Running your own local Apache server for development is a great idea, and even better if you've enabled local virtual hosts.

As demand for open source software increases, so do the options. Popular packages are frequently ported to different platforms, so it's fully possible to run a local install of Apache regardless of which operating system you use on your workstation.

The stumbling block is mainly know-how, which is fortunately an easy gap to fill. I am decidedly not a system administrator, but I've run various Apache installs over the past year - without much conviction I should note, so learning has been slow.

After this past weekend's rebuild, I got around to re-configuring a fresh copy of Apache Complete last night. Here are two tips from that experience....

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A year ago this week, trying to keep track of everything I was learning regarding using Movable Type, I wrote my first MT tutorial and launched Learning Movable Type. Stung by comments in the forums to RTFM (read the f%$#ng manual), exasperated that the manual - while thorough - seemed to be written in some foreign geek language understandable only to those who could probably write code in their sleep, and determined that other newbies and non-techies would not suffer the tens and hundreds of hours of lost productivity pulling their collective hairs out over trying to get some dang thing on their MT blog to work, I got to writing.

It must be clear to most technically savvy people who...

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There are several situations in which you might want to combine two or more blogs into one. You might want to create a "Portal" blog which displays the most recent entries or headlines of entries from various blogs. You might want to create a Sideblog or Linkblog (see tutorial). Or you might want to have what looks to be just one blog (such as Learning Movable Type) but is actually a combination of several.

The tools you have at your disposal are David Raynes' MultiBlog plugin, PHP Includes, SSI - Server Side Includes, and RSS, among others. This tutorial will focus on the easiest of these alternatives - how to use the MultiBlog plugin to combine blogs from a single installation of...

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1.3 (2001.12.11)

• Fixed bug where days="N" would override category="Foo" in <MTEntries> tag. (cwodtke) • Added DBM file locking (shared lock when reading, exclusive when writing). • Export process now exports excerpts, and import now imports them. • When you upload a file, if a file by that name (at that location) already exists, you now get a confirmation screen to overwrite the file, or not. (Requires that File::Temp is installed.) • Added search and replace functionality. • You can now upload files into specific directories...

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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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Another update to MT-Notifier, which fixes a small bug with purging a user record from within the management screen. This worked okay if you were purging your own record, but if you were accessing the user interface from your Movable Type main menu (logged into the system), when you purged user data, you were kicked out of management mode and had to start over (the data was purged, however). This has been fixed. I also added a small log entry to record the number of notifications sent during any particular notification run. Thanks to Simon for another excellent (and easy to implement!) suggestion.

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Updated. Originally posted March 29, 2004. Providing printer-friendly versions of your weblog entries can be useful to your weblog readers. For example, my cooking weblog has printer-friendly versions of the recipes like this. Learning Movable Type links to printer-friendly versions at the end of each entry. There are several ways to create printer-friendly versions. I've outlined two methods in this tutorial. The first method is a simple header tag and CSS trick that automatically generates printer-friendly pages whenever someone goes to print a page from your blog. The second method is a bit more involved, creating a printer-friendly archive template with associated...

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Validation matters. No it doesn't. Validation is hard. No it isn't. Standards are flexible. No they're not. Does this conversation sound familiar? Updated 18 Jun 2004

While variations of the debate over the ease and importance of following the standards to the letter have been flying around for years, the coming summer months appear to be heating up the arguments once more.

There's a cross-site conversation about validation happening at the moment, and you may have seen it in places I haven't. On this site anyway, a seemingly innocuous opinion piece from last week calling for moderation and sensibility saw the discussion fly completely off the rails...

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Atom is a standardized format for describing weblog content. With a standard format, you can exchange weblog content not only between web services but between command line tools--that's the idea behind some Java programs called "atomflow." To the same end as the atomflow project, I'm delighted to present a Perl module for creating command line Atom tools. I'm using it to post Flickr photos to a TypePad sidebar, but I'm sure you'll have many more ideas for it.

XML::Atom::Filter

The Atom format is being designed as a lingua franca of weblog content. Recognizing that a standard format makes meaningful integration between software programs easier, Diego Doval, Matt Webb, and Ben Hammersley invented...

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Alright you Nielsenites you, that didn't go quite like I expected. It's probably my fault for calling it ‘Best Practices' in the first place - what we're looking to create is more a crib sheet of practical advice, something for reference when a designer gets stuck while using CSS specifically.

"A lot of these ‘best practices' are just arbitary favouritism for a particular way of working." - jgraham

I'd tend to agree. While nobody wants a blue, underlined link world, and we'll be debating for ages the best way to size fonts, this is what I was getting at: "a CSS Best Practice is a one sentence action...

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I took pretty aggressive notes during the panel that came after mine. Enjoy!

(You can tell I was paying more attention to the two people who were talking about things I hadn't heard much about before; less notes from their portions. Both were very good.)

