Originally posted 9-28-04.

The ability to leave comments on other people's weblogs and accept comments on your own is one of the features that make blogs so compelling. Accepting comments on your blog however, can be like having an open house party where ill-behaved uninvited guests show up. TypeKey, a free service from Six Apart, can help you control who gets to comment on your weblog.

If you are setting up a new weblog in MT3.x, adding Typekey authentication is easy. You'll need to get a TypeKey token from TypeKey.com and select various comment settings in your weblog config preferences. If you have upgraded to MT3 from an earlier version of Movable Type and want to use TypeKey...

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Movable Type is set up for doing date-based archives by day, week, and month, but not by year. There are a few plugins and methods out there that will help you create a yearly calendar of your archives, for example, Brad Choate's Year Archives in MT Perl script plugin will produce a calendar archive ( example). Lummox JR's ArchiveYear plugin will produce a similar calendar ( example).

I prefer a yearly archive to show a list of entries by month, as I've set up on one of my blogs ( example). An archive page like this can be accomplished using the ArchiveYear plugin with some simple changes to the sample code given. Update August 1, 2005 The ArchiveYear plugin seems to not be in its...

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

Future posting is a convenient new feature in MT3.1x, allowing you to create an entry and have it automatically post at a future time. But before you can use this feature you need to set up a Cron Job on your server.

What is a Cron Job?

Cron is a task scheduler for unix servers. A cron job is a specific task that runs a certain number of times per minute, day, week, or month on your server. For example, you can use a cron job to automate a daily MySQL database backup. The main problem with cron jobs is that if they aren't properly configured they can cause high server...

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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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Looking for a way to incorporate a Photo Gallery into your MT blog? Check out Photo Gallery Templates from StopDesign.com.

There are many ways to create a web-based photo album or photoblog in Movable Type. This tutorial addresses just one method for creating a photo album, and is based on the steps I took to create my MT-based photo album. This tutorial is for experienced MT users and assumes familiarity with plugins, CSS, creating a new weblog, category archiving, and uploading images. Although long, the tutorial is easier than it looks, especially if you want a photo album that works just like mine. It's always the customizations that take time. In this tutorial I will give...

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If you have a lot of content - entries, categories, sidebar information - sooner or later things may begin to look a little cluttered on your weblog. One way to address this is to make some of your lists expandable and collapsible, as I have done with LMT's Table of Contents. There are probably many different ways to do this. I have found one method, based on Javascript, that is simple to implement and appears to work fine, from Bleeding Ego.

1. Upload listmenu.js to your server.

Copy the following script into a new file with a texteditor. Save the script as "listmenu.js". Upload the script to a location within the public directory of your server using an FTP program. (You can...

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Updated June 12, 2005. Originally posted in Spring of 2004.

The default Movable Type installation automatically publishes RSS feeds for your weblog. The three formats supported are Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. You can find the templates associated with these syndication formats in the templates section of your MT edit screen.

The default RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 syndication feed templates for MT version 3.x produces a feed with the content in your MT entry body. The default Atom feed template produces a feed with both the entry body and the extended entry. The default RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds in MT version 2.661 generated feeds with only the entry excerpt.

You may or may not want to...

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Here are some simple changes that even a non-CSS expert like me can implement to make some fundamental changes to the default styles of MT3 weblogs.

1. Moving the sidebar from the right to the left side. The default MT3 Stylesheets have the sidebar on the right side of the page. To move the sidebar to the left hand side you don't actually have to change the stylesheet at all. The changes are made to the Main Index template and any other archive template that has a sidebar. In the Main Index template, find the sidebar code section:

<div id="right"> <div class="sidebar">

Your sidebar code

</div> </div>

If your sidebar is currently on...

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People who want to start blogging often ask me which tool they should use, Typepad or Movable Type? 9 times out of 10 my answer is Typepad. That's odd, you might think coming from someone who runs a blog all about Movable Type. The answer has more to do with who is asking the question than the relative merits of either program. Both products are created by the team at Six Apart and both are based on the same technology. The main difference between the two is that Typepad is a fee-based hosted service and Movable Type is software that you license to run on your own server or web host. The reason that I more often recommend Typepad is that, unlike Movable Type, you don't have to...

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This tutorial is written by LMT author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog. Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and LMT.

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 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...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Mike Everett-Lane of Ishbadiddle.

A Subject Index can give context to your posts and makes it easier for your readers to browse what you've written on specific topics. Unlike Categories, which are limited, top-down, and hierarchical, Subject tags are open-ended and limitless. While your blog's Category system is like the Table of Contents of a book, a Subject Index is like the book's Index, one that is constantly updated.

First, you might want to read my blog post on how the use of Subject Indexes can improve the organization of your blog. You can see it in action there as well as here on LMT. For instance, here's the index of all my subjects, and the index of all my posts on the subject of...

