Oops. Something went wrong. You're not sure what - was it you? Was it the website? What do you do now?

Welcome to the world of the Error 404 page. You've requested a page - either by typing a URL directly into the address bar or clicking on an out-of-date link and you've found yourself in the middle of cyberspace nowhere. A user-friendly website will give you a helping hand while many others will simply do nothing, relying on the browser's built-in ability to explain what the problem is. We can do better than that, can't we?

I won't go into details about how you set your server up to deliver a custom 404 page - ...

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Several users of MTLookup reported that sometimes the result lists' sort order seemed to be strange. Important entries were on position 10, and not so important entries reached top positions.

I analyzed the situation and compared the result lists that were generated by MTLookup with those that were created by Google and Yahoo. Some important facts could be found.

What is most important, the MTLookup ranking could be improved. Now it works consistent - no matter whether the keyphrase contains short or long words, or it contains words that appear often or seldom it the database.

I could even find some situations, where Google and Yahoo produced not so perfect result lists. It was...

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Posting a New Entry

Problem

You want to post a new entry.

Solution

Click the New Post button in the Weblog Toolbar or use a Quickpost bookmarklet.

Discussion

Since entries are what weblogs are all about, it should come as no surprise that there are a number of ways to create them in Movable Type.

The two most likely ones are either to use the New Post button in the Weblog Toolbar or use a Quickpost bookmarklet that MT can help you create. See "Making posts quickly from your browser" for more on Quickposts.

When creating a new entry, you will have the chance to set the...

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Setting Up Google Enabled Entries

Problem

You want to integrate Google search results into your entry.

Solution

Provide Movable Type with your Google API Key and use the MTGoogleSearchResult template tag.

Discussion

Movable Type is capable of making Google search queries and inserting the results into site layouts. This built-in functionality is geared toward inserting related links into an entry or a specific topic such as an author's name rather than providing unfettered access to the full power of the Google search engine. This is more a limitation of the Google API...

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Tutorials in Alphabetical Order

"Email Me" Contact Forms A Safe Way to Upgrade to MT 3.2 Add Your Links Here Adding a Footer Adding a Sidebar - MT3.1 and Earlier Adding a Sidebar to the Default Archive Templates Alphabetize Your Entries Amazon Web Services An Overview of the MT Program File Directories Applying MT3 Style Templates to MT2.X Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Banner Images Blog Maintenance Blogger Audioblogging with Movable Type CGIWrap and suEXEC Category Archive Pages Category Customizations Closing Comments Colors - Background, Banner, Headline, and Font Colors - Experimenting With, Using MTSetVar and MTGetVar Combining Multiple Blogs Into One Concerning Spam Converting from Fixed to Fluid Style...

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Introduction

One of Movable Type's most powerful traits is its flexibility to adapt to practically any weblog design or use you can imagine. For the average user, most of this flexibility comes from Movable Type's template engine.

The template engine is crucial to automating the process of publishing and is what makes a publishing system go. When a rebuild is performed, templates are merged with content to create a page that visitors can view in their browsers.

These templates are what control the design and layout of your site and what keeps that design separate from the...

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If you are putting hours into writing content for your blog, you may want to make a few bucks (or more) to help pay for hosting charges and other costs associated with running it. Some bloggers find that they can make more than just small change, but most not enough to quit their day job. In any case, here are a few of the more popular methods.

Several ways by which you can make money with your weblog include Google Adsense, Amazon Associates, various other affiliate programs, advertising, and donations. Keep in mind that the success of these programs is highly dependent upon your content and the level of traffic you get to your site.

Google Adsense

Since its launch in the spring...

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Turning unordered lists into elegant navigational menus has become the new favorite pastime for many web developers. Adding a unique id or class attribute to indicate which menu item reflects a user's current page, however, can become laborious. Even if you use body id attributes instead, as ALA does, some labor is involved and it is easy to make mistakes. But thanks to PHP, we can add these current-page indicators automatically.

