Suppose you change the name of a file. But instead of deleting the old file that is on your server (that may have many sites already linked to it) you want to forward anyone who goes to the old file URL to the new one.

One way to do this is to place a Meta Refresh tag in the html header section of the file that you want to forward. The tag looks like this:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3;url=http://www.yourblog.com/archives/name_of_entry.html">

content="3 means that when someone goes to the old file, it will take 3 seconds to be forwarded to the new file. You can change this number to be more or fewer seconds, down to zero. Note that if...

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Sometimes you may want to keep an entry, or all entries within a certain category, at the top of your weblog, above all of your other entries. For example, you may want to highlight announcements at the top of your site, or you might have a site explanation or introduction that you wish to maintain at the top. There are several ways to accomplish this.

1. Changing the date of the entry.

If all you want to do is to put one particular entry at the top of your blog, perhaps only for a limited time, the easiest way to accomplish this is to give it a date that is posted at a later date than all of the other entries. To do this, in the edit entry window, scroll to the bottom of the page....

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If you have installed the basic MT package and are including the default search function on your blog, you may have noticed a check box for "Regex Search" that appears underneath the search box on your search results page. There is also a check box for "Match Case", but that is more self-explanatory. What is a "Regex" search? And how can you get rid of that check box so you don't confuse your visitors?

What is a Regex search?

Regex stands for "Regular Expression". It is a programming term. Doing a Google search reveals several definitions:

Regular Expression is a sentence written in a language to describe patterns.

or

A regular expression is a way of describing a group...

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3-Column 404 Error About Page Absolute Pixel Sizes Accessibility Activity Log Add Your Links Here Adding An Author Additional Weblog Adsense Advertising Affiliate Programs Align Attribute Alphabetize Entries Alternative Search Template Amazon Amazon Web Services Archive Pages Archives Ascii Characters and Symbols Ascii Mode Audioblog Author Archives Authors Background Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Backup Banner Banner Images Berkeley DB Binary Mode BinHex Mode Blockquotes Blog Maintenance Bloglet Book Review Bookmarklet BookQueueToo Buttons Captcha Captions Categories Category Category Archive Category Archiving CGIWrap Changing Servers CHMOD Chron Job Clocks Closing Comments...

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Adding a background pattern to your weblog is pretty straightforward in Movable Type, requiring the change of only one line in your stylesheet.

1. Pick a pattern. You can make your own pattern using a tool like Photoshop, or you can pick a pattern from one of the many sites that offer patterns for free (for non-commercial use).

Patterns from Kaliber 10000.

Patterns from Squid Fingers

2. Make a tile.

Patterns are based on tiles, small files of the design that, once repeated, create a full pattern. Once you find a pattern you like, you need to save the gif or jpeg file of the tile upon which the pattern is based. One way to do that is to view the source of the HTML of the...

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Many weblogs have a footer bar running across the bottom of the page with information that pertains to all of the pages of the weblog, such as copyright, XHTML validation, software used to create the weblog, etc.

Adding a footer to your Movable Type weblog is pretty straightforward.

1. Create a Footer Id in your stylesheet. Include elements for how you want the links in your footer to appear. For example:

#footer { font-family: Trebuchet MS; font-size: x-small; padding:2px; margin:0px; background-color:#CBE3F6; color:#fff; border-bottom: 1px solid #9EC4E2; border-top: 1px solid #9EC4E2; ...

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Have you ever had difficulty looking up a tag description in the Movable Type User's Manual? Arvind Satyanarayan has created a new bookmarklet tool MT Tabs which he has posted to his new "All things Movable Type" Movalog weblog.

Install MT Tabs as you would any other bookmarklet (see What is a Bookmarklet?) by dragging the MT Tabs link from the Movalog MT Tabs page directly into your browser toolbar. Once the MT Tabs link is in the toolbar, you can click on it to either open a sidebar in your browser or open a new window (depending on your browser) containing the MT Tabs tool.

To use the MT Tabs tool, click on the category tab for the tag that you want and then click on the tag...

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Here are some fun and useful weather utilities you can easily add to your weblog:

1. Weatherpixie

Weatherpixie is a small bit of javascript code that you can place in your sidebar that generates a graphic showing the local weather. You determine the location for the weather report and choose from a selection of pixie images. Place the javascript from www.weatherpixie.com in the sidebar sections of your Main Index or archive templates.

2. WeatherForYou.com

Enter a city and state or zip code to get your local weather. On the results page on the left hand side, scroll down to "Weather for Websites" in the sidebar. Click on that link to get instructions on how to put the...

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In MT versions 2.661 and earlier, there is an icon and link for "Set Up Bookmarklets" on the main menu weblog edit page. In MT3.x, the name "Bookmarklets" has been changed to "QuickPost". In this tutorial everything that describes how to use bookmarklets can be used to describe how to use quickposts.

What is a bookmarklet and how do you use it in Movable Type?

A bookmarklet is a small bit of Javascript code that you can place in your browser favorites or bookmarks. Whenever you want to use the functionality of that code you can click on your browser bookmark for it. There are lots of bookmarklets available for all sorts of uses. In Movable Type, there is a bookmarklet available...

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There's a great repository of buttons at gtmcknight.com.

You too can create a custom button for your site with Kalsey's Button Maker.

