Web developers have various methods for creating print friendly versions of their websites. By using a server side routine or print stylesheets, the print version may strip out images and navigation that lose their meaning on the printed page, and perhaps display the page in a single column using a different font with a different size.

But what happens when there is no printable version, or the printable version includes ads or other settings that don't suit you, the user? That's where user stylesheets come in. Armed with a little CSS knowledge and some web development tools, you can easily create your own print versions formatted exactly the way you want them....

continue reading ...

The default Movable Type layouts don't give you a lot of choice in terms of navigation. Clicking on the top bar with the title of the weblog will take you back to the main page of the weblog. Every other nav element is in the sidebar. You can however, pretty easily add a horizontal nav bar, with links to important-to-first-timers, or frequently used areas of your site, such as archives, about, or contact links.

Adding horizontal nav bar requires adding a few lines of code right underneath the banner section in your index and archive templates and adding a few new elements to your style sheet. Once you've created your navigation code, the most efficient way to add the code to the...

continue reading ...

There are several ways to get statistics about your Movable Type weblog. Most web hosts give you access to some statistics regarding your site as a matter of course - referral logs (list of sites that link to you in which someone has clicked on the link to get to your site), number of hits, number of page views, etc. If you want more information, i.e. the search terms used to find your site, the most recent entry pages to your site, the mix of browsers and OS platforms of those viewing your site, the length of time people spend on average on your site, you can use a site statistics service, also known as a hit counter. These services work by having you put a small piece of code on the...

continue reading ...

What do all these folders do?

This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog.

There are several folders in the default distribution of Movable Type. This tutorial will attempt to guide you through them all so that you feel more comfortable with what they do and contain.

extlib/

This directory contains perl libraries and files that support Movable Type. These are the modules that are needed by Movable Type to run (for example those modules listed in mt-check.cgi are normally found here) Some plugins also require some special perl modules to be installed, and normally you can install these perl modules into the extlib/ directory. For example, the BlogTimes plugin requires the GD perl module to be installed. Obviously you can get your host to install it and then that module would be available server wide. However, if you uploaded the files provided on the BlogTimes page into your extlib/ directory, you would have the GD module installed just for your installation without having to go to your host....

continue reading ...

Google recently released some useful tips on how to optimize the use of Google Adsense on one's web pages. No surprise - the hottest "hot spot" for the best click-through returns lies right in the middle of your content.

How does one place a Google Adsense ad (or any other ad, bit of text, or image for that matter) between entries on the main index page of your MT weblog? By using a simple trick of the "lastn" and "offset" attributes outlined in the MT manual here.

Normally on your Main Index template, you would have your MTEntries section laid out like so:

for MT 3.2:

<MTEntries> <$MTEntryTrackbackData$> <MTDateHeader><h2 class="date-header"><$MTEntryDate format="%x"$></h2></MTDateHeader>...

continue reading ...

This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog.

Updated Nov 16

The default styles that come with MT are known as 'fixed' styles. This means that size and position of layout elements, such as columns, are fixed and are defined in pixels (px). This also means that no matter what a person's screen resolution, everything will be the same width and in approximately the same position. The alternative to a fixed design is a fluid design. A fluid design uses percentages when defining size and positions, so the sizes of elements on the page are relative to the user's screen resolution. A fluid design also removes the horizontal scroll bar. With a fluid...

continue reading ...

This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Chris Vannoy of Circadian Rhythm.

Movable Type's default templates have always been intimidating things to those new to the system, and with Six Apart's decision to standardize their template structure across all three of their blogging platforms, TypePad and LiveJournal being the other two, they've become a lot more intimidating in version 3.2 of Movable Type.

This standardization is a great idea if you are a web designer already familiar with the intricacies of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The standardization means that, assuming users stick to the default templates, you could design one stylesheet that would work on sites on all three...

continue reading ...

To save space on your sidebar listing of categories or monthly archives, you might want to use a pull-down menu like so: Select Category Beginner Tips Categories Definitions General HTML and Javascript Install Marketing Reference RSS Security Servers Style Weblog Goodies

To do this for your category list, make sure that you have category archiving selected as an archiving option in your weblog config, and add the following code to your sidebar:

<form action="" name="pulldown1"> <select name="mypulldown1" onchange="document.location=pulldown1.mypulldown1.options[selectedIndex].value"> <option value="">Select...

continue reading ...

(Note that this tutorial is appropriate for MT versions 2.661 and earlier.)

Say you want to send an email to your weblog readers when you update your blog, so they know to go to your site. There are various ways to do this. Movable Type has a built-in email notification feature. Unfortunately it is probably the least robust of the many wonderful MT features as I will explain shortly. With some serious hacking of the code the feature becomes more functional. Another option (which I prefer) is Bloglet, a third party service that can seamlessly provide email notifications for your site.

1. Movable Type's built-in Email Notification feature. Using MT's email notification feature, you...

continue reading ...