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If you are using Movable Type default templates, the titles of your entries on the main page of your MT blog are just that - titles. They look pretty but go nowhere. If you want to get from the entry on your main blog page to its individual entry page, you need to click on "Permalink" or "Continue reading".

Setting it up so that the titles of the entries themselves are hyperlinks to the individual entry page is fairly straightforward and requires edits to two templates - your Style Sheet and the Main Index template.

If you are using the default MT3.2 templates

1. The Stylesheet The MT3.2 default stylesheet is a huge file. The last time I printed one out it took 18 pages. It...

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(Note: this tutorial is intended for MT versions 2.661 and earlier.) If you are new to Movable Type, and are using the default style sheets you may have encountered a surprise when viewing your weblog in various browsers. The reasons for this are many. First, different browsers (Internet Explorer, AOL, Netscape, Safari) on different platforms (Windows XP, Windows 2000, MacOSX) render CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in different ways. What looks one way on a Mac running Safari can look way different from a PC running AOL. Second, our dedicated team at Six Apart - Ben and Mena Trott - are Mac-ophiles, assuring that most of their default styles render well on a Mac, but not necessarily so...

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Sometimes you might want to link to a popup window from your Movable Type weblog. For example you can make your About page a popup instead of a separate page. Although using the target="blank" attribute in a hyperlink can generate a new page, using javascript commands for popups will give you more control over the appearance and location of the popup.

Movable Type already uses popups. You can create a link to an image file that will create a popup of the image when clicked (see Uploading Images and Photos). There is javascript code in the default headers of your index and archive templates for OpenComments and OpenTrackback that can be used to invoke comment and trackback popup...

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The default main index page of a Movable Type weblog displays entries made in the last 7 days. You can change this number by entering a different number in the weblog config preferences.

lastn If you keep the default setup, you may notice that if you don't post for a while (more than 7 days) your main weblog index page becomes blank - no entries. To change the setup so that the weblog displays the last 7 entries instead of entries in the last 7 days you need to add a lastn attribute to the MTEntries tag.

Changing <MTEntries> to <MTEntries lastn="7"> in the Main Index template will cause the index page to display the last 7 entries. Adding the attribute lastn="10"...

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Has it ever happened that you make a change to your default templates or stylesheet and suddenly your weblog doesn't look right anymore? Panic begins to set in as you quickly try to undo the changes that you just made, but it's still not working? A great tool to use to help troubleshoot problems like this is the W3C Markup Validator.

The W3CWorld-Wide Web Consortiumis the organization responsible for setting the HTML specifications and standards that browser developers use in their web browsers. If your web page "validates" then it should be able to be viewed properly in the major web browsers. If it doesn't validate, then the validator tool will list out all of the errors or...

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Updated September 20, 2004

If you are new to Movable Type and/or weblogs you may have encountered the term Permalink and wondered (as I did when I first read the term), what the heck is that?

A permalink is the permanent identifier to a specific weblog post or article. On Movable Type, a Permalink is usually a link to an entry's unique web page. The default archiving set-up in Movable Type includes date-based archives and individual archives. By default the permalinks are set up to link to an entry's individual archive page. You may see permalinks listed on many Typepad sites (like this one from Art Addict:

Clicking on the Permalink link will take the viewer to the page devoted...

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Yahoo allows people to easily add RSS newsfeeds into their user-customized My Yahoo portal pages. For publishers of RSS feeds, like almost every Typepad and Movable Type user, this means that you can easily let your readers add your feed to their My Yahoo page by simply clicking on a button.

Millions of people use My Yahoo pages to create their own customized view of the news they care about. Most people outside of the blogging community don't know what RSS is and tend to look cross-eyed when you try to explain it to them. Yahoo makes it very easy to reap the benefits of RSS without having to see funky looking files or download a newsfeed reader, yet another piece of software.

For those of us with weblogs...

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In the default configurations for MT versions 2.661 and earlier, trackback links on your index and archive pages are set to generate a pop-up window containing the trackback information and pings. What if you would like to have the trackback pings appear on your individual entry pages, just as the comments do?

There are two straightforward methods for doing so. (Correction posted May 23, 2004) Both methods require that you rebuild your site in order for new trackback notices to appear on the individual entry pages. Method A method allows you to have trackback pop-ups as well as inline trackbacks. The second - Method B - involves a PHP include and requires that your site is in...

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Updated March 23, 2005

Once you are uploading images to your MT weblog with ease, you might on occassion want to wrap text on either side of the image, like so:

Placeholder Latin text - Vt enim quidam monumentis suis testati sunt, in Hispania pro consule et a sociis pecunias accepit emendicatas in auxilium aeris alieni et Lusitanorum quaedam oppida, quanquam nec imperata detrectarent et aduenienti portas patefacerent, diripuit hostiliter. Gallia fana templaque deum donis referta expilauit, urbes diruit saepius ob praedam quam ob delictum; unde factum, ut auro abundaret ternisque milibus nummum in libras promercale per Italiam prouinciasque diuenderet. In primo consulatu tria milia...

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