mod_rewriting your way to fame, fortune… and frustration.

A new feature I've added to the Zen Garden is a far nicer URI schema. I've moved from this: http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=145/145.css

to this: http://www.csszengarden.com/145/

Nice, right? Except it's not quite perfect yet.

For the sake of easy, short URIs for the book, I looked into mod_rewrite at the time, but never quite got it working. So I hacked this all together manually by adding redirects for each of the designs to an index.php file in their respective directories. Ugly, unmaintainable, and more work than necessary, but it worked.

Then Mathias Bynens asked if the new links could be applied to all designs. And since I had originally planned for this anyway, I went further into the...

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Simple static site templating with a CSS focus.

I use a very lightweight templating system of my own devising on this site that strikes me as something that might be of value to someone, somewhere. No database required, although you could certainly use one in conjunction with this method if you feel so inclined.

This is pretty basic stuff, so feel free to skip this one if you're an old hand at server-side scripting. Then again, it sets up a lot of the CSS tricks I use around here, which may prove interesting even so.

Around 1998 or so, I maintained a semi-large site for a local ISP which grew pretty quickly, so templating was largely a matter of global find and replace. It...

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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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Setting up a consistent, well-organized website is kind of like building a new house. You can rush in, sticking bricks and mortar hither and yon with wanton abandon, and wonder why a few months down the track your roof leaks and visitors are hit by falling debris.

Or you can plan ahead, and make up a blueprint for your site, keeping expandability in mind at all times. After all, what designer doesn't want to add new content? And what site doesn't sometimes need to change its underlying technology?

Sadly enough, a frequently overlooked step in this process is the structure of your links - the actual URLs you'll be using to point to items on your site....

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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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In this article, we'll build a simple, template-driven site that separates style, content, and structure in your website. We'll create a cross-browser stylesheet switcher that remembers the user's preferences, touching on php variables, cookies, if statements, and including pages with require_once.

Separating style, content, and structure

The separation of style from content has become the bugbear of the HTML developer. Traditionally, we've used well-written CSS and XHTML to achieve this separation, and we've seen how much easier it is to update our sites or provide multiple styles when we write our markup this way. By adding some...

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Today I was working with someone and having a bear of a time getting their 3.17 install working on their GoDaddy hosting account. It turns out that the way the script name was accessed had changed - and since GoDaddy runs under sbox, it was returning sbox as the name when it redirected you back to the page! So with a few small edits to App.pm, I got around this issue and made things work.

I'm still having problems with getting dynamic publishing to work on GoDaddy, but at least we're making progress. If you are installing Movable Type on your GoDaddy host, and running into problems, take a look at our Movable Type Consulting Services to see how we can help.

Update: I think I have...

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Question

How can I switch my site to use PHP file extensions?

Answer

Update Archive Settings

Log into Movable Type and navigate to Settings > Publishing1. Locate the setting for File Extension for Archive Files under Publishing Preferences and enter php in the setting field (without a leading period).

Scroll down to Archive Mapping2, and check to see if any of the Archive File Template boxes are filled in - if so, change the extension to php there as well. Press the SAVE button.

Update Index Templates

Navigate to Templates. For each Index Template...

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I further discussed my previous post with many pepole and felt I needed to clarify some doubts I and many others had about the new dynamic MT, so here's a follow up post ! Brad explained how the new MT/Smarty/PHP system will work. The template gets pulled from the database; there is a pass over it to make it smarty-compatible; then it gets executed by smarty. so if you have a real simple template like this: <MTEntries> <MTEntriesHeader><ul></MTEntriesHeader> <li><MTEntryTitle></li> <MTEntriesFooter></ul></MTEntriesFooter> </MTEntries>

it gets changed to this: {Entries} {EntriesHeader}<ul>{/EntriesHeader} <li>...

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We're running Movable Type 3.2 beta 4. Rather than upgrading, I did a fresh installation. It went smoothly, and the upgrade is well worth it. I think I have everything working correctly ( danandsherree.com Search, danandsherree.com Notifications, and other stuff I had customized). I haven't updated the alternate templates yet, though.

Given all the new features, I'm a little surprised that this release is being called 3.2 - it could be 3.5 or maybe even 4.0! I haven't gotten to see the new Junk tools in action yet to say how well they work. Basename control is cool, and works, as this entry shows. I suppose I could mention all the cool new features, but...

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