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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UPDATE files are bundled in an archive.

I was very impressed with the WordPress Suggest plugin and wanted to port it over to MT. The porting was easy but the query was very slow and pulled some bad results from the database. Chad helped me last night and we had almost cleaned it up until v0.2 was released which seems to have fixed the problems I had. Try it using the search form on the sidebar.

This plugin is similar to LiveSearch (and the MT implementation) however the difference is it lets you keep the mt-search.cgi functionality which I liked. Also this plugin works slightly differently to LiveSearch, I prefer this!

Implementing it with MT is very easy, you need to have PHP and be...

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It's a shame MT doesn't provide year-based archives because some of us have enough entries for them even if Movable Type hasn't been out that long! Here's what my 2001 blogging year looks like. Well, you can create them manually-- and since you only have to do it once a year, it isn't too bad. Click the 'more' link for details...

All you have to do to build a year archive is create an index template...

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Updated April 30, 2005

Once in a while you might just want to show actual code - HTML, PHP, or Javascript - in an entry you make in Movable Type. For example, say I want to show the A HREF tag and code to get to elise.com. It looks like this:

<a href="http://www.elise.com">elise.com</a>

However, if I simply type that code in while I'm writing the entry, the resulting page will not show the tags and code, but the actual link: elise.com.

So how do you display code in entries? There are several methods:

1. Manually write out the symbol equivalents of your code. If all you want to do is write a short tag, the easiest way may be to write out the < and...

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Lead-ins are an eye-catching mechanism usually found in print publications. Recreating that effect for the web is easy to do, but it could be easier. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a 'leadin' tag that you could use to identify the word or phrase you want to style like that? Well...

MT-Macro to the rescue! Actually, the technique described here utilizes 3 of my Movable Type plugins. All functioning...

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This tutorial is co-authored by LMT guest author Chad Everett of Everitz Consulting and Elise Bauer of elise.com.

Movable Type allows you to create categories and sub-categories for organizing your entries. The default MT3.2 Main Index template includes code to list these categories in the sidebar section. This tutorial will attempt to explain the tags used in this code and how they work together.

Categories, Sub-categories, Parent, Child, and Levels

The only difference between a category and a sub-category is that the latter will always have a "parent" category. The sub-category is still a category, and everything else remains the same as any other category. But by having...

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As the campaign has been successfully completed, here's MT Blogroll 2.0. Thanks to all those that donated to the campaign, the donors will get priority if bugs or problems are faced. If you feel like donating, the campaign is now over, but feel free to use the donate button on the sidebar.

There are some new features including the ability to quickly add a blogroll entry by just entering the URI and having MT-Blogroll gather all the other information. I've also added the ability to define the the names of the author's of the blogs and the target of the blog.

I think all the bugs from the previous version should've been fixed, if you experience a bug, drop me a note.

If you are already using MT...

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When I set about re-creating MovaDir, I wanted to create a form that would post directly into MT. I soon discovered that I would need to use the XML-RPC API to really streamline it. This is a tutorial that will guide you through setting up a form that will allow a user to manipulate entry fields and then rebuild the entry. Use of the mySQL database is required.

You will need to create a new index template called Incutio XML-RPC Library, set the output file as IXR_Library.inc.php and copy this file for the template body.

Next create a new index template called IP Tracking with an output file iptracking.php and copy this file into the template body.

This is a very neat script written by...

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I don't have a complete knowledge on IRI. So below contents might have some misunderstandings. If you find one, please feedback to me.

* At first, this post was written in part of Cool IRI for a permalink. So in this post, you'll often see the words, "this plugin". "This plugin" means that a plugin for a Movable Type bloggin tool, which enables you to create a Cool IRI for blog archives.

You may be stunned by comparatively long page. I swear this content is not deeply technical and is just common knowledge. If you have no time to read it, just see some pictures. Perhaps it will do a little for you.

What means a "Cool" ?

If you've never heard of Cool URI, I...

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Blogs that have multiple authors sometimes have the need for a 'credits' page or something like that that lists everyone. This plugin allows you to do just that by providing a <MTAuthors> tag that Movable Type lacks. Continue reading for documentation and download link.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtauthors-1_32.zip

Installation

To install, place the 'authors.pl' file in...

