I've assembled some templates to build a photo gallery with Movable Type. What makes mine different and special from all the others? Easy: it's compatible with MT version 3.2. That means it'll work with the StyleCatcher plugin and the Movable Type Style Generator!

The only special requirement to use these templates is PHP. PHP is used to calculate the image size. The plugin Better File Uploader - with its For Photo Gallery button - will make adding photos go much quicker.

I've created a small example gallery, if you're interested in seeing the result before trying it yourself.

Setup a New Weblog

First, you'll want to create a new...

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I've assembled some templates to build a photo gallery with Movable Type. What makes mine different and special from all the others? Easy: it's compatible with MT version 3.2. That means it'll work with the StyleCatcher plugin and the Movable Type Style Generator!

The only special requirement to use these templates is PHP. PHP is used to calculate the image size. The plugin Better File Uploader - with its For Photo Gallery button - will make adding photos go much quicker.

I've created a small example gallery, if you're interested in seeing the result before trying it yourself.

Setup a New Weblog

First, you'll want to create a new...

continue reading ...

Similar to the weighted category list, the weighted keyword list builds a list of keywords used on your site and uses varying font sizes to show how popular they are. This list might be more representative of what your site is about than the weighted category list is. Here's the list for this site:

adobe backup book camera camporee car cars cat category cd christmas collection collector color com computer cow danandsherree detail digital dpi dvd elsewhere file files film fire florida image life light links monitor movable movie news nikon page paper park photo photos photoshop php pinball print profile radio raw river scan scanner...

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Before you install Movable Type there are three fundamental questions you need to ask yourself, 1) should you really be using Movable Type as your blogging software?, 2) do you have everything you need to use Movable Type? and 3) should you do the install yourself or should you pay someone else to do it?

1. Should you really be using Movable Type?

As weblogs gain more public visiblity, more and more people are setting up their own blogs. Many turn to Movable Type as it is one of the more established and powerful tools available. Movable Type however requires much more technical expertise than hosted blog services such as Typepad and Blogger. The first requirement is that you know...

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Text styling is the dull headache of web design. There are only a handful of fonts that are universally available, and sophisticated graphical effects are next to impossible using only standard CSS and HTML. Sticking with the traditional typefaces is smart for body text, but when it comes to our headings - short, attention-grabbing blocks of text - it would be nice to have some choice in the matter. We've become accustomed to this problem and we cope with it either by making the most of the few fonts we have, or by entirely replacing our heading-text with images.

Most sites that replace text with images do so using hand-made images, which isn't so terrible...

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The default Movable Type MT3 templates come with a sidebar on the right side of the Main Index page, but not on any of the individual entry, monthly, or category archive pages.

There are two basic ways to add a sidebar to archive pages. The easiest for beginners is just to copy and paste the existing sidebar code into the correct place in the archive templates. The slightly more involved, but much preferable method is to create a separate file with the sidebar code and use a PHP include or an MT include to include the file into the various templates. You can also very easily move a sidebar from the right to the left side of your weblog pages.

Where is the Sidebar Code? MT3.1 and...

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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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If Movable Type creates an archive file, it converts the entry's title into a filename. With this conversion all blanks from the title are replaced by underscores. But if you want to achieve a good ranking in Google, this is no good replacement. Fortunately the behaviour can be changed.

Factors influencing Google

There are a number of factors that have an influence on the ranking of a page in Google's result lists. Of course the page's content is analyzed with respect to the searched keywords. However, the words appearing in the domain name and the file name also have some influence on the results. Thus, for achieving the best result it is important to know, how Google splits a URL...

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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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Page: 1 2 2 Pages.

Newsgator Toolkit

Although not directly related to Movable Type, many bloggers I know have been asking for such a tool. The Newsgator Toolkit is an extension for Mozilla Firefox that will eventually provide you with a series of complex and powerful tools...

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Posted on 10/13/2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Updates to the Style Generator

At long last I've made some updates to the Style Generator to better fit with Six Apart's standard. This means that you can finally apply the tips discussed in this tutorial to stylesheets created using the style gen. Most of...

Continue reading "Updates to the Style Generator"...

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The default entry URL file name structure for Movable Type 2.6 looks something like this:

http://www.yourblog.com/archives/000123.html

This structure puts all of the files into one archive directory and assigns each of them a number corresponding to the number of entries you have entered so far in your weblog.

What if you would prefer to have the URLs for your entries include the actual name of the entry and maybe even the category they are in? Something like this:

http://www.yourblog.com/archives/name_of_category/title_of_entry.html

Easy.

