As I mentioned yesterday, I recently managed to hack the Movable Type search module in order to provide Last-Modified dates on my search results. This is useful, as it may help save in bandwidth costs. Instead of having a Last-Modified date of whenever the search was run, the Last-Modified date will be from the last modification of the search results.

If you want to see what I mean, use Web-Sniffer to pull up one of your search result pages. Chances are that you will not see a Last-Modified date on it (look in the HTTP Response Header section of your results). If there is one, it's likely the time you ran the request. This means that every time someone or some robot runs that search,...

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For a lot of bloggers, participating in a community online is what motivates us and keeps us blogging. Good feedback from commenters and people sending TrackBacks can keep a weblog alive and vibrant, but negative comments or, worst of all, the plague of spam, can take all the satisfaction out of maintaining a blog.

Because nothing's more frustrating than spammers or trolls ruining your community, we've tried to make sure you have strong anti-spam tools out of the box in this new version of Movable Type. But eliminating the annoyance of spam is where the new community management features start, not where they end. So, we've made a powerful new Feedback Rating System in Movable Type 3.2....

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Chad Everett has released a plugin called MT-Approval that presents an effective way to combat the comment spam brought on by spam bots that make up 99% of the comment spam most Movable Type users experience.

MT-Approval requires MT version 3.1 or higher.

MT Approval works by requiring that a comment contain an "approval hash" - a list of data that is generated in the comment form by a new template tag called <$MTApprovalHash$> on the comment preview template. Spam bots don't use the form on the preview template; therefore they are missing the hash when they try to post the comment directly to the comment.cgi and thus their comments never post.

MT Approval requires that you force a preview...

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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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There are several situations in which you might want to combine two or more blogs into one. You might want to create a "Portal" blog which displays the most recent entries or headlines of entries from various blogs. You might want to create a Sideblog or Linkblog (see tutorial). Or you might want to have what looks to be just one blog (such as Learning Movable Type) but is actually a combination of several.

The tools you have at your disposal are David Raynes' MultiBlog plugin, PHP Includes, SSI - Server Side Includes, and RSS, among others. This tutorial will focus on the easiest of these alternatives - how to use the MultiBlog plugin to combine blogs from a single installation of...

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This new version introduces inline editing for comments by the commenters. A cookie is set when the person hits the post button on the comment form. The cookie is set to expire in 5 minutes so the person must make any edits within five minutes.

Download MT-InlineEditor_1.1.zip. Preserve the directories in the zip starting from your root MT directory (therefore files in the extlib/ folder in the zip go into MT's extlib/ directory and mt-ie-cookiecheck.php goes into your root mt directory etc.)

For every blog you want this enabled on, you will need to create two index templates of the two text files in the zip (mt-inlineeditor.php and mt-inlineeditor.js) I've used MT Tags in those...

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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 MT uses to create its dynamic pages. This tutorial will explore several of the errors you may experience, explain what they mean, and show you how to solve them. This is by no means a complete guide to every error you may experience; I will continue to add to this tutorial as I come by more of them.

The Basics

Many of the error messages you may see will take the format: Smarty Error: [in mt:## line:##]

This error message provides useful information that can help you...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog. 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 MT uses to create its dynamic pages. This tutorial will explore several of the errors you may experience, explain what they mean, and show you how to solve them. This is by no means a complete guide to every error you may experience; I will continue to add to this tutorial as I come by more of them.

The Basics

Many of the error messages you may see will take the format: Smarty Error: [in mt:##...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Neil Turner and is cross-posted on Neil's World.

Since upgrading to Movable Type 3.2 I've dumped Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist and instead made SpamLookup handle comment/trackback spam on its own. The plugin is included by default on MT 3.2, and while it can do a good job as it is, you might like to try some tune-ups to make it more effective. Moderation and Junking

In Movable Type 2.x, comments just had one status - published. Any spam blocking system could only accept or deny comments and trackbacks. In MT 3.0x and 3.1x, comments gained an additional status - ‘moderated'. This was where comments could be held for human...

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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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A while ago I read What's this blog about?, which showed a weighted list of keywords that appears on his site. I thought that was a cool idea, to show - based on font size - the most written-about topics.

What I put together isn't anywhere near that complex. The weighted category list simply assigns a font size to the category name based on the number of entries associated with that category. Here's a snapshot of danandsherree.com's weighted category list:

About Dan (Old Stuff) Boy Scouts Christmas Computers Crafts danandsherree.com News Elsewhere in our Life Girl Scouts Movable Type Music, Movies and Television Photography Pinball the Cat...

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It's calling itself "the social browser" and claims to be the champion of Web 2.0.

Visit the site and you'll find humongous type and a free-spirited blurb about the way the web should work, but what is Flock and should you be excited about it? It claims to be one of the first browsers that emphasizes the internet sharing experience, allowing you from within the browsers interface to add and share del.ic.ious links (cf. my post about that), post to and manage your blog(s), add and share Flickr photos and act as a fully functioning RSS news reader. Those are some ambitious goals and certainly some vital needs in this new age of Internet.

Internet Explorer essentially...

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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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Strange adding a category called categories... but I digress.

Two Roads Diverged...

I've been working on a new blog in which I want to sort the categories in order other than alphabetical. Now, there is an quick and ugly solution, and there is a time-consuming and beautiful solution. First, we'll look at the ugly way of sorting your categories of the U.S. Presidents:

The Easy, Ugly Way

Create first category for Washington, only call it 01:Washington. Create second category for Adams... name it 02:Adams. So and so on through the U.S. Presidents. When Movable Type builds your page, it catches those initial numbers and puts them in order by number. A...

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You now know why there hasn't been any updates in nearly 20 days! I'm very proud to announce MT Blogroll 1.0. Basically MT Blogroll is a blogroll manager, similar to blogrolling.com. You are able to store various details about a link including its URI, Name, Description and Relationship and assign them to various categories. If you have been using another blogroll manager like blogrolling.com or blo.gs, you can use the Import OPML tool to import those links into MT Blogroll.

I would suggest reading the README first which describes the installation process and includes some example code. Other documentation includes the Tag Reference which describes the template tags that MT Blogroll...

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UPDATE

I've had this idea swimming around my head ever since Planet Mozilla launched but never implemented it because until a few weeks ago I was under the impression that my host did not provide Python.

Anyways, announcing Planet Movable Type.

What is it?

Planet MT aggregates posts from the following weblogs: • 6A ProNet (feed) • Brad Choate (feed) • Chad Everett (feed) • David Raynes (feed) • Girlie's Tips & Tricks (feed) • Learning Movable Type (feed) • MT Forge Dev (feed) • MT Plugins (feed) • MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse (feed) • Mena's Corner (feed) • Movable Type News (feed) • MovableStyle (feed) • Movalog (feed) • Neil's World (feed) • Phil Ringalda (feed) • Six Apart (feed) • The Tweezer's Edge...

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One feature I find lacking in MT is yearly archives. A yearly archive basically is just a page of twelve calendars - one for each month of the year - see mine in action here with permalinks to the days.

Now there are two ways you can do this, one easier than the other. The first - harder - way to do it is installing Brad Choate's PerlScript Plugin and then follow the steps he has laid out here. I call this the harder method because for every year you are blogging you need to create a new index template and call the template module.

The second method, all you need to do is setup the archiving and MT will do a lot for you - including tidying up you monthly archive list ! You will need...

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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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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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