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Introduction

This article explains how you can customize the user interface of the Movable Type application. This is a powerful area of functionality that's easy to get started with and almost unlimited in its potential.

Some key points we'll cover: • How to create custom application templates for Movable Type's interface • The benefits of using application templates • Ideas for how to use application templates with your plugins or workflow • Links to some example application templates, to see what's possible and to inspire your own

Customizing the Movable Type user interface

To understand the potential of customizing your Movable Type interface, you'll need a little bit of background....

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Tutorial cross posted on Learning Movable Type and Movalog.

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 have 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 any of these three platforms and designers can...

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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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A question that is raised by serious professionals considering Movable Type for their CMS needs is "What about static page?" Obviously MT was made for dynamic pages. Turning a list of entries into well organized websites is what MT does best. But it's those individual, doesn't-quite-fit-in-the-flow, static pages that can cause grief, consternation and if nothing else, confusion.

Our primary goal is to create pages that are both easy to manage and easy to update (so we're not quite talking about static pages). There are many ways to handle individual pages, I'll deal with two:

via Archive Mapping

This only works well in certain situations, and you'll see...

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Movable Type gives you an amazing amount of control over your content, but one of the things that it sorely lacks is the ability to make massive changes to all of your entries at once. Oh sure, you can edit the basics in power editing mode--categories, authors, dates and titles--but we want more. Being able to make massive changes to the extended, excerpt and keyword fields can become almost a necessity if, like me, you're using those fields for something other than their original purpose.

For instance--Customer A is using MT to store course listings. The extended entry field contains the dates offered, the excerpt field holds the price and the keywords...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for collecting information from specified HTML tags in your entries, and collating and displaying that information. This lets you enhance your MT-based pages in a variety of ways. For example, you could: • Display footnotes for the links or images that appear within each entry. The StripTags plugin could also do this; since this plugin can do everything StripTags can do and much more, StripTags is superseded by Collect and will no longer be updated. See the Usage Examples section, below, for some examples of how to duplicate the functionality of StripTags with Collect. • Generate a "Recent Links" listing to display in your sidebar. • Create "by citation" or "by quotation" archives, similar to the ones Mark Pilgrim has on...

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Upgrading Movable Type

Problem

You want to upgrade the Movable Type software.

Solution

Upgrading follows nearly the same steps as installation except that you will want to perform a backup of your system before attempting the upgrade. If you are upgrading from Movable Type 3.1x or before, you will also want to migrate to the new configuration file: mt-config.cgi.

Discussion

If you're on any past version of Movable Type, version 3.2 offers a lot of features and improvements that will make managing your blogs easier. To take advantage of them, you'll need to install the latest...

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I'm releasing an updated version of MT-Notifier today. This adds a couple of changes: 2.4.4 - Added MTNotifierCatID template tag to display ID of context category.

This change allows you to use the MTNotifierCatID tag inside of a context category - useful for pulling out the category ID when you are in a category archive, for instance, and allowing you to dynamically create subscriptions for categories. 2.4.5 - Added ability to specify parameter "url" on subscription form.

If you create your own subscription form, add the parameter "url" to the form. You can make this hidden, and I would probably suggest doing so, but you could also allow it to be a drop-down list or something....

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This setting controls who may comment on your site. There are three choices: • Anyone • Authenticated commenters only • No one.

Anyone and No one are self-explanatory except that the latter effectively disables commenting on the blog. If you are using the new template structure introduced in Movable Type 3.2, a rebuild of the Index templates will also remove the comment form from all of your individual entries. If not, you must rebuild all Individual archives to remove the comment form.

Autheticated commenters allows only commenters authenticated through the TypeKey service (or another...

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The Movable Type team has been hard at work and we have some very exciting things coming in the 2005 release schedule. To kick things off we are proud to introduce Movable Type 3.16.

Movable Type 3.16 sports significant improvements to application security and over one hundred other fixes which really make it a highly recommended upgrade for all users.

Movable Type 3.16 is a simple drop-in replacement for any user who is running version 3.1 or higher. As long as you are running one of these more recent versions, there is no need to run an upgrade script or do anything other than upload the files in the upgrade distribution. Of course, if you're running a version older...

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