This morning I saw a flurry of new information from many sources about this thing called rel="nofollow" which is supposed to help stop comment spamming. Read about it's interaction with Movable Type at Six Log, Movable Type, and the Six Apart Professional Network, and a little more generic info is at Google.

Either I don't fully understand what nofollow is supposed to do, or it really is a dumb idea. I'm confident it's the latter.

Well, ok, those who implement nofollow will definitely help in not raising a spammer's Google PageRank. But that's the only benefit. As has been pointed out, a legitimate commenter's link won't count...

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And at last, the transcript of Monday's panel from SXSW 2004. Enjoy!

See, the way I see it, CSS is about font control. You can manipulate things like your leading, text color, and font face. That's about all it gets you.

Well… The old school method of thinking (old school being as late as last year for some, though I'm thinking more of 1998-era methods) was that CSS was useful for typography, and that's about it. I was guilty of that mindset myself for years. In fact, it was embarrassingly recent that I realized that hey, you know, this stuff can do a whole lot more.

I'm a graphic designer, image is important to me. I need things to look just right...

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{Part II of a two-part series.}

In Part I, we showed how Slashdot could save money and reduce bandwidth requirements by converting to semantic XHTML markup and CSS layout. In Part II, we explore how standards-compliant markup and deft use of CSS could make Slashdot (and your sites) play nicely in print and on handheld devices.

Printer-Friendly Slashdot

The print.css file adds a feature that Slashdot didn't have before, and it is only 10 lines of CSS code. We simply turn off the floating on each <div>, and then do a display:none; on any <div> of information that is useless to a printed documented, such as search, advertisements, etc. {The ALA 3.0 print style sheet takes a similar approach. - ...

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It strikes me as fundamentally wrong that success on the web can bite you in the ass.

The direct server–to–client model is great for keeping information centralized and under your control. But when your traffic starts edging upwards it becomes a make–or–break proposition to keep your site running. Bandwidth ain't free, never has been, and probably never will be. You have to store your site on someone's server, and keeping that computer up and running can sometimes be a full time job. Not to mention the electric bill.

More and more sites are resorting to funding blitzes to stay alive, soliciting donations under the threat of closure. The...

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The history of science is crowded with stories about competitive researchers sprinting for new discoveries. First place gets patents, research money, and sometimes a Nobel. Second place gets a snarky note in the sidebar of junior-high science textbooks. While competition can foster innovation, scientific progress is retarded when researchers delay the publication of groundbreaking cancer research data in order to secure the most advantageous patents, or when research teams refuse to share information for fear of a licensing double-cross.

Happily, web development isn't genome science. Your reputation may be solidified if you work out a zingy new CSS technique or write a...

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3-Column 404 Error About Page Absolute Pixel Sizes Accessibility Activity Log Add Your Links Here Adding An Author Additional Weblog Adsense Advertising Affiliate Programs Align Attribute Alphabetize Entries Alternative Search Template Amazon Amazon Web Services Archive Pages Archives Ascii Characters and Symbols Ascii Mode Audioblog Author Archives Authors Background Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Backup Banner Banner Images Berkeley DB Binary Mode BinHex Mode Blockquotes Blog Maintenance Bloglet Book Review Bookmarklet BookQueueToo Buttons Captcha Captions Categories Category Category Archive Category Archiving CGIWrap Changing Servers CHMOD Chron Job Clocks Closing Comments...

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WebCron is a pseudo scheduler for emulating Unix's cron on MT 3.2 platform. Unix's cron or MS's scheduler enable you to run some tasks on your predefined interval. If you have your own server or buy a premium hosting service, then you can absoluetly enjoy "cron"ing your scheduled tasks. In MT, we can set "Post Status" of an entry to "Scheduled". If you do, publishing of that entry will be postponed until that setting time. As you may predict, this feature needs to use "cron-like-scheduler".

But to poor MT users like ME, these cron-needed-features are "Pie in the sky". Yes it's BIG pie... I even didn't know it's delicious or not because it is in the sky. So I...

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{Part I of a two-part series.}

Ask an IT person if they know what Slashdot's tagline is and they'll reply, "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." Slashdot is a very prominent site, but underneath the hood you will find an old jalopy that could benefit from a web standards mechanic.