The default Movable Type MT3.2 templates come with one sidebar on the right side of the Main Index page. With a little template manipulation you can have an additional sidebar on the left - a 3-column layout.

The MT3.2 stylesheets and templates are designed to have the columns laid out in order, starting with the column named "alpha". The columns, in order are alpha, beta, gamma (for a 3-column layout), and delta (a hypothetical fourth column that one could create). In the default MT3.2 Main Index template, the sidebar is on the right and is in a column named "beta.

To add a third column, you will make a copy of the default "beta" column code and put it before the "alpha"...

continue reading ...

A year ago this week, trying to keep track of everything I was learning regarding using Movable Type, I wrote my first MT tutorial and launched Learning Movable Type. Stung by comments in the forums to RTFM (read the f%$#ng manual), exasperated that the manual - while thorough - seemed to be written in some foreign geek language understandable only to those who could probably write code in their sleep, and determined that other newbies and non-techies would not suffer the tens and hundreds of hours of lost productivity pulling their collective hairs out over trying to get some dang thing on their MT blog to work, I got to writing.

It must be clear to most technically savvy people who...

continue reading ...

The first thing you might want to do when customizing your Movable Type blog style is to change the color of the background, banner, headlines, or text. This is pretty easy to do; the adjustments are made in your weblog's stylesheet template.

Before you start, you should have a basic understanding of how colors are coded into a web page. Open up your stylesheet from the templates menu in your MT edit screen. If you scroll down you will see several instances of the word "color" followed by a # sign and six characters comprised of letters and or numbers. These six characters represent a color; the first 2 characters affect the RED tones of RGB, the third and fourth characters...

continue reading ...

Movable Type weblogs require some level of maintenance, beyond just adding new content. Here are some suggestions that can help keep your blog running smoothly. If you have other suggestions not on this list, please let us know in the comments section.

Dead Links

If you link to any other websites from your blog, and or have comments or TrackBacks enabled, you need to periodically scan your site to make sure that your external links are still active. Links with URLs that are no longer valid give a "404" server error when someone clicks on them.

One of the biggest deadlink culprits can come from TrackBack links. Periodically click on the "TrackBack" button on the left side of...

continue reading ...

A great way to easily customize the look of your Movable Type weblog is to replace the default title banner with a banner image. There are two basic methods for adding a banner image - adjusting the CSS or adjusting the index and archive templates.

Before making template adjustments, you first need to prepare your banner image. You might choose to use an image that will take up the entire banner space, or you might want more of a logo-like image that would only take up a part of the banner space, with a solid color making up the difference. Photographic images that extend to the edges of your weblog's container work best for banners in "fixed width" styles, such as in the default...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

{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. - ...

continue reading ...

Updated. Originally posted in early 2004.

The template edit windows and the New Entry edit windows in Movable Type can easily be made larger with a simple adjustment.

MT3.2

In the folder that contains your static MT files on your server, open the file style.css in a text editor.

To change the edit-entry window, find the following lines of code:

#edit-entry .full-width { width: 577px; }

Add a height dimension after the width.

#edit-entry .full-width { width: 577px; height: 400px; }

To change the template edit window, find the following lines of code:

#edit-template textarea.wide { width: 618px; }

Add a height dimension after the width.

#edit-template textarea.wide...

continue reading ...

Co-authored by Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

With the release of Movable Type 3.1 comes a new and powerful feature - Dynamic Publishing. To take advantage of Dynamic Publishing, you need to edit or create a file on your Apache server called .htaccess as explained in the Movable Type Manual. htaccess files can give you extra control over your server, allowing you to password protect directories, enable server side includes, generate custom error messages, and block users by IP address among other things. (See this Guide to .htaccess for more information.)

Note: You should really know what you are doing before...

continue reading ...

Updated 12:30 am PST, Oct 4

Wednesday morning, September 29th, Learning Movable Type and some of the other MT weblogs hosted at elise.com were intruded by a spammer who placed popup generating code on the MT index and archive templates. Not being aware of the additional code on my templates, as I rebuilt the pages of my weblogs, the rebuilt pages included this code which generated an obnoxious spam popup window every time someone visited the page. I apologize to all who may have been inconvenienced by this, and thank those of you who brought it to my attention.

The good news is that the spammer could have done a lot of damage to the site, but didn't. The bad news is I'm not sure...

continue reading ...

Warning: main(/home/elise/public_html/mt/mt32badge.inc): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/eliseb/public_html/archives/001012multiple_authors.php on line 90 Warning: main(): Failed opening '/home/elise/public_html/mt/mt32badge.inc' for inclusion (include_path='') in /home/eliseb/public_html/archives/001012multiple_authors.php on line 90

With MT you can have multiple authors on the same weblog, making it easy to have a friend contribute to your blog as a "guest author" or to create a group weblog to which many people contribute. You can even customize to a small degree, aspects of the author-specific Individual Entry pages.

Adding an Author

To add an author in MT 3.2...

continue reading ...