changes to your weblog.

If you are using Berkeley DB and you change servers, or your host upgrades your server (this has happened to me twice in the last year), the version of Berkeley DB must be exactly the...

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(Note that this tutorial is appropriate for MT versions 2.661 and earlier.)

Say you want to send an email to your weblog readers when you update your blog, so they know to go to your site. There are various ways to do this. Movable Type has a built-in email notification feature. Unfortunately it is probably the least robust of the many wonderful MT features as I will explain shortly. With some serious hacking of the code the feature becomes more functional. Another option (which I prefer) is Bloglet, a third party service that can seamlessly provide email notifications for your site.

1. Movable Type's built-in Email Notification feature. Using MT's email notification feature, you...

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I took pretty aggressive notes during the panel that came after mine. Enjoy!

(You can tell I was paying more attention to the two people who were talking about things I hadn't heard much about before; less notes from their portions. Both were very good.)

Tantek Çelik

• Good CSS: standards • Bad CSS: abuses, misuses, amazing screwups (tables poorly mixed with css) • Ugly CSS: necessary: hacks, workarounds, wishes they never existed • CSS2.1 is now a W3C Candidate Recommendation: this is big news. CSS2? forget it. 2.1 incorporates changes, errata, adds the colour orange. • CSS2.1 reflects reality of current implementations • CSS validator updates, updates for validating...

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It was an unassuming little web page that posed a singular challenge: could you build a complete website using less than 5 kilobytes?

5K? Was contest creator Stewart Butterfield nuts? The rules of the 5K Awards, in their entirety, read as follows: "All HTML, script, image, style, and any other associated files must collectively total less than 5 kilobytes in size and be entirely self-contained (employing no server-side processing)." Great. All he left out was the part about not using a monitor or keyboard. And the flagellation, of course.

One of the most-respected designers on the web told us privately: "It can't be done."

We nodded sagely. After all,...

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Most people who've attempted to recreate a sophisticated design in HTML email have run into a wall when using CSS, either in the form of inexplicable mangling by email clients or a pronouncement by an email administrator stating that CSS is "against the rules." If you're not content to roll over and use font tags in your HTML emails, read on.

Despite prevailing wisdom to the contrary, you can safely deploy HTML emails styled with good old-fashioned CSS. Yes, I really just said that. Not all attributes will be invited to the party, but many of them work flawlessly with this method.

First comes love: unconditional acceptance

From web design publications,...

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With all the new features in Movable Type 3.2, the question on the minds of a lot of our current users is, "Yeah, this looks good, but how easy will it be to upgrade?"

We think the new version's not just the easiest version of Movable Type by far to upgrade, but it's the easiest of almost any web application we've seen. It'd be easy to tell you all about it, but it's even better to show you. So we've created a brief (one minute) Flash video to show you just how simple it is.

You can click on the thumbnail to start the 818KB movie.

[This is part fifteen in a series called "Our 32 Favorite Features of Movable Type 3.2".]

Trackbacks:

Q Daily News - Anil's breaking into spoken word - July 15, 2005 08:34 PM...

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Google Suggest offers suggestions while you're typing in a search term. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for or how to spell it, the Suggest feature can make finding what you want easier. I've added the same functionality to danandsherree.com. Try it - start typing something in the search box at the right and watch the suggestions appear! It was a pretty easy feature to institute.

In an amazing piece of coincidence, Arvind at Movalog has just announced Suggest Search. For better or worse, his approach works a bit differently than mine.

If you want to use my incarnation of Suggest Search you'll first need a list of suggested...

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04.28.2005

Blogs as a complement to newspapers

Forbes online picked up an Associated Press story about the eleven blogs being published by the editorial staff of the News & Record in North Carolina.

The broad range of Movable Type-powered blogs have earned high praise from others in the journalism business. As Editor & Publisher said:

"When the paper's overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years," wrote the industry-watching magazine Editor & Publisher. "Greensboro will be the first place where this conceptually...

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T'was the week before Christmas, and Mac users received an early present: upgraded versions of Opera Software's Opera browser and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. We test drove and reviewed both, then asked browser makers Håkon Lie and Tantek Çelik to respond to our comments.

Opera: the mini–review

The Opera Browser for Macintosh now comes in two flavors: Beta 5 for systems 7.5.3–9.2, and Beta 3 for OS X. Opera Mac beta supports CSS1, HTML, XHTML, and much of ECMAScript 1.1 (the web–standard version of JavaScript).

Fast and light

Beta 5 is incredibly fast at rendering web pages. They seem to spring onto your screen in the blink...

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Co-authored by Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

With the release of Movable Type 3.1 comes a new and powerful feature - Dynamic Publishing. To take advantage of Dynamic Publishing, you need to edit or create a file on your Apache server called .htaccess as explained in the Movable Type Manual. htaccess files can give you extra control over your server, allowing you to password protect directories, enable server side includes, generate custom error messages, and block users by IP address among other things. (See this Guide to .htaccess for more information.)

Note: You should really know what you are doing before...