In this article we will show how an engine overhaul could take place by converting a single Slashdot page from their current HTML 3.2 code, nested tables, and invalid, nonsemantic markup, to a finely tuned web standards racing engine. The goal is not to change Slashdot, but to rebuild it with web standards and show the benefits of the transition.

Before you panic because...

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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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Updated. Originally posted January 4, 2004.

If you are interested in driving more traffic to your blog, the first thing you should do is create useful, compelling content. The next thing you should do is make sure that content is easily found in search results from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Movable Type does a few things automatically that are very helpful to getting ranked higher in search engines. For example, Google likes pages that are well structured, with header and title tags, and with lots of text. The default templates in MT ensure that the pages of your blog are well structured with H1, H2, and H3 header tags, and even title tags that include the name 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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The Touch of Hope web site is powered by Movable Type. It's more than your average blog site though. Don't let it's blogging slant fool you-- MT is a budding CMS!

The architecture is like this: • 1 blog for the site's basic content: welcome page, about page, Art for Hope page, request a site page, make a donation page, contact us page and the news and updates content. All of this is in...

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As you've probably seen, either through rumors in the blogosphere, in the FAQ linked on our company homepage, or in Mena's account on Mena's Corner, we (Six Apart) have acquired LiveJournal. A lot of the details are covered in those links, but there's some information that might be of specific interest to the Professional Network community:

(Re-)Introducing LiveJournal

Most of you are probably familiar with LiveJournal, but it might be worth reviewing what it is and how it works for those of you who haven't had a chance to take a look. As you might know, LiveJournal is a hosted journal service that's similar to TypePad in some ways. However, LiveJournal is strongly focused on community,...

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Designed to fully comply with five key web standards (HTML 4, CSS-1, XML, JavaScript/EcmaScript, and the W3C DOM), Gecko was developed by the open-source Mozilla group over a period of nearly two years. During that same time period, Microsoft unleashed its Internet Explorer 5 browser for Windows.

IE5 failed to fully comply with key web standards (notably XML and the DOM). In fact, IE5 "extended" these technologies in suspect ways, while failing to fully support the standards that were already on the table. Nevertheless, Microsoft's browser rapidly eroded Netscape's market share, due to the dominance of the Windows platform, the strength of...

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Among the many websites that are out there, few are standards-compliant. Among those few, only a handful sport style sheets adjusted to the needs of handheld devices. Of those which do offer styling for handhelds, not all will fit the smallest, lowest-resolution screens without presenting the user with the ultimate handheld horror: namely, horizontal scrolling.

The Opera browser runs on handheld devices of all screen sizes and resolutions, some of them only 120 pixels wide. We work for the company that produces Opera, so we can offer a degree of insight into the functions of Opera for handhelds. In this article, we've prepared a set of general suggestions for creating a...

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One of the great things about RSS is that you can display, or "feed" in, headlines and content from other people's websites directly onto your own website. In another article, we've already covered what "syndication" is, and RSS, and how you can use a newsfeed reader to efficiently read and browse through the latest content from your favorite weblogs and news sites. The focus of this article will be on the other main use of RSS - feeding external content into your site. An example of this can be found here on my recipe website. Clicking on a sidebar link opens a new page with several feeds from various food and cooking websites. Check the page at a later time, and if there...

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Sooner or later, you may be called upon to create or maintain an internal website. If you work for a major corporation, or are contracted at one (as I am), internal sites may comprise the bulk of your work.

Don't be afraid of internal sites. In many respects, they are very similar to external sites. There are two main differences though. • Internal sites tend to be much larger. • They're geared toward employees, not the great unwashed masses.

Let's say you work for Fergus & McFungus Associates, a major corporation that produces lots of useless things that people just can't get enough of. The CEO, Angus McFungus, approaches you in his usual...

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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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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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Even more analysis after the publication of the Comscore study last week: Blog Readers Spend More Time and Money Online, says ClickZ. Some key points:

Blog readers are 11 percent more likely than the average Internet user to have incomes of or greater than $75,000. Similarly, blog readers are 11 percent more likely to visit the Web over broadband either at home or the office.

Blog readers tend to make more online purchases. In the first quarter of 2005, less than 40 percent of the total Internet population made online purchases. By contrast, 51 percent of blog readers shopped online. Blog readers also spent six percent more than the average Internet user.

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