Hey! That's mine!

Most web professionals are all too aware of the problems caused by hotlinkers. Leechers. Bandwidth thieves. People who use images hosted on your web server on their own pages.

For some lucky people who don't pay by the gigabyte for the amount of data they transfer, that's not too big a deal. Who cares if some little-trafficked weblog uses your photograph of snow falling in New York?

For other sites, however, it's a much bigger problem. If a 100K JPEG is hotlinked on a site that gets, say, 1,000 hits a day, that's 100MB of data transferred from your site without a single person actually visiting your site. If you have only a few gigabytes of...

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Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic publishing over static publishing?

Elise Bauer, editor of Learning Movable Type and Arvind Satyanarayan, author of Movalog, discuss some of the pros and cons of dynamic publishing. Non-techie luddite-wannabe Elise shies away from anything that seems like it might not be worth the effort and so far hasn't even tried dynamic publishing. Plugin creator and MT hack-master Arvind has embraced dynamic publishing with his usual boundless...

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Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic publishing over static publishing?

Elise Bauer, editor of Learning Movable Type, and Arvind Satyanarayan, author of Movalog, discuss some of the pros and cons of dynamic publishing. Non-techie luddite-wannabe Elise shies away from anything that seems like it might not be worth the effort and so far hasn't even tried dynamic publishing. Plugin creator and MT hack-master Arvind has embraced dynamic publishing with his usual boundless...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Sarah Hughes of This Chick (aka Maddy in the MT Forums).

Many customizations for Movable Type call for using PHP scripts that require that your pages have a .php extension rather than a .html or .htm extension.

PHP is a server-side scripting language which involves a) the server looking at your pages for a PHP script, b) running the script, and c) outputting the results to the page. This is called "parsing". In order to successfully use PHP in your pages, you need to ensure that your account on your webserver is set up to parse your pages for PHP scripts. This feature is pretty standard these days, but check with your webhost before...

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This is the first in a series of tutorials regarding the API for developing Movable Type plugins for the new PHP dynamic rendering engine.

This tutorial applies to the current release of MT, which is version 3.11. Subsequent 3.x releases should also be compatible (and releases beyond that, but I cannot say for sure).

PHP Dynamic Publishing Architecture

The first thing we should cover is the architecture behind it all. In terms of PHP scripts, the following shows the order of invocation from request to response. • HTTP request • .htaccess rule / error document • mtview.php • MT Class (MT.php) • MTViewer Class, aka Smarty (MTViewer.php) • PHP • HTTP response with output

Let's examine each stage of...

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Updated October 16, 2004

The results of the LMT Web Host Survey are in! Thanks to all who participated.

The first step in installing Movable Type is making sure that your web host meets MT requirements. In addition to the basic requirements there are many other factors to consider, in particular the quality of support, the reliability of the service, and the degree to which the host's staff is familiar with Movable Type. Which web host you choose can make a big difference in terms of the ease with which you install and maintain your MT weblog.

What to Look for in a Host Provider

Absolutely Necessary: 1. Ability to run custom CGI scripts 2. Perl installed on server, version...

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Enabling Dynamic Publishing

Problem

You want to enable the dynamic publishing features in Movable Type.

Solution

Configure your web server so requests are routed through mtview.php, the Dynamic Bootstrap Handler.

Discussion

• 1. Turn on the dynamic page option in Movable Type.

Select whether to publish all of your archive templates dynamically or set your templates' publishing modes individually. See Specifying the Publishing Model. • 2. Set up the template cache directory.

In your weblog's root directory, create a new subdirectory named templates_c. The directory should...

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So Thursday AM is "The Big Day", the day when we all get to experience Movable Type 3.2, sans beta.

My entries are slow-in-coming for a few days while I launch my brand new design site. The current site is truly ghastly. I'm also currently slogging my way through 12 rounds in the ring with a couple of ornary problems:

Headache#1: .htaccess

First, I'm trying to get my server to process my .html files as .php files so I can use includes for my sidebar. I'm up to my neck in .htaccess, and I've tried adding the simple "AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html" with no luck. The site keeps returning a happy 500 error any time I try to view a .php file or...

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Question

I get a 500 Internal Server Error when trying to view pages I've set to publish dynamically.

Answer

The dynamic publishing feature creates an .htaccess file in your weblog directory; however, some hosts do not allow the use of these files, and you will see these errors as a result.

You should confirm with your host whether or not you are permitted to use .htaccess files on your account.

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Dynamic Publishing - Pros and Cons

Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic...

Continue reading "Dynamic Publishing - Pros and Cons"

Posted on 05/28/2005 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Troubleshooting Smarty Errors

Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type If you move from static publishing to dynamic publishing in Movable Type, you may encounter a variety of confusing error messages in Smarty, the system...