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Co-authored by Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

The installation instructions in the Movable Type Install Guide contain a section in the Configuration area called Enable Security Features. These instructions tell you to uncomment the Umask lines in your mt.cfg if your server is running cgiwrap or suexec. If you don't know what CGIwrap or suEXEC are, you may be tempted to skip this step. Don't. This step gives your MT installation extra security, which we will explain. (Note that this tutorial is only appropriate for MT installations on Linux/Apache web servers.)

What is CGIWrap or suEXEC?

CGIWrap and suEXEC are features...

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Updated August 29, 2005. Originally posted in 2004.

Spammers have discovered bloggers and sooner or later if you allow comments or trackback pings on your weblog you will get spammed.

Blog spam appears in many flavors:

1) Basic comment spam. The spammer leaves a short uneventful message in a comment field in one of your entries. The spam comes from the URL placed in the comments URL field. These URLs link back to every conceivable scam. The spammers leave URLs here to create a link from your site to theirs, thus increasing their Google ranking. Spammers are also now linking to legitimate sites that have not cleared their pages of comment spam, thus increasing the Google rank...

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This article was prompted by the growing crop of CSS "tips and tricks" articles that have surfaced in the last two years. Typical of these are the three column design making use of left and right fixed columns hanging on their margins; and the use of @import, instead of JavaScript, to feed appropriate style sheets to differently enabled browsers.

These ideas are very cool and their authors should rightly be heaped with praise, but I can't help feeling we've been here before.

Remember when you figured out how to make a table of images display without the gap? Or how about when you worked out the browser's table rendering algorithm and started using...

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XML (Extensible Markup Language) is the Eurodollar of web development. Both XML and the Euro bring order to chaos; both offer undeniable, wide–ranging benefits; both are poised, in 2002, to change the way we do things. Frankly, both scare the crap out of people.

For web developers, 2002 is a time to conquer fears and take their first hands–on approach to XML. It's time to examine XML and realize the practical benefits that it can provide to web projects today.

The bankers can fend for themselves.

XML, HTML & Databases

If you need a good analogy to describe XML to other people, don't mention HTML. Although XML looks a lot like HTML,...

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Co-authored by Elise Bauer and Arvind Satyanarayan. Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

Future posting is a convenient new feature in MT3.1x, allowing you to create an entry and have it automatically post at a future time. But before you can use this feature you need to set up a Cron Job on your server.

What is a Cron Job?

Cron is a task scheduler for unix servers. A cron job is a specific task that runs a certain number of times per minute, day, week, or month on your server. For example, you can use a cron job to automate a daily MySQL database backup. The main problem with cron jobs is that if they aren't properly configured they can cause high server...

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If you don't know what style sheets will do for you and your audience, you can review the spec online; or see Dr Web {Dr Web is now off-line - Ed.} for a quick tutorial. We'll be here when you return.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) save bandwidth, vastly reducing the size of your files when compared to old-style <FONT FACE> markup. With styles, your sites load faster. You work faster, too. Styles shave grueling hours of grunt-work off your design workload: one brief CSS document can style an entire domain; and when it's time to redesign, you can execute site-wide changes in minutes instead of days.

Style sheets bring genuine leading and sophisticated...

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Provides code syntax highlighting and beautification for a variety of programming languages - including PHP, Java, Perl, Scheme and Flash ActionScript.

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ClockLink Clocklink from www.clocklink.com is a free service that consists of a shockwave-flash application that you can embed into your website with a simple link. Pick your clock type and your timezone.

Copyright © 2004-2005 Elise Bauer. All Rights Reserved (unless otherwise specified).

Has this tutorial been helpful? Please consider linking to Learning Movable Type at http://www.learningmovabletype.com/ . Thanks!

Posted by Elise Bauer on March 08, 2004 to Weblog Goodies | Email to a friend | Comments(0) | Printer-friendly version

Search Engine Marketing, Inc. : Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site [Book] Buy Now from Amazon.com! $32.99...

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For your style-sheet-switching pleasure, A List Apart offers the Switcher, a piece of JavaScript that dynamically changes page styles. Functional as it is, it quite unfortunately relies on the user to have both JavaScript and cookies enabled. There's not much we can do about the cookies, but we can sidestep client-side processing with a little help from PHP.

PHP is a scripting language available on many, many servers. It's fast, it's free, it's open source and it handles everything on the server side, so there's no need to worry about users who have disabled client-side scripting in their browsers. If you're not sure if your host...

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The team at Macromedia has just launched Macromedia Labs, where you can check out new and upcoming technologies that might be making their way into Macromedia's products in the coming months.

With offerings ranging from the Flex framework to new versions of the Flash player, there's a little something for almost every developer. You can even read a full overview of what the labs are about, a copy of this month's Macromedia newsletter, or check out the Macromedia Labs blog. It's a great channel for talking about these unreleased technologies, and Movable Type makes it easy to power the dozens of public blogs that help keep Macromedia so tightly involved in its community.

(A bonus for web developers:...

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