Right after having bought Movable Type there were problems. Fact is that the installation description does not contain specific information for the Windows platform. Because of this, it took some time until I finally managed to make it work.

Looking back after having completed the installation successfully, it is not difficult. Until Six Apart gives better installation instructions for Windows users, maybe my description will help.

Introduction

The installation consists of the following parts • Installing the Perl runtime environment • Copying the Movable Type components • Configuration of some Movable Type files • Configuration of MS IIS • Creating the Movable Type Database

All screenshots can be...

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07.24.2002

TrackBack at OSCON

If you're at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, then you might be interested in checking out TrackBack at OSCON. The purpose of this page is to supplement ORA's existing weblog coverage and provide a listing of weblog entries regarding OSCON-related topics.

Posted by Mena at 10:59 AM | Permalink

07.16.2002

Support Forums Moved

The support forum is now running on a new server. If you use the forums regularly, you will probably notice that it's faster.

We've tried to make the transition seamless, but in anything like this there are bound to be problems. And the main problem here is...

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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

Occassionally databases get corrupted, servers fail or web hosts go out of business. So it's a good idea to back up your Movable Type blogs. There are many methods for doing so, a few of which I will cover here. The back-up process is much easier if you are using MySQL as your database, which, by the way, is one good reason to use MySQL over the default Berkeley DB.

TypeMover

TypeMover is a new plugin for the purpose of backing up, restoring, and/or migrating your Movable Type weblog. It is compatible with MT3 and later versions of Movable Type. From the TypeMover website:

TypeMover is a MovableType plugin. It adds backup, restore and migration features that let you get...

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Movable Type 3.2 features a new take on an old friend: the Junk folder. In your email program, some messages are likely to be spam, and most email applications these days offer a folder that can be set to delete junk after a set period of time.

We've brought the same convenience and power to Movable Type. Using the new feedback scoring system described earlier, comments or TrackBacks that fall below your spam threshold score can be set to be automatically deleted after a configurable period of time. (The default is 14 days.) The best part about the new junk folder? You don't have to touch it. If you just want to accept the default settings and not mess with junk comments or TrackBacks...

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Fortunately for those of use who use Movable Type, there are several folks who devote much of their free time to understanding, exploring, and extending the capabilities of MT, and are willing to share that knowledge with the rest of us.

Here's my roundup of good sites (in addition to LMT) to investigate while learning how to use Movable Type (I will add to this list over time): Movable Type Support Forums - The MT Forums should be your first stop for questions regarding Movable Type. Before posting, read this thread which will explain general rules of conduct and the best way to find answers. Generally, play nice, read the MT Manual (3.2) ( for 3.1 and earlier) first, and try a search...

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01.31.2005

BlogBinders: Publish your blog in print

If you're looking for a way to hold your blog in your hands, BlogBinders.com offers a simple and clever service to turn your blog into an attractive, customized book. BlogBinders supports LiveJournal, Movable Type, and TypePad.

Posted by Anil in Web Services at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

01.31.2005

Gawker launches Lifehacker and Gridskipper

Gawker Media's just added two new Movable Type-powered weblogs to its media empire, as announced by Nick Denton. Lifehacker is a friendly geek site and Gridskipper is a travel site aiming for selectivity.

Posted by Anil in New Sites at 10:45 AM | Permalink |...

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For those who want to help in the development of MultiBlog 2.0, here is a version you can start playing with.

It is not feature complete. In fact, parts of it will probably work incorrectly. The security controls are not completely implemented. Any security settings available in the system plugin settings are completely ignored currently.

To install, first completely remove any existing version of MultiBlog (plugins/multiblog.pl, multiblog-config.cgi, and extlib/rayners/MultiBlog*.pm). Then grab one of the development version archives from the MultiBlog page and unpack it into the main MT directory. It should stuff all of its files into plugins/MultiBlog/.

The rebuild control and...

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02.28.2005

TypePad UK Launches

We're proud to announce today that TypePad has launched in the UK. Though it was our least strenuous language translation ever, we're proud to have another country-specific offering to complement our current services in Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, Spain, and The United States.

Posted by anildash in TypePad at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

02.27.2005

Dreamforce, blogs for the Salesforce.com community

Salesforce.com is one of the most popular hosted business applications, with an active community of users and developers. One of the ways that they're keeping in touch with these diverse...

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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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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags related to calendar dates.

