Macromedia's just released Macromedia Central 1.5, the latest version of their Flash-based development platform for cross-platform rich internet applications. Formerly code-named Gemini, Central now includes a range of new features that build on top of its existing functionality.

Central's always been very blog-friendly, including the ability to easily do things like read XML feeds, and it's definitely worth looking at if you'd like to connect a rich internet application to Movable Type or TypePad.

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Your Blogger Code is: B6 d+ t+ k s++ f- i o+ e l c-- ( decode it!)

What will they come up with next? According to The Blogger Code, "Geeks have one. So do hairy gay men and their admirers. Isn't it time bloggers have a code to describe themselves as well?". Want to understand someone's blogger code? Check the decoder.

Hat tip to Arvind of Movalog.

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 November 08, 2004 to Weblog Goodies | Email to a friend |...

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We've already shown you how the powerful new listing screens in Movable Type 3.2 let you easily select any item or range of items, just by clicking anywhere on a row. And you can even shift-click to select a range of items such as comments, TrackBacks, entries, weblogs or authors. But once you've selected your items, you're not just limited to the menu options built into the application.

With the new plugin functionality built into Movable Type 3.2, any plugin can add its own menu items to the list of available actions on a listings screen. For example, we can demonstrate a simple plugin which allows you to transfer an entry from one blog to another with just a few clicks. This...

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For more than a year, ominous rumors have been privately circulating among high-level corporate leaders that Mozilla had been at work on what was darkly hinted to be the Ultimate Weapon, a Doomsday device. Intelligence sources traced the site of the top secret Mozillan project to the perpetually smog-shrouded wasteland known as Mountain View, California. What they were building, or why it should be located in such a remote and desolate place, no one could say.

How General Ripper was Driven to the Edge of Madness

U.S. General Jack D. Ripper was busy coding the Burpleson Air Force base website when he began experiencing problems. His fonts were serif where they were supposed to be...

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I just read an interesting post about Movable Type and plugins (specifically Workflow). In a nutshell, the argument is that Movable Type is a product - one which costs money - and having to buy add-ons to provide what is perceived as core functionality isn't a good thing. It's an interesting argument, and one that I can understand as a consumer.

When that equation flips around, however, is when there is an issue. The developing of plugins really doesn't take that much time. I can write something that works on my system in a flash, and then pack it up so that anyone can download it.

What kills me is the testing and support time required. Not everyone uses the same setup as I do, and...

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Mapping, CERN, and the possibilities that the XMLHttpRequest method is opening up for the web this year.

Simon Willison points us to a phenomenal demonstration of XMLHttpRequest usage - Map.Search.ch, an interactive map of Switzerland that pulls in satellite photos and allows you to zoom down from a high level (the entire country) so close that you can make out houses, boats, and trees.

Here's the kicker - it's DHTML. No Flash or Java is involved, it's all being pulled from the server real-time, and the interactive controls (Zoom and Pan both, try click + dragging the map) are something you'd have to be crazy to implement on dynamic data, but...

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Questioning width and height values for images.

Paraphrased, from the inbox:

height and width attributes no longer apply to images, I suspect. How then do my images render? They seem to automatically size. Is it based strictly on their original size, or should I be defining my attributes in my CSS?

Good question. I still set these particular attributes in my HTML, for both historical and practical reasons.

It used to be, before we were building table-less layouts and offloading all presentation to the CSS, that defining an image included things like turning off the border (darn 2px, blue-bordered linked image default!), specifying ALT text, and defining the width and height...

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Updated

I have found two great services for showing and sharing your photos on your website: Flickr and Photoblox. Of the two, Flickr is by far the easiest to implement, and what you put on your site links back to a larger social networking service based on photo sharing.

1. Flickr Zeitgeist

Flickr Zeitgeist is a fun little flash-based goodie that shows the most recent public photos that people have posted to Flickr, a photo social network. (Note: I had a little bit of trouble gettng this to work; the problem was that the MT entry template automatically put line breaks in the javascript code. I adjusted the code so there are no more line breaks and it seems to work fine.)

It's still in beta, but...

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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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An unauthorized companion to the Online Style Guide of the Branch Libraries of The New York Public Library

XHTML is the standard markup language for web documents and the successor to HTML 4. A mixture of classic (HTML) and cutting–edge (XML), this hybrid language looks and works much like HTML but is based on XML, the web's "super" markup language, and brings web pages many of XML's benefits, as enumerated by the Online Style Guide of the Branch Libraries of The New York Public Library.

If you want your site to work well in today's browsers and non–traditional devices, and to continue to work well in tomorrow's, it's a good...

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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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08.31.2005

Simple Example Templates for Movable Type 3.2

Chris Vannoy has posted some simple Movable Type templates based on the new default templates in Movable Type, but with much of the XHTML structure stripped out so they're easier to read. As Chris explains in his following post, they're not designed to be used on an actual site, since the styling would be pretty ugly by default, but they're a useful basis for creating your own completely custom design if you just need a place to get started.

We'll be producing additional documentation about all the new abilities that templates and styles have in Movable Type 3.2, but this is a great place to start if you...

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Now that Movable Type supports a real database with the MySQL support in version 2.2, it's time for some new tags that can let you select entries, comments and categories using any criteria you'd like. Click the 'more' link for full docs and download link.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtsql-1_52.zip

Installation

To install, place the 'sql.pl' file in your Movable Type 'plugins'...

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We believe in total empowerment of the user to decide what content they want to look at. – Microsoft Product Manager Shawn Sanford, as quoted by NewsBytes

Microsoft thinks they can improve my writing. This makes me want to get a gun and go to war. – Dave Winer, Scripting.com

Smart Tags can be developed by anybody, are completely under the user's control, and can do some very useful things. – Executive Editor David Coursey, writing for ZDNet AnchorDesk

This is exactly like what Microsoft did in the past...leveraging what they have on the desktop into another market... – Gartner analyst Michael Silver, as quoted by News.com

The dustup surrounding...

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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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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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