Here's one for Learning Movable Type:

If you would like to add a Learning MT button and link to your site please host the image on your own server. (You can download it from this page by right-clicking over the image and selecting "Download Image to Disk" or "Save Image As".) After you upload the image to your server you can use this code to add the link to LMT:

<a href="http://www.learningmovabletype.com/"><img src="http://www.your_web_site/path/to/images/button.png"></a>

Note: if all you want is a link to...

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Let your site visitors from other countries easily translate your pages into their own languages. Note these services are far from perfect. I often get a big laugh when I translate a site from Japanese or French into English. But you can usually get the point.

1. Babel Fish from AltaVista Let your weblog readers translate your pages with Babel Fish from AltaVista.

The translator seems to work pretty well with text. Unfortunately for this site, it also translates what I've identified as code which, if used in its translated state, won't work. But for sites that aren't talking about code snippets, Babel Fish looks like a useful utility.

2. FreeTranslation.com

Like Babel Fish,...

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Six Apart released the public beta of MT version 3.2 today. This new release of MT brings some welcome features - Trackback moderation, global comment and trackback management, administrative control for those with multiple blogs on the same installation, spam protection, and user-interface improvements throughout the application. Here's some more information on the new features including improved documentation. Now that's a long time coming. (But hey, why isn't LMT or Movalog mentioned in the "But I love to read" section? Does one have to be in print to be considered an author of useful MT info? From my server logs I can see that thousands of tutorial pages are printed out from...

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The new style sheet and templates in MT3.2 can be daunting to the non CSS expert. Changing the position of the sidebar from the right to the left shouldn't be so difficult. Once understood, it is a bit easier to do.

Changing the Sidebar Position

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 (if you have a 3-column layout), and delta (a hypothetical fourth column that one could create). If you change sidebar position from right to left, the order of the columns still needs to be the same on your index and any archive templates where you have placed a...

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Learning Movable Type now has a Subject Index which will allow you to scan for entries based on keywords, or "tags", the authors have assigned to them. Selecting a subject will not only bring you a list of entries that have been assigned that keyword, but also a list of related keywords.

Creating a subject index like this is not that hard to do; it does require several plugins and that you've assigned keywords to your entries. See this tutorial for details.

The expandable menu list Table of Contents has been moved to a separate page as well, in order to save load times on the tutorials. The list of entries was just getting too long.

I hope these changes make it even easier to find...

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If you are creating a group weblog with multiple authors, you might want to customize the look of the Movable Type editing windows with the group's logo. MT3.1 makes this really easy to do. The styles.css file and the images folder that are in the folder you chose for your static files on your server are where you can find the files you will need to adjust.

Changing the logo

The default upper left-hand logo of the editing window looks like this in MT3.x:

The file name is topnav-logo.gif and it can be found in the images folder in your static files folder. You can use an image editing program like Photoshop to swap out the Movable Type logo for that of the group's. Save the image...

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Anil sent a message out a week ago or so asking people about the impact MT has had on our lives. Here's my story...

I started LMT primarily as a way to keep track of what I was learning while customizing and updating my recipe blog. I created Simply Recipes as a way to document my family's recipes while my parents were still alive and healthy and able to show me how to make all the wonderful things they made for us growing up. Last December I got a call from Mike Dunne, Food Editor of the Sacramento Bee, asking for an interview. Mike's article was published in January and my parents and I were featured on the front page of the food section that week. Complimentary publicity is...

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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.)

An htaccess file is a simple ascii text file which you create or edit in a text editor. The dot (.) before the word htaccess indicates that .htaccess is a file extension. Some text editors will add on an additional .txt file extension when you save your document. When you upload it to your server however, make sure the final file is named .htaccess and set the file's permissions to 644. The (.) in .htaccess also makes...

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Some of the more interesting customizations you can do with your Movable Type weblog require using PHP scripts, either on their own or in conjunction with the MySQL database. Some scripts are easy enough to install and require very little configuration. Others, however, require that you know something about how the script works, or how your MT database is set-up, or both.

Larry Ullman's PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites is a well organized, fairly comprehensive, easy-to-follow introduction to PHP and MySQL. Ullman expects you to know basic HTML and have had some exposure to programming. I took a basic Pascal programming class 25 years ago, but that's about it and I still...

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Plugins are bits of code that, once installed, extend the functionality of Movable Type. The word plugin is often used by software developers to describe a third party application that "hooks" into a main application to extend its functionality. Movable Type hosts an active plugin developer community whose plugins have greatly enhanced the capabilities of Movable Type. You can find a directory of MT plugins at http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/. To use a plugin, you will need to use an FTP program to load the plugin files to your server. When you upgrade your MT version, you must be careful not to overwrite your plugins file. Either that, or reload the plugins after the...

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If you want your Movable Type entries to be displayed in alphabetical order, substitute the <MTEntries> tag with:

<MTEntries sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend">

Use the same </MTEntries> closing tag.

Links: MT Forum thread on case insensitive sorting - sort_by="title" is case sensitive by default in Movable Type. This thread shows David Phillips' tip on how to adjust the perl code so that your sort_by attribute can be case insensitive.

Copyright © 2004-2005 Elise Bauer. All Rights Reserved (unless otherwise specified).

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