Note: The MTDaylightOrStandard tag, which was part of earlier versions of this plugin, is now part of its own plugin.

Required Modules

The DateTags code relies heavily on the Date::Calc Perl module. Depending on your or your ISP's installation, this may already be present on your system. To check whether Date::Calc is installed, open a shell connection to the host on which you're running Movable Type, and type: perl -e 'use Date::Calc'

Hit Enter. If this prints nothing, the module is installed. If it prints an error message, you'll need to install Date::Calc. (The MTIfDaysOfMonth and MTBirthstone tags do not require Date::Calc, so you should be able to use those without the module installed.)...

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06.30.2005

New in Movable Type 3.2: A home for administrators

One of Movable Type's biggest strengths is the platform's support for an unlimited number of weblogs. Once you've got a thriving community of bloggers creating entries and publishing their thoughts, though, it quickly becomes necessary to manage the weblogs on your system.

To meet this need, we've introduced an entire new area of functionality in Movable Type 3.2: The System Overview. We've chosen the System Overview as the first feature to highlight in this new release because it represents a single home for administrators. It's one place to go to oversee everything that's happening across your...

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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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Using Andre Torrez' cool (and TypeKey-enabled!) DropCash service, award-winning Movable Type plugin developers David Raynes and Chad Everett have started asking for donations to fund the further development of their plugins.

Chad's looking for support to help expand what Notifier can do, and David's looking to fund the creation of a plugin that works with... DropCash itself. Sounds cool!

Let us know if you're planning a similar campaign, or if you've had other successes in raising funds to support your plugin development. You don't have to be an award-winning plugin writer to make something cool and we're glad to see people getting a reward for the great work they put into expanding...

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Except when you're writing or editing entries, much of the time spent in Movable Type is in managing the listings of entries, comments, TrackBacks, authors, or other items in the system. In past versions, listings could be inconsistent, with listings offering varying degrees of control, and the arrangement of information on some pages being frustrating. Worse, when the same type of information was listed in two different places, it wasn't always the same. For example, the comment listings page and the display of comments on an individual entry worked in completely different ways.

Every listing page improved

With Movable Type 3.2, we've made some massive improvements to the way that...

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Version 2.63 of Movable Type is now released. This is a bug fix release, fixing various localization, XML-RPC, Postgres, and Creative Commons errors. This update is also recommended using MT for private weblogs; your IncludeBlogs and ExcludeBlogs settings will now be applied to the experimental mt-view.cgi script. If you are using 2.62 and not experiencing any problems, there is no urgent need to ugprade. If you are having problems with 2.62, the changelog lists the changes and fixes in 2.63.

If you hadn't yet upgraded to 2.6, see the Guide to Movable Type 2.6 for explanations of the above features, and for instructions on adding these features to your existing weblog if you...

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•

01: Installation and Upgrade

• Introduction • Choosing the Right Weblog Platform • Finding Perl on your Server...

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08.31.2005

Simple Example Templates for Movable Type 3.2

Chris Vannoy has posted some simple Movable Type templates based on the new default templates in Movable Type, but with much of the XHTML structure stripped out so they're easier to read. As Chris explains in his following post, they're not designed to be used on an actual site, since the styling would be pretty ugly by default, but they're a useful basis for creating your own completely custom design if you just need a place to get started.

We'll be producing additional documentation about all the new abilities that templates and styles have in Movable Type 3.2, but this is a great place to start if you...

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LinkEntryToFile is a plugin that modifies the interface of Movable Type. When the plugin is installed, you can specify a file on your server to link to the Entry Body or Extended Entry field. The linked file will be kept in sync with the entry, so that you can edit it in an external editor.

This plugin basically takes MT's handy "Link this template to a file" feature and applies it to entries. When using MT to manage certain types of content, especially content that contains extensive HTML formatting, it's useful to be able to use your favorite text-editing application, with syntax highlighting, Undo, search and replace, etc., without having to repeatedly copy and paste into the MT entry...

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Here's a little plugin that provides some new Category tags for Movable Type.

Availability

You can download this plugin from here: mtcatx-1_5.zip

Requirements

The following are requirements for using this plugin: • Movable Type 2.21 or later • MT-Regex (if using the 'pattern' attribute of the IfCategory or IfPrimaryCategory tag).

Installation

To install, place the 'catx.pl' file in your Movable Type...

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