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Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 29 KB, 1874 words
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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Movalog, Tutorials, 37 KB, 2028 words
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...
continue reading ...
Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 31 KB, 2285 words
One way to set up a private, password-protected weblog is by adding a .htaccess file to the directory in which the weblog resides. 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. I've already described the fundamentals of .htaccess in another tutorial, see What is .htaccess? If you are setting up .htaccess for the first time, be sure to read this tutorial thoroughly.
1. Create .htpasswd
The first thing you need to do, before creating your .htaccess file, is to create a file called .htpasswd, which will hold the user...
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Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 21 KB, 809 words
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.)
An htaccess file is a simple ascii text file which you create or edit in a text editor. The dot (.) before the word htaccess indicates that .htaccess is a file extension. Some text editors will add on an additional .txt file extension when you save your document. When you upload it to your server however, make sure the final file is named .htaccess and set the file's permissions to 644. The (.) in .htaccess also makes...
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Six Apart Knowledgebase, Manuals, 27 KB, 546 words
Question
I'm unable to publish my weblog index to the root folder of my site due to host restrictions, so I have it publishing to a subfolder. But I still want it to be the first page visitors see when they browse to my domain name.
Answer
If your account is hosted on an Apache server, see if your host permits you to use .htaccess files.
An .htaccess file is a hidden system file in your server directories. You may or may not have one by default, depending on your host. The file can be created in any text editor and uploaded to the directory you...
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Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 24 KB, 1162 words
Updated. Originally published Jan 2, 2004
Error messages are the messages that are displayed when a visitor to your site encounters a server error. The most common error messages are 404: File Not Found and 403: Access Forbidden. The 404 error message is displayed when a visitor to your site tries to access a page that does not exist on your server. The 403 message is displayed when a visitor tries to enter an area on your site that is off limits to the public.
You can customize your error messages so that instead of seeing an ugly server message, your visitor sees instead a personalized note from you. The methods are different depending on if you are doing static (the default) or dynamic...
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alogblog, Plugins, 20 KB, 1422 words
World Wide Web has been mainly constructed with US-ASCII, even for URL. But in now and future, WWW will shift from US-ASCII only world to Internatinalized world with the help of Unicode, UTF-8, IRI, and so on.
If you are European, or Asian, or others, you would write an entry by your own language, therefore the title of it also will be with yours. However, the default MT removes or deforms non US-ASCII characters in title to make an entry basename for permalink URL(It is completely right in URI side). As a result, they couldn't enjoy full features of MT that can create Cool URI. Only English users could do.
This plugin makes your permalinks as Cool IRI...
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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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A List Apart, Tutorials, 14 KB, 1425 words
Looking around the web, you've run across plenty of URLs that look like: /content.cgi?date=2000-02-21/article.cgi?» id=46&page=1
Server side scripts generate the content of those pages. The content of a particular page is uniquely determined by the URL, just as if you requested a page with the URL /content/2000-02-01.html or /article/46.1.html. These pages are different than server-generated pages created in response to a form like a shopping cart, or enrollment. However, search engines will not index these content pages, because search engines ignore pages generated by CGI scripts as potential blind alleys.
A search engine would follow a URL like
/content/2000/02/2...
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A List Apart, Tutorials, 16 KB, 1877 words
If you're building or maintaining a dynamic website, you may have considered the problem of how to get rid of unfriendly URLs. You might also have read Bill Humphries's ALA article on the topic, which presents one (very good) solution to this problem.
The main difference between Bill Humphries's article and the solution I will present here is that I decided to do the actual URL transformations with a PHP script, whereas his solution uses regular expressions in an .htaccess file.
If you prefer working with PHP instead of using regular expressions, and if you want to integrate your solution with your dynamic PHP sites, this might be the right method for you....
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Movalog, Tutorials, 30 KB, 1313 words
The first question/answer from Ask Arvind...
Lea writes:
Can you provide tips on how to have cruft-free URLs (a la diveintomark.org, as well as others)? I already have this employed in my blog, but a lot of others don't.
The diveintomark tutorial in question can be found here.
First of all what is cruft ? Cruft is basically the extensions of webpages for example .php, .html etc. In the field of SEO it is meant to be very bad. Here's a - hopefully easier - method to have cruft-free urls. For this to work you will need to install the Short-Titles plugin (thanks Amit!)
•
Blank out "File Extension for Archive Files" under Weblog Config → Preferences •
Change the Archive File...
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MT-Hacks, Tutorials, 11 KB, 861 words
This is a hack I began using recently, in an emergency situation. Blog comment spam was creating a huge CPU load on my web server, to the point that it was causing server crashes and CPU restrcitions from my (now former) web host. I have heard increasing report of web hosting banning the use of Movable Type on their hosting plans for the same reason.
This an MT-Blacklist hack that automatically blocks the IP address of someone trying to post commnent that matches your blacklist. It does this using htaccess, so repeated POSTs from that IP will never reach the MT scripts, thus saving your CPU.
First, let me be clear that I agree with Jay Allen and Adam Kalsey's comments about the...
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Six Apart ProNet Weblog, News, 38 KB, 2484 words
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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Movalog, News, 35 KB, 1825 words
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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Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 27 KB, 1771 words
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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A List Apart, Tutorials, 21 KB, 1922 words
Google's caching system offers several cool features; one of most useful is that the words you searched for are highlighted in the page. Most web users don't read pages carefully - they scan text for what they're looking for. This is why Google's cached-page highlighting is so useful. When the page is rendered, users don't need to read the entire page to find what they came for, the page shows them where it is. As a quick example, the words highlighted above most likely caught your eye before you actually got to reading them.
Usability heuristics state that users should not have to remember information from one...
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Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 25 KB, 1231 words
Co-authored by Elise Bauer and Arvind Satyanarayan. 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...
continue reading ...
Six Apart User Manual, Manuals, 31 KB, 1746 words
While entries make up the content of a weblog and templates control how these entries are displayed, it is the process of publishing that makes a weblog go. Movable Type refers to the process of publishing as rebuilding -- a reference to its static page generation roots. When a rebuild is performed, templates and your content are merged to publish a page that visitors can view in their browsers.
Choosing Between a Static or Dynamic Publishing Model
Movable Type provides the flexibility to choose between either static page generation or dynamic pages to optimize weblog performance on a per-template...
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