Results
If the result list is too large, please consider these hints
- Reduce the number of websites.
- Add more keywords.
- Use quotes for building terms from keywords. For example, the phrase banner image searches for all articles containing both words. However, "banner image" searches for the exact two-word phrase.
Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 46 KB, 3451 words
This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Mike Everett-Lane of Ishbadiddle.
A Subject Index can give context to your posts and makes it easier for your readers to browse what you've written on specific topics. Unlike Categories, which are limited, top-down, and hierarchical, Subject tags are open-ended and limitless. While your blog's Category system is like the Table of Contents of a book, a Subject Index is like the book's Index, one that is constantly updated.
First, you might want to read my blog post on how the use of Subject Indexes can improve the organization of your blog. You can see it in action there as well as here on LMT. For instance, here's the index of all my subjects, and the index of all my posts on the subject of...
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A List Apart, Tutorials, 16 KB, 1925 words
With Jim Heid
In the absence of finalized rich media standards for the web, plug-ins were developed that enabled websites to offer streaming video, animated vector graphics, annoying music tracks, and the like. Over the past couple of years, W3C recommendations have emerged to suggest standardized ways of doing what proprietary plug-ins already do so well.
One of these is SMIL™, the W3C recommendation for multimedia; the other is SVG, intended to deliver vector graphics such as those already used in Flash (but with some essential differences from Flash).
When faced with SMIL, many web designers shrug; when shown what SVG can do today, most Flash designers laugh....
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Brad Choate, Plugins, 114 KB, 4017 words
Update: A 2.01 release of MT-IfEmpty is now available, which mainly adds support for dynamic publishing in MT 3.1x.
You can download this plugin here: mtifempty-2_01.zip.
Usage: <MTIfEmpty var="EntryTitle">(untitled)</MTIfEmpty> <$MTEntryTitle$>
Embedded expression support works like this: <MTIfNotEmpty expr="[MTEntries days='1']1[/MTEntries]"> We...
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A List Apart, Tutorials, 23 KB, 2972 words
With Ryan Holsten and Michael Krisher
The year 2000 came and went. Where did design go? As sad as it sounds, not terribly far. It was a year of trendiness, inspiration, imitation, and the imitation of inspired trendiness. What we can take away from the past year in digital design is the knowledge that the new medium is still deep in its early discovery phase.
Y2K (for lack of a shorter term) was going to change everything. Flying cars, artificial intelligence, talking toasters – this was our supposed fate. So where's our Jetsons lifestyle? Maybe Y3K would have been a more practical projection!
It's 11 p.m. Does your Mom know where you are?
The web is now recognized as...
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Six Apart ProNet Weblog, News, 63 KB, 5850 words
06.30.2005
New in Movable Type 3.2: A home for administrators
One of Movable Type's biggest strengths is the platform's support for an unlimited number of weblogs. Once you've got a thriving community of bloggers creating entries and publishing their thoughts, though, it quickly becomes necessary to manage the weblogs on your system.
To meet this need, we've introduced an entire new area of functionality in Movable Type 3.2: The System Overview. We've chosen the System Overview as the first feature to highlight in this new release because it represents a single home for administrators. It's one place to go to oversee everything that's happening across your...
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Movable Type Weblog, Tutorials, 17 KB, 647 words
When I started to work with fulltext search in Movable Type, I enhanced my Movable Type Weblog with a native MySQL fulltext search engine. Later I created a new website called MTLookup, which could be used for searching several websites at the same time.
After MTLookup was released, the search within the Movable Type Weblog was still based on the initial release: no Google-like keyphrase, only my weblog being indexed, some of the most recent articles not included at all.
Starting today, the search within the Movable Type Weblog will be powered by MTLookup, making all the enhancements of MTLookup available within the Movable Type Weblog.
Some more details
Although both websites - the...
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Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 23 KB, 981 words
Movable Type uses CSS elements defined in your weblog's stylesheet template to control font sizes as well as other style factors. The following graphic indicates which default stylesheet classes correspond to which heading and text elements in the default Gettysburg style.
To change the size of one of the font elements, you need to change the stylesheet. For example in the default Gettysburg stylesheet, you'll find the following:
.content p { color: #666666; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; text-align: left; margin-bottom: 10px; }
Movable Type uses absolute-size keywords for font sizes in the...
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Don't Back Down, Tutorials, 14 KB, 917 words
The world is afire this morning with talk of the announcements by Six Apart and the three major search engines ( Google, MSN and Yahoo) to support a new HTML attribute named nofollow (in full, rel="nofollow"). By adding this attribute to your link anchors, the search engines will no longer consider the linking page as a component of the linked page's rank.
The idea is a simple one: Add this attribute to all link tags that you don't want to contribute to the rank of the linked page. For instance, comments and trackbacks, which are submitted to your site by users, are by their very nature considered "unknowns". Adding this attribute to those tags means you don't "stand up" for the value...