1. Using the entry title instead of the entry number. On the left hand side of your weblog edit window, click on "weblog config" navigation...

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As broadband Internet connections become more ubiquitous, and more corporate sites begin to incorporate Flash and use it as their primary tool, there will be more of a need to incorporate e-commerce functionality into the Flash-based websites that you design. For the moment, this is uncommon, and I can propose two reasons why: • Most e-commerce developers have experience creating HTML-based sites, and the current crop of development tools (i.e. ASP, PHP, JSP, Cold Fusion) are specifically designed to spit out HTML pages. • Many people still use dial-up modems. So, to provide easy, quick access to the largest number of customers possible, simple HTML sites are almost always the way to go....

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Syndicate this site means that the headlines, a link, and an entry description for each new weblog entry are made available for others to use on their websites or to access through a newsfeed reader program.

What is a "newsfeed reader" program? Rather than manually checking in on each of the weblogs or news sites that you enjoy, you can instead use a newsfeed reader program that will compile all of the latest headlines and excerpts of your favorite sites that have enabled RSS - sometimes known as Really Simple Syndication. With a newsfeed reader you can easily and freely subscribe to content from enabled websites.

For example, say there were several cooking weblogs that interested...

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This tutorial is written by LMT author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog. Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and LMT.

With Movable Type 3.2, Six Apart launched a new markup and stylesheet structure that has also unified their three platforms. These new templates and stylesheets (from now on referred to as themes) have been called tag soup due to the sheer number of <div>s and indents.

What a mess - why did they do it?

The new themes can be quite intimidating the first time you come across them, however Six Apart created these new themes for several reasons: • First of all, Typepad, LiveJournal and Movable Type now share exactly the same markup. This means that a theme will work on...

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Hot on the heels of v1.0, here's version 1.1. The only new feature is the availability of dynamic tags, i.e. those of you that wanted to use MT Protect on dynamic templates now can!

Download MT-Protect_1.1.zip and follow the installation instructions. If you installed any older version of MT Protect, you will need to disable and re-enable protection on all your blogs via the global configuration so that the new files get downloaded.

The template markup is identical for both static and dynamic templates!

If you experience a bug or a problem, please file a ticket.

The campaign has not yet reached its target, if you find this plugin useful people consider donating to the campaign.

On a sidenote, Movalog is now...

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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...

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Required: PHP

I wanted to use this tutorial on skinning but to be completely honest, the verbiage makes me slip into a coma. Way back when, its technical-ness made me wary, and it still does, a little bit. I ran my site though that stupid W3C thing and it came up with so many errors I just didn't want to go any further. I'm not going to escape every single apostrophe I use in a post, and apparently that's what it would take to make myself error free.

Then I found Brenna's quick site skinning. And I was saved. Part way down in the comments there, she tells you how to skin your comments, something that didn't even occur to me until I saw this post at pixelsphinx.

Someday I'll revisit the...

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UPDATE: If you have any feature request I'm all ears. Gearing up for the release I want to see if there are any feature requests I can implement, I think I've fixed all the bugs that were reported so expect a release in the next few weeks.

I had released this to ProNet a few days ago but have not gotten much feedback. That can be either that people are waiting for the point release and don't want to install a beta or that there aren't many bugs in this beta. Either way I want to open up testing for MT Blogroll 2.0 (I'm still thinking about that version number). I'm going to copy my post to ProNet here to save me some time.

I've re-written Blogroll to use its own tables in the DB so...

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Via PhotoMatt I found a very interesting comments thread on what is basically an argument of Movable Type vs. WordPres. Now everyone knows that I worship Movable Type, but I wish to voice some thoughts on this topic.

Movable Type and Wordpress are aimed at completely different audiences. If you upgraded to MT 3.0 you would have seen that the title was no longer "MOVABLE TYPE :: Personal Publishing System" but now was "Movable Type Publishing Platform." As can be seen from this post at Mena's Corner

One final thing. You'll notice that we're no longer describing Movable Type as a "Personal Publishing System" -- we now call it a "Publishing Platform." While "personal" remains a major...

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The default Movable Type MT3.2 templates come with a sidebar on the right side of the Main Index page, but not on any of the individual entry, monthly, or category archive pages.

There are two basic ways to add a sidebar to archive pages. The easiest for beginners is just to copy and paste the existing sidebar code into the correct place in the archive templates. The slightly more involved, but much preferable method is to create a separate file with the sidebar code and use a PHP include or an MT include to include the file into the various templates. You can also very easily move a sidebar from the right to the left side of your weblog pages.

Where is the Sidebar Code?

The MT3.2 stylesheets and...

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