Usually a weblog is not the best place to give a good introduction into a certain subject. The author writes about whatever he wants. He doesn't care whether the current entry fits to the last entry or not. With this sitemap I want to give a complete listing of all entries and bring some structure into the chaos.

You can also use a simple list or a category-grouped list of all entries.

Why do I start a weblog?

There are probably many reasons for starting a weblog. Maybe you are interesting in mine. • In the Beginning nothing but Problems • Wake up! • Trying to be a Global Player

Basics

When I first read a weblog I thought its structure was rather difficult to understand....

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10.29.2004

Firefox on the March

Red Herring's got an interview with Rob Davis, the man behind the campaign to advertise Firefox in the New York Times. It's especially good timing for promoting every geek's favorite browser, since the updated roadmap shows the browser scheduled for release on November 9th.

Posted by Anil in at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

10.29.2004

Advice to the bloglorn

Metaforix President Lois C. Ambash has some advice for those afraid of business blogging. It's a solid set of guidelines, but we also loved the praise for TypePad:

As a novice blogger, I chose TypePad for my own blog, and I couldn't be happier. The...

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The formal announcement:

Six Apart, éditeur américain d'outils de publication de weblogs, vient d'acquérir son partenaire francais Ublog. (Six Apart, American weblog tool maker, has just acquired its French partner Ublog.)

Loïc and his team have been acting as our exclusive agent in Europe for the past six or so months bringing the TypePad service and Movable Type to the European market. Today we announced the formation of Six Apart EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) a subsidiary formed through the acquisition of Ublog.

Now, the informal, interesting, background on the deal:

Around November of last year we began speaking to Loïc (who had been...

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A few details about the forthcoming collaboration between Molly and me.

"The Zen of CSS Design" was officially announced over a week ago at WE04 in Sydney. I expected that word would leak, so a quick mention on my Update got the message out to everyone else. Molly made mention of it as well, and filled in a few details in her comments.

But we haven't spent much time talking about the book yet, and now that I'm back (good to be home) and with connection (which I didn't miss nearly as much as I thought I would) I figure it's a good time to share what the book is, and isn't.

Those who caught the Keynote in Sydney ( slides available) caught a preview, but only of the first 30 or 40 pages. Both were written concurrently, and the first chapter covers the same major points that were touched on in the keynote - the early web and slow adoption of CSS, the inspiration and building of the Zen Garden, what the site teaches, and what the site has taught me....

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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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12.22.2004

MT-Blacklist v2.03-beta

As part of the ongoing efforts against comment spam, Jay Allen has released Blacklist v2.03-beta. This release is designed to take advantage of the improvements in Movable Type 3.14, and the combination of the two is an excellent way to manage comment spam while not imposing too much of a burden on your web server.

If you're using an older version of MT-Blacklist, it's strongly recommended that you update to this new version. And just to review, MT-Blacklist, despite the name, MT-Blacklist offers a wide variety of techniques to manage or moderate comments or block spam, in addition to its namesake Blacklisting feature.

Posted by Anil in Plugins at...

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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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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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by Category | by Date

Anti-Spam

Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist - MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist Birdhouse notes on Comment Spam - Why this web host is forcing comment registration Blacklist to Mod Security - by Peter Wood Brad Choate: SpamLookup - anti-spam plugin Interview with a Comment Spammer - The Register's interview with a blog comment spammer. MT-Approval Plugin - Prevents comment spam from spam bots MT-DSBL Open Proxy Comment Filter - from Brad Choate MT-Moderate - Plugin for moderating trackbacks and comments from Chad Everett Mod Rewrite to Block Bot Spam - Mod Rewrite method to divert comment spam bots to a 403...

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11.30.2004

Interview with Nick Bradbury

A good interview with Nick Bradbury of TopStyle and FeedDemon fame, with tips on becoming an independent software vendor:

If you plan to do this for a living, focus on building tools that make peoples lives easier or more interesting, and chances are youll last longer and find your work more fulfilling.

Posted by Anil in Blog Strategy at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

11.30.2004

More on the MT3 Bible

Rogers Cadenhead talks a bit more about the newly-released Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition, and is very generously giving away five author's copies to people who comment on, or link to, his post...

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Macromedia released Flash MX in mid-March of 2002, including enhancements to the player and the authoring tool to improve accessibility for people with disabilities.

Admittedly, some areas like screen reader access couldn't possibly get any worse than they were in previous versions of the player: popular screen readers such as JAWS and Window-Eyes ignored Flash content completely. Other features, such as the ability to add captions (which has been available since Flash 5), benefit from improvements Macromedia made to the Flash architecture in this release.

The changes have also automatically improved access to existing Flash content when viewed in the Flash Player 6, but to...

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Over at CNN.com, they're running an interview with me about weblogging, the web and where I see the industry going: Pundits and knitters find common ground in Weblogs.

When Ben read the interview, he commented that it was a sort of "stream of consciousness" piece. Some may think that he meant to say "hey, you're rambling." What *I* think he meant to say is "hey, your passion for weblogging really comes out in this piece!"

I find that when I do these sort of weblogging from 20,000 piece interviews, I tend to get extremely moved by what we're doing when we blog. And this isn't so much about tools or Six Apart -- it's about the fact that weblogging has lead to so many stronger...

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Many of you spend a lot of time and effort just trying to convince your company or your clients to start a blog. But we think that, in many cases, the need is even greater: Many companies need to start a number of blogs.

Though there's been so much attention paid to business blogs in the past few months, we're still in the early days of awareness. Whether it's saving time in communication, improving the connection with customers, reducing the cost of gathering feedback, or just participating in the conversations around your industry, there are a number of ways to make the case for business blogs, even if a company is nervous about entering the blogosphere.

The good news is, those...

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• Initial beta release

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0.02 (2001.09.25)

• Added FTP URLs to installation instructions. (Daniel Talsky) • Fix some warnings. (Caroline van Oosten de Boer)...

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Learning Movable Type is now hosted on a new server and now has its own domain name - http://www.learningmovabletype.com. In the process of changing servers and changing URLs, we may have created some broken links or other site hiccups. If you encounter something that just doesn't seem to be working properly, please email me using the contact form.

Humongous thanks to Chad and Arvind for their invaluable assistance with this move.

If you link to Learning Movable Type (and we hope you do) please, please, please change the URL in your link to the new one. That way, Google will find us more easily, and those using Google to find things regarding Movable Type will find us more easily too....

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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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Sometimes it's nice to get a lot for a little. Macros let you do that. Instead of typing laborious HTML as you write your entries, a macro can do all the work for you so you can concentrate on writing. Perhaps you want to use a set of icons within your posts but don't care to write <img> tags all day long. Or maybe you'd like to link up to Google queries without having to type out the full URL. This plugin allows you to do that and much more.

...

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Matt Haughey has a great article on how he uses Movable Type to do it all (apparently, Kottke does too… can't wait to see his article).

Anyhow, I wanted to share a tidbit in that vein. I've just set this up recently, and I'm in the process of moving the rest of my static content to use it. What I did: • Created a new Movable Type blog and named it "bradchoate.com: Static Content". • Deleted all the Index templates. • Deleted all the archive templates, except for the Individual archive template. • Made sure individual archives were enabled. • Made the archive path the root...

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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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