Technorati, a leading blog search engine and index, has made it very easy for blog authors to get their "tagged" blog entries into Technorati's tag index. What is a tag? A tag is a type of category, and the process of tagging a simplified categorization method for your entries. The concept of tags has become popular with services such as del.icio.us and Flickr. By creating tag classifications for your weblog entries, you make it easy for Technorati to index your blog entries by tags that you specify. With Technorati tagging, you get to choose how you want your weblog entries to be classified, in contrast to algorithm-driven search engines like Google that make their own...

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Providing contact information on your weblog can be useful to your site visitors who may want to email you directly rather than submit a comment to one of your entries. You can choose to write out your email address, provide a mailto link (see MailTo Syntax for how to write out a mailto hyperlink), or you can provide a contact form. Contact forms are often preferred because they can easily hide your email address information from the spammers who regularly scour the web looking for email addresses to harvest.

I have researched and tested two free PHP-based contact form scripts - TheSiteWizard Feedback form and DodosMail - either of which you can easily implement to add a contact form...

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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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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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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Lance McCord of lancemccord.com and Perpwalk

Including audio content on a blog is easiest when you can phone it in. Authors who use Blogger to manage their sites have free access to Audioblogger, a service that lets users dial a phone number and leave their audioblog content like a voicemail message. This content shows up on the user's blog as an image linked to an mp3 hosted on audioblogger.com.

Similar services (like audblog) are available for a fee, but with a little effort (and a very little bit of PHP) you can have the free benefit of this Blogger service on your Movable Type sidebar. For this to work, you must publish your Movable...

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Movable Type 3.0 ushered in a whole new look for its default style templates, based on what we've seen with Typepad default styles. The new stylesheets can be found here in the Movable Type documentation. The new stylesheets do not work with the default templates for MT2.661 or earlier versions of Movable Type. The old stylesheets are posted on the MT website here. You can update your MT2.661 (or earlier version) stylesheet with one of the new MT3 default styles (with or without updating to MT3), but if you do so, you need to change your templates so that they will work with the stylesheet. The new MT3 templates are posted on the Movable Type website here. The templates that you...

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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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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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One of the great things about RSS is that you can display, or "feed" in, headlines and content from other people's websites directly onto your own website. In another article, we've already covered what "syndication" is, and RSS, and how you can use a newsfeed reader to efficiently read and browse through the latest content from your favorite weblogs and news sites. The focus of this article will be on the other main use of RSS - feeding external content into your site. An example of this can be found here on my recipe website. Clicking on a sidebar link opens a new page with several feeds from various food and cooking websites. Check the page at a later time, and if there...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Sarah Hughes of This Chick (aka Maddy in the MT Forums).

Many customizations for Movable Type call for using PHP scripts that require that your pages have a .php extension rather than a .html or .htm extension.

PHP is a server-side scripting language which involves a) the server looking at your pages for a PHP script, b) running the script, and c) outputting the results to the page. This is called "parsing". In order to successfully use PHP in your pages, you need to ensure that your account on your webserver is set up to parse your pages for PHP scripts. This feature is pretty standard these days, but check with your webhost before...

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Updated

The default templates in Movable Type list archives by month, not by category. See the following steps for configuring your weblog for category archiving, creating and assigning categories, adding a category list in your sidebar, and adding a "Posted to" line at the end of each entry.

1. Edit your weblog configuration for category archiving. In your weblog config window, tab over to "archiving". Put a check in the checkbox next to "category". Save and rebuild your weblog.

2. Create and assign categories. When you create a new entry, right next to the Title window is a scroll bar for selecting a category. Scroll down to "Add new category". This will open a window for...

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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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Updated Sept 14, 2004

A sideblog is a separate weblog which appears in the sidebar of your main weblog. Sideblogs are often used as a convenient way to list out interesting links, something akin to a frequently-updated, public list of IE favorites. Rather than mixing in your "this link is cool" entries in with all of your other entries, with the accompanying overhead of code for individual entries, comments and trackbacks, you can streamline your links into a linkblog.

A great example of a linkblog can be found at MovableBLOGthe Asides section in the right sidebar.

Making a sideblog is pretty straightforward; it can be accomplished by creating a new weblog in Movable Type and using...

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One measure to guard against spam is to close comments on old blog entries. This is easy enough to do.

At the bottom of your Edit Entry window is the pull-down for none, open, or closed comments. If you don't see this as pictured, click on "Customize the display of this page" link, select "Custom" and select the fields you wish displayed, including "Allow Comments".

You can also set comments to be open, closed or non-existent by default through the weblog config window, Preferences section. Under "Comment Configuration" see "Allow Comments" Default. Note that you can override this default via your selection on the individual entry.

Plugins

There are several plugins that can be...

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Posting photos and images to your weblog entry is easy in Movable Type.

1. Prepare your image for the web. First make sure your image is a manageable size. Whether you are using software that comes with your digital camera or specializied photo software such as Adobe Photoshop or PhotoElements, reduce the image size of your image so that it will comfortably fit in the space provided by your weblog at a resolution of 72 dpi. Most cameras take images at high resolutions so that they will be able to print out well on photo paper. Your computer's screen resolution however is a low 72 dpi (dots per inch). So if you want to see what your image will look like on your weblog, view it at...

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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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Updated. Originally posted April 3, 2005.

If you are using a MySQL database and your blog is PHP enabled (see Converting to PHP), you can use PHP scripts to pull blog data from your database to add customizations to your blog. For example, say you would like to have on your sidebar a quote, randomly pulled from a selection of quotes, with a new quote displayed every time you refresh the page. You can accomplish this by creating a separate weblog for quotes, then using a simple PHP script to pull the data from your MySQL database, and using a PHP include to put the script results into your main weblog page.

PHP scripts are a level of difficulty up from Movable Type, and require...

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Moving your Movable Type blog to a new server or to a new host is much more perilous than you might think. If not done properly, you could lose all of your entries. I recently went through this exercise and what saved me was a set of instructions from MT user Russcam. What I've done here is reworked Russcam's instructions for what worked for me with moving a site with multiple MT blogs. In some cases in this document I copy his words, word for word. I may get skewered for plagarism here, but I hate PDFs and need a web-findable record of what I did. This is essentially Russ's work, with my tweeks and ammendments. Please leave comments, questions, or proposed amendments in the...

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There are two methods to create a random entry, pulled from your weblog database (if you aren't using dynamic publishing). The easiest is David Raynes' MTRandomEntries plugin. However, MTRandomEntries generates a random entry only when you rebuild the page on which the MTRandomEntry code is located. If you want a random entry to be generated each time the page is refreshed in a browser, you can do that with a PHP script that pulls the data from your MySQL database. For this method to work your blog needs to be PHP enabled and you need to be using a MySQL database.

This tutorial will outline variations of a PHP script you can use to generate random entries, similar to what can be seen...

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If you are putting hours into writing content for your blog, you may want to make a few bucks (or more) to help pay for hosting charges and other costs associated with running it. Some bloggers find that they can make more than just small change, but most not enough to quit their day job. In any case, here are a few of the more popular methods.

Several ways by which you can make money with your weblog include Google Adsense, Amazon Associates, various other affiliate programs, advertising, and donations. Keep in mind that the success of these programs is highly dependent upon your content and the level of traffic you get to your site.

Google Adsense

Since its launch in the spring...

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