Tantek Çelik

• Good CSS: standards • Bad CSS: abuses, misuses, amazing screwups (tables poorly mixed with css) • Ugly CSS: necessary: hacks, workarounds, wishes they never existed • CSS2.1 is now a W3C Candidate Recommendation: this is big news. CSS2? forget it. 2.1 incorporates changes, errata, adds the colour orange. • CSS2.1 reflects reality of current implementations • CSS validator updates, updates for validating...

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Google recently released some useful tips on how to optimize the use of Google Adsense on one's web pages. No surprise - the hottest "hot spot" for the best click-through returns lies right in the middle of your content.

How does one place a Google Adsense ad (or any other ad, bit of text, or image for that matter) between entries on the main index page of your MT weblog? By using a simple trick of the "lastn" and "offset" attributes outlined in the MT manual here.

Normally on your Main Index template, you would have your MTEntries section laid out like so:

for MT 3.2:

<MTEntries> <$MTEntryTrackbackData$> <MTDateHeader><h2 class="date-header"><$MTEntryDate format="%x"$></h2></MTDateHeader>...

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• Initial beta release

Back to top | Permalink | Comments (0)

0.02 (2001.09.25)

• Added FTP URLs to installation instructions. (Daniel Talsky) • Fix some warnings. (Caroline van Oosten de Boer)...

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Several months ago, author Rogers Cadenhead released the first book detailing MT3 - the Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition. Since Anil mentioned the book in a MT news post on MT books, I thought I would put my 2 cents in about this book.

The first thing you should know is that the MT3 Bible is not a book for non-technically-oriented beginners. The book is filled with great information, but if you are looking for the simplified introduction to Movable Type, this isn't it. Many of Roger's instructions are in the form of Unix shell commands that you would use to manage files on a web server. In fact, the book's second chapter is on how to prepare your web server for Movable Type. If...

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Multiblog is an indespensible plugin that allows you to display content from other blogs. Unfortunately, in its current version it doesn't work with dynamic publishing. A few days ago I was investigating the best way to duplicate MultiBlog's functions in the dynamic templating system. As it turns out, Movable Type's powerful dynamic templating system makes it easy to include content from other blogs.

With dynamic publishing all you need to do to pull content from other blogs is to change the blog context of the page. Every tag is parsed within a context which affects the content it outputs. For example, with the MTEntries tag the correct entries are outputted because Movable Type...

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NetflixAdvanced is a moveable type plugin that allows you to display the contents of your Netflix queue and send/recieve status on your weblog. It also allows you to set up a "private" listing of movies to be displayed on your site (regardless of the status of your Netflix queue). For each movie, NetflixAdvanced keeps track of the date it was entered, the date it was last modified, and optionally associates the movie with a blog entry (for movie reviews, etc). NetflixAdvanced stores each movie's movie ID number internally (an ID used by the Netflix site), and uses custom "scraper" code to fetch properties such as title, description, and images from Netflix for display in the weblog and in...

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Learning Movable Type is now hosted on a new server and now has its own domain name - http://www.learningmovabletype.com. In the process of changing servers and changing URLs, we may have created some broken links or other site hiccups. If you encounter something that just doesn't seem to be working properly, please email me using the contact form.

Humongous thanks to Chad and Arvind for their invaluable assistance with this move.

If you link to Learning Movable Type (and we hope you do) please, please, please change the URL in your link to the new one. That way, Google will find us more easily, and those using Google to find things regarding Movable Type will find us more easily too....

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To save space on your sidebar listing of categories or monthly archives, you might want to use a pull-down menu like so: Select Category Beginner Tips Categories Definitions General HTML and Javascript Install Marketing Reference RSS Security Servers Style Weblog Goodies

To do this for your category list, make sure that you have category archiving selected as an archiving option in your weblog config, and add the following code to your sidebar:

<form action="" name="pulldown1"> <select name="mypulldown1" onchange="document.location=pulldown1.mypulldown1.options[selectedIndex].value"> <option value="">Select...

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UPDATE Fixed a bug with moderation set on Typekey users. Bit to be edited is the code in edit_comment.tmpl

The moderation queue is one of the most powerful features that MT 3 has, and some advocate an aggresive use of it when paired with plugins. Currently, you are able to approve a comment but not unapprove a comment. This hack will add an unapprove button to the edit comment screen that will throw the comment back into moderation.

Open lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and around line 32 find

'approve_comment' => &approve_comment,

and add beneath it

'unapprove_comment' => &unapprove_comment,

Next find

sub list_commenters {

and add above it

sub unapprove_comment { my $app = shift; my $perms = $app->{perms}...

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Elise Bauer has updated her overview of the weblog tools market. Besides all the facts and figures, Elise points out some very cogent points about the market for tools:

As we move forward, distinguishing the different dynamics in the consumer, small business, and the corporate markets will become more important, as customers in these segments are using blog tools for different reasons and have different needs.

More relevant to Professional Network members is the observation made about corporate deployments of blog tools:

The tools that will win in this space may not actually be the best tools per se, but have the most organized sales force, the best documentation, and the best...

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