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During the comment spam crisis, before 3.14 was released, my host installed something called mod_security. I have noticed that ever since it was installed, the comment spam flood I normally experienced turned into a trickle. mod_security helps with a lot of things. It's good for helping block a lot of the script vulnerability attacks like cross-site scripting, bad PHP includes, etc so there's a good chance it will be installed on your host, if not ask them.

If you do have mod_security installed, I will guide you through setting it up such that it blocks of comment spam. What is the advantage of mod_security over MT-Blacklist? mod_security scans the comment before it hits MT-Blacklist or...

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Here are some tips on how to optimize your weblog and make the page load times drop: • Sidebars: Sidebars are everything when you're talkin about page load. I have found that sidebars on the right decrease page load times dramatically. Having the sidebar on the right also allows the content to load first. The content is what your readers have come for and hence they can start reading even before the page has fully loaded. The default MT templates have the sidebars positioned to the right, to change your sidebar location you'll need to change the float element in the css: float:right;

or you may have to move around some of your markup (the template code) • Content: Although content is...

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Movable Type weblogs require some level of maintenance, beyond just adding new content. Here are some suggestions that can help keep your blog running smoothly. If you have other suggestions not on this list, please let us know in the comments section.

Dead Links

If you link to any other websites from your blog, and or have comments or TrackBacks enabled, you need to periodically scan your site to make sure that your external links are still active. Links with URLs that are no longer valid give a "404" server error when someone clicks on them.

One of the biggest deadlink culprits can come from TrackBack links. Periodically click on the "TrackBack" button on the left side of...

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3.16 (2005.04.13)

Security

• Made several important improvements with regards to application authentication and security.

Notifications

• Fixed ``Send Notifications'' feature for multiple recipients. • Fixed a bug where comment notifications weren't being sent for some moderated comments.

Error checking

• Improved validation of user input in many places. Leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed from author names, category names, and blog names. None of these can be left blank except for a known issue with editing the...

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Step right up, step this way. Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you the amazing journey from one server-side technology to another. You'll be amazed, you'll be awed, you'll laugh, you'll cry. You'll… okay, so my writing style needs to calm down a touch.

I've been working on this on and off for months now, and I meant to have it up far earlier than this. Some of the final details are fuzzy at this point, but the bulk of it is on target.

This is the process I went through when upgrading my Movable-Type powered site from IIS (and ASP) to Apache (and PHP), from start to finish. For the benefit of Google, and you the reader, I'll try to spare...

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Sometimes you would like to display the age of an entry as compared to a specific date. In the case, of my daughter's blog, I've displayed her actual age at the time of each post, based on her birth date and the authored-on date of the entry.

Updated to support time difference too.

Updated to correct date_delta function's accuracy.

This is a Movable Type/PHP tip. I haven't...

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2.6 (2003.02.13)

• Added Text Formatting options. Instead of a simple Convert Line Breaks checkbox, you can now set a different formatting option for each entry. Plugins can add new options to the Text Formatting menu, which allows for greater integration with the formatting within the system (for example, Text Formatting will be applied on the preview screen). • Added PostgreSQL and SQLite database drivers. • Incorporated Brad Choate's Sanitize plugin, adding an mt.cfg setting for a global default and a per-blog setting to override it. Sanitize is turned on...

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I don't have a complete knowledge on IRI. So below contents might have some misunderstandings. If you find one, please feedback to me.

* At first, this post was written in part of Cool IRI for a permalink. So in this post, you'll often see the words, "this plugin". "This plugin" means that a plugin for a Movable Type bloggin tool, which enables you to create a Cool IRI for blog archives.

You may be stunned by comparatively long page. I swear this content is not deeply technical and is just common knowledge. If you have no time to read it, just see some pictures. Perhaps it will do a little for you.

What means a "Cool" ?

If you've never heard of Cool URI, I...

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For those who aren't using the dynamic publishing feature of Movable Type (see below), experiencing slow rebuild times is not an infrequent complaint especially as the size or complexity of the blog and its templates grows. While there are very good reasons to rebuild, there are no good reasons for it to be painfully slow.

In this essay, we will detail a number of reasons why your rebuild times might be slow and steps you can take to drastically reduce or completely eliminate the time you spend waiting for Movable Type to finish its work.

Upgrade to Movable Type 3

Has anything significant happened to you in the 16 months? Probably so. Well, the same can be said for Movable...

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It's hard to work in the web business nowadays without hearing about Perl. (It's hard to work in the web business nowadays, period, but that's another story.) Perl is one of the most popular languages in use today, is completely free, open sourced, and supported by an extremely enthusiastic community.

In addition to the core features of the language, numerous modules and scripts are available on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network ( CPAN).

These ready–made scripts include everything from streaming MP3 servers to hooks into news clients, while the modules offer powerful generic functionality for almost any task imaginable. Everything on CPAN is completely...

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