<MTOnThisDay> Movable Type Plugin

The plugin support for Movable Type 2.2 is fantastic! And now we can develop the stuff that Ben just hasn't gotten around to yet. Here's one-- I've created a container tag that lets you pull entries that match the current system/entry month and day.

If you want to read more about it, visit the MT Plugin support forum page I've set up for this plugin.

To download the plugin, click here.

Updated on July 5. See included readme.txt file for details.

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I am glad that you found my website about Movable Type and I hope that you are able to find important information for your own work. In this entry I want to give you some information about my website, so you are able to use my Movable Type Weblog efficiently.

What is next?

After having read this help, you should have a look at the Sitemap. There I have collected all entries and put them in a reasonable structure. You will get a good overview of all entries.

What is a weblog?

Movable Type is a product developed by Six Apart. It is used for creating websites organized as a Weblog.

The name Weblog« is the short form for »Web Logging«. It is a certain way of...

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The FAQ has been extended, explaining the following questions.

June 2nd, 2005: In Movable Type, entries or comments or other objects are often shown in lists. For example, the main index shows the most recent entries, a category archive also shows entries, or an individual entry archive shows comments. I preferred if not all items in such lists were styled the same. For example, there should be an alternating white / gray background. How can this be done? Read FAQ: Entries or Comments with alternating Style

June 1st, 2005: I have a couple of categories. When using the MTCategories tag, these are sorted by name. However, I preferred if I could choose the order manually. There is a...

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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...

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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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You should just be able to copy and paste this style sheet into the master style sheet of your blog and you'll get a nice little site refurb, on the house:

 # Waters of the Hudson # CSS distributed by # PlasticMind Design # http://plasticmind.com body { margin: 0px 0px 20px 0px; background-color: #000033; text-align: center; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif; } a { text-decoration: none; } a:link { color: #336699; } a:visited { color: #336699; } a:active { color: #336699; } a:hover { color: #ACBED5; border-bottom-width:...
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I want to display a list of categories in a sidebar on my Category Archive Template page. If I enter the code from the Main Index, my category archive sidebar comes up empty (literally, it displays nothing under the categories heading). To fix that, I am calling that same code into my category archive template as a php include.

Create a new index template called categories.php and place in it the sidebar code (from main index template) for your CATEGORIES:

<MTSubCategories> <MTSubCatIsFirst><ul></MTSubCatIsFirst> <MTIfNonZero tag="MTCategoryCount"> <li><a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"...

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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...

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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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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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Now that Movable Type supports a real database with the MySQL support in version 2.2, it's time for some new tags that can let you select entries, comments and categories using any criteria you'd like. Click the 'more' link for full docs and download link.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtsql-1_52.zip

Installation

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

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Updated

I have found two great services for showing and sharing your photos on your website: Flickr and Photoblox. Of the two, Flickr is by far the easiest to implement, and what you put on your site links back to a larger social networking service based on photo sharing.

1. Flickr Zeitgeist

Flickr Zeitgeist is a fun little flash-based goodie that shows the most recent public photos that people have posted to Flickr, a photo social network. (Note: I had a little bit of trouble gettng this to work; the problem was that the MT entry template automatically put line breaks in the javascript code. I adjusted the code so there are no more line breaks and it seems to work fine.)

It's still in beta, but...

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Well, for no good reason I felt I wanted to have a "Ask Brad" column on my site. I'm getting tired of thinking up subjects to post about so I'm letting my audience do that for me. LazyWeb syndrome I guess. Anyhoo, here's how I set it up with Movable Type. No complicated hacks required, honest.

First of all, I created a new blog for "Ask Brad". Then I created an entry in that blog, titled "Question...

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You've seen them before: links that say "click here for printer-friendly version" or words to that effect. Every time you follow one of those links, you load a separate document that presents exactly the same information with a different layout, and probably different markup.

That means somebody (or a script) had to take the original document and convert it to a stripped-down version that's more suitable for print output. Maybe that somebody was even you.

Print style sheets to the rescue

One of the wonderful things about CSS is that it allows authors to create media-specific styles for a single document. We're pretty used to styling...

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Two quick CSS tricks that I've been relying on more and more lately: • Applying positioning to a parent element, to allow absolute positioning of a child element within the parent. • Context-sensitive elements. Chaining classes by applying two or three or more to the highest parent element possible allows cascading down to deep child elements.

Positioning

Something I've only recently wrapped my mind around is that if you position a parent element by using absolute or relative positioning, you can absolutely position any child elements from the edges of the parent.

Too abstract? Try this: apply position: relative to a <div>, without supplying a top or left value. Then apply...

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<MTPerlScript> is tag for Movable Type templates. If you know how to write Perl code, this custom tag gives you remarkable flexibility in producing pages from Movable Type. You can literally do any kind of manipulation you can think of using your Movable Type data.

This tag was written with a 'trust-the-programmer' mentality (or in this case, the template writer). There aren't any restrictions...

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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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by Category | by Date

Anti-Spam

Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist - MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist Birdhouse notes on Comment Spam - Why this web host is forcing comment registration Blacklist to Mod Security - by Peter Wood Brad Choate: SpamLookup - anti-spam plugin Interview with a Comment Spammer - The Register's interview with a blog comment spammer. MT-Approval Plugin - Prevents comment spam from spam bots MT-DSBL Open Proxy Comment Filter - from Brad Choate MT-Moderate - Plugin for moderating trackbacks and comments from Chad Everett Mod Rewrite to Block Bot Spam - Mod Rewrite method to divert comment spam bots to a 403...

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Updated September 23, 2004

Movable Type comes with a built-in capability for allowing your weblog visitors to easily send an email with a link to your entry by filling out a simple form. The one small catch is that spammers can take advantage of cgi email programs like this to send out spam. Ben Trott has made a few adjustments to the MT code in the most recent releases to help protect against these types of spammers. But the easiest way to take advantage of this useful utility while at the same time protecting yourself is to change the name of the mt-send-entry.cgi script. (See the reasons why here) The following are instructions on how to include Email to a Friend on your MT...

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Question

What are all those templates used for? Will I need each and every one, if I want to work with Movable Type? What template should I try to understand first?

Answer

Actually, you do not have to look at the templates at all. If you are satisfied with one of the default templates, or you find a template for download somewhere, you will not have to dig into this subject.

But even if you want to change your weblog's style, you will not have to look into each and every template. Fortunately, most templates are not needed in the beginning. The most important templates are as follows: • The Main Index Template is responsible for creating the start page of your weblog. It is...

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