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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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...

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2.5 (2002.10.08)

• Localization: the MT interface can be available in multiple languages, on a per-author setting. • Integrated Jay Allen's mt-search (Thanks, Jay!). We've made the following changes from version 1.31b: • Rewrote ``new comments search'' to make it more scalable (using recently_commented_on functionality) • Added a search log through the Activity Log. • Added search request throttling, to help against denial of service attacks. • Merged mt-search.cfg directives into mt.cfg....

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The link for the rss feed has now changed. I've finally embraced Feedburner so that I can track stats etc (no ads yet don't worry). The new feed is located here while the sideblog feed can be found here I have put permanent redirects onto the old rss files (both combined and normal) to point to the new Feedburner feed. Most RSS readers will pick this up and update it accordingly. If not then manually change it if you wish to keep up to date. Sorry for the inconvenience. The link to the Planet Movable Type feeds will remain the same as I don't want to mess around with any tracking tools used by the sites that are aggregated!

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The first IE7 Beta is out. Yes, there are CSS improvements. No, they're not going to change the world.

Yesterday, Microsoft released a beta of the forthcoming Vista operating system, along with the first beta of IE7. Unfortunately, both are only available to MSDN subscribers.

An XP -compatible version is available from a third party if you have a BitTorrent client. This is probably breaking all sorts of terms and conditions though, and likely won't last. Grab it while you can. (Update: Upon further investigation, the site in question is a BitTorrent tracking site with links to all sorts of other copyrighted material. Since an XP-compatible version of the beta...

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Co-authored by Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer 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 loads...

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Co-authored by Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer 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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UPDATE: Make your own

With Movable Type 3.12, Six Apart built in a more powerful set of quicktags and on the whole they worked pretty well and looked quite nice too. I didn't really want to go back to the clunky Quicktags of before. So here are a few hacks to port some of the most useful features (in my opinion) from the old quicktags, to the new. You will need the following files • edit_entry.tmpl, this is found in MTDIR/tmpl/cms • mt.js, this is found in your StaticWebPath (or if you have none in your root MTDIR folder)

I have decided to port over four functions, Spell Check, Encoding HTML and Insert Image

Spell Check

Add the following to the end of your mt.js file

function Spell(myField)...

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I will be using Movable Type's default RSS 2.0 template, simply for size reasons. These template changes can apply just as easily to Atom feeds or any other feed template you can come up with.

First, here is the default template: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="<$MTPublishCharset$>"?> <rss version="2.0"> <channel> <title><$MTBlogName remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></title> <link><$MTBlogURL$></link> <description><$MTBlogDescription remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></description> <language><$MTBlogLanguage ietf="1"$></language> <copyright>Copyright...

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Movable Type templates aren't too difficult to write, but they can be difficult to read. So I've whipped up another plugin to fix that. Simple Template is a plugin that provides an alternative syntax for Movable Type templates 1.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtsimpletemplate-1_21.zip

Installation

To install, place the ‘simpletemplate.pl' file in your Movable...

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From the crown of its cranium to the tips of its Ruby-slippered toes, A List Apart 4.0 is both old and new. Old in its mission to help people who make websites see farther and jump higher. New in its design, structure, publishing system, and brand extensions.

The magazine has long advocated accessibility and web standards, providing deep and sometimes controversial insights into these areas and not infrequently presenting ideas and methods that change the way you think and work. We will never abandon this subject area, but we are once more widening our gaze to encompass disciplines and themes beyond those that have obsessed us for the past five years.

I say "once more"...

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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...

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2.64 (2003.05.28)

• Replaced RSS 0.91 template in default templates with an RSS 2.0 template, from the RSS validator site. (Thanks to the RSS validator folks.) • Fixed some XSS bugs (comments, TrackBack, notification addresses, and search queries). (Reported by Dumky and others) • Fixed width of #content div in Clean stylesheet so that it doesn't require scrolling in Windows IE. • Fixed TrackBack auto-discovery and text filters--auto-discovery is now done against the filtered entry body rather than the unfiltered body. (Timothy Appnel) • Added <q>...

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05.31.2005

Movable Type Cheat Sheet

One of the great things about Movable Type being localized into a number of languages and having such a broad international presence is that we get great contributions from our community around the world. The latest contribution is Jörg Petermann's Movable Type Cheat Sheet, which he's published in both German and English.

The Cheat Sheet, available in both PDF and PNG formats, covers all the standard Movable Type template tags, as well as common attributes for the tags and the date format used for output. Most of these tags also apply to TypePad's advanced templates as well, so it's worth keeping a copy of the Cheat Sheet...

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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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UPDATE: If you have any feature request I'm all ears. Gearing up for the release I want to see if there are any feature requests I can implement, I think I've fixed all the bugs that were reported so expect a release in the next few weeks.

I had released this to ProNet a few days ago but have not gotten much feedback. That can be either that people are waiting for the point release and don't want to install a beta or that there aren't many bugs in this beta. Either way I want to open up testing for MT Blogroll 2.0 (I'm still thinking about that version number). I'm going to copy my post to ProNet here to save me some time.

I've re-written Blogroll to use its own tables in the DB so...

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You know the dogma has gone too far when…

Here's a code sample from someone who obviously misunderstands the fact that "it's okay to use tables for tabular data", and probably spent more time than was necessary coming up with the CSS to make this work: <h3>My Schedule</h3> <ul class="pseudotable"> <li> <span class="event">Event #1</span> <span class="location">(location)>/span> <strong>May 15, 2005</strong> </li> <li> <span class="event">Event #2</span> <span class="location">(location)</span> <strong>May 16,...

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Version 2.64 of Movable Type is now released. This is a maintenance release, fixing various CSS, XML-RPC, UI, and Creative Commons errors. This release also plugs a number of cross-site-scripting (script injection) holes for search queries, comments, TrackBacks, and notifications, and is recommended for anyone using any of these features. We have also improved the options for available RSS templates--in addition to the RSS 1.0 template that we have always provided, the default templates now include an RSS 2.0 template instead of a 0.91 template. Also in the default templates, this release fixes the rendering of the default stylesheet ("Clean") on Windows Internet Explorer. The full changelog lists the changes and fixes in 2.64....

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In what seems to be an increasingly popular idea, moreover is offering contextual ads in their free RSS feeds, which will probably spark the ongoing discussion around ads in XML feeds in general. According to their press release, "By working closely with the developers of leading RSS readers, Moreover is able to intelligently deliver contextual advertisements through RSS without filling a news folder with advertisements every time a feed is refreshed."

While they're not more specific about the details, it seems clear that some feeds in the future around going to include ads, which makes it seem likely that ad-blocking and filtering technologies that have been created for web...

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When coding larger sites, the CSS cascade is both friend and foe. The choice is yours: redundancy, or dependency?

CSS forces you to make a choice in your coding techniques, a choice that becomes more obvious the larger a site grows. As the amount of variance between different templates increases, you can go in one of two directions: you can either code for redundancy, or code for dependency.

I'll give you some examples to illustrate what I'm talking about. First, redundancy. You've just created a series of forms across three pages. Each form has a couple of fields in common with the other forms, that you'd like to present in a similar way. The redundant...

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