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Brad Choate, Tutorials, 100 KB, 3747 words
Things you probably didn't realize you could do with MT-Textile 2: • Hyperlinks for Amazon, IMDB and Google searches. For example (search term can be placed after the last ‘:', or will default to the hyperlinked text): • "James Bond":imdb:Sean+Connery becomes James Bond • "Tangerine Dream":amazon becomes Tangerine Dream • "Movable Type":google becomes Movable Type • ["MT plugins by Brad Choate":google:movable type plugin choate] becomes MT plugins by Brad Choate • Float images to the left and right; center stuff too: • !>/images/me.jpg! (floats...
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Six Apart User Manual, Manuals, 25 KB, 973 words
Choosing the Right Weblog Platform
Problem
You are trying to determine whether Movable Type or TypePad is right for you.
Solution
Decide what is most important to you: simplicity or control.
Discussion
TypePad is a complement to Movable Type, not a replacement. The two tools share a common core designed to address the needs of users with different requirements and capabilities. So, the question that will often be asked is, which is right the tool to use, Movable Type or TypePad? The answer comes down to simplicity vs. control. TypePad's centralized design and focus on...
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Don't Back Down, News, 18 KB, 1042 words
I'm releasing an updated version of MT-Notifier today. This adds a couple of changes: 2.4.4 - Added MTNotifierCatID template tag to display ID of context category.
This change allows you to use the MTNotifierCatID tag inside of a context category - useful for pulling out the category ID when you are in a category archive, for instance, and allowing you to dynamically create subscriptions for categories. 2.4.5 - Added ability to specify parameter "url" on subscription form.
If you create your own subscription form, add the parameter "url" to the form. You can make this hidden, and I would probably suggest doing so, but you could also allow it to be a drop-down list or something....
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A List Apart, Tutorials, 10 KB, 1032 words
Any internet marketing professional will tell you, just as we will, that an effective Search Engine Optimization campaign can generate more traffic than an expensive banner-ad program, or costly and time-consuming pay-per-click methods. Some of the best methods of optimizing a website are ensuring that a page is not overly heavy in file size, maintaining a good content to code ratio, using lots of relevant content, and filling the page with as much text and links as you can without "spamming" the search engine spiders.
We're not going to cover all of the basics of XHTML and CSS. We assume that you have a basic, working knowledge of the two languages and have...
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Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 21 KB, 1155 words
(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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Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 43 KB, 3663 words
Update April 9, 2005: Brad Choate has released a new anti-spam plugin called SpamLookup. Jay Allen, the creator of MT-Blacklist recommends SpamLookup over MT-Blacklist.
Spammers have discovered Trackback and have recently been leaving their trail of unwelcome links all over the blogosphere. To get a sense of what we are up against, read The Register's interview with a link spammer. Listed here are some defensive measures you can take.
MT-Blacklist
As with comment spam, your first recourse is Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist. The blacklist will help you delete the trackbacks and ban the URLs the spammers leave. Note that if you are using MT2.661 and MT-Blacklist 1.65, Jay has special instructions for deleting trackback spam pings....
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MezzoBlue, Tutorials, 14 KB, 1088 words
Validation matters. No it doesn't. Validation is hard. No it isn't. Standards are flexible. No they're not. Does this conversation sound familiar? Updated 18 Jun 2004
While variations of the debate over the ease and importance of following the standards to the letter have been flying around for years, the coming summer months appear to be heating up the arguments once more.
There's a cross-site conversation about validation happening at the moment, and you may have seen it in places I haven't. On this site anyway, a seemingly innocuous opinion piece from last week calling for moderation and sensibility saw the discussion fly completely off the rails...
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Six Apart Mena's Corner, News, 43 KB, 2721 words
Ben and I gave a talk at BlogTalk in Vienna on Tuesday. Unfortunately, because of jetlag and some bad timing, we weren't able to convey all the points we wanted to make in the talk itself. So, I'm posting a transcript of the speech we prepared.
I realize that we've never really communicated these messages. I feel strongly — and have always — that personal weblogs are often marginalized because of their presumed triviality. Weblogs are going to hit the mainstream and they're going to be a new method for communicating with small, intimate groups in a more optimized manner.
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Good morning. My name is Mena Trott and this is Ben Trott, my husband and co-founder of Six...
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Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 21 KB, 1256 words
When you are first setting up a new weblog, Movable Type prompts you to choose a file extension in the weblog config preferences section. The default setting is HTML.
If your server allows PHP scripts, and you would like to add customization features that aren't part of the default Movable Type system, it is highly recommended that you choose PHP as your default file extension preference in place of HTML. Doing so allows you to take advantage of many freely available PHP scripts to help customize your weblog. PHP is an open source scripting language that is powerful, stable, and extremely popular for adding dynamic elements to websites. In your Movable Type weblog, PHP scripts can...
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