Consider this tutorial a marriage of Christopher Robbins's Manage Your Content With PHP and Mark Newhouse's CSS Design: Taming Lists. The offspring of this marriage will be a single navigational document called navigation.php. Using PHP, we will include our one-size-fits-all navigational menu into every page of our site. Unlike other site-wide includes, however, this one will know which page the user is viewing and will adjust the current-page indicator appropriately....

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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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A little while ago I converted my site to use the Smarty for dynamic templating. I'm still using Movable Type for the content management though. Click the 'more' link for an overview of how it all works together...

Smart Templates

The Smarty template engine for PHP is pretty sweet. There's a lot of power in dynamic template rendering. The most important for me is that I can change the shape of my...

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{Part I of a two-part series.}

Ask an IT person if they know what Slashdot's tagline is and they'll reply, "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." Slashdot is a very prominent site, but underneath the hood you will find an old jalopy that could benefit from a web standards mechanic.

In this article we will show how an engine overhaul could take place by converting a single Slashdot page from their current HTML 3.2 code, nested tables, and invalid, nonsemantic markup, to a finely tuned web standards racing engine. The goal is not to change Slashdot, but to rebuild it with web standards and show the benefits of the transition.

Before you panic because...

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Smarty Docs

Now that Smarty is built into MT, you've got a whole load of new features that you can use. Just have a look at the documentation everything discussed in those docs are available to MT users, the only difference is instead of single braces you need to use double, for example where in the Smarty docs it gives you a line like this {include file="sidebar.php"}

when you implement that into MT it will need to become {{include file="sidebar.php"}}

This was chosen over the single braces because the single braces can cause problems when you start writing Javascript. None-the-less if you really wish to use single braces, find in your mtview.php template the following line (thanks...

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Technorati, a leading blog search engine and index, has made it very easy for blog authors to get their "tagged" blog entries into Technorati's tag index. What is a tag? A tag is a type of category, and the process of tagging a simplified categorization method for your entries. The concept of tags has become popular with services such as del.icio.us and Flickr. By creating tag classifications for your weblog entries, you make it easy for Technorati to index your blog entries by tags that you specify. With Technorati tagging, you get to choose how you want your weblog entries to be classified, in contrast to algorithm-driven search engines like Google that make their own...

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This is the first in a series of tutorials regarding the API for developing Movable Type plugins for the new PHP dynamic rendering engine.

This tutorial applies to the current release of MT, which is version 3.11. Subsequent 3.x releases should also be compatible (and releases beyond that, but I cannot say for sure).

PHP Dynamic Publishing Architecture

The first thing we should cover is the architecture behind it all. In terms of PHP scripts, the following shows the order of invocation from request to response. • HTTP request • .htaccess rule / error document • mtview.php • MT Class (MT.php) • MTViewer Class, aka Smarty (MTViewer.php) • PHP • HTTP response with output

Let's examine each stage of...

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This is the first in a series of tutorials regarding the API for developing Movable Type plugins for the new PHP dynamic rendering engine.

This tutorial applies to the current release of MT, which is version 3.11. Subsequent 3.x releases should also be compatible (and releases beyond that, but I cannot say for sure).

PHP Dynamic Publishing Architecture

The first thing we should cover is the architecture behind it all. In terms of PHP scripts, the following shows the order of invocation from request to response. • HTTP request • .htaccess rule / error document • mtview.php • MT Class (MT.php) • MTViewer Class, aka Smarty (MTViewer.php) • PHP • HTTP response with output

Let's examine each stage of...

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For a complete list of the new features in v0.6, click here.

MTTrackbackEntry is a Movable Type plugin and hack that enables you to create new entries from the Trackbacks that you receive. In other words, it enables other people to post new entries in your blog, simply by pinging an entry or category on your blog. The title of this plugin/hack could just as easily be called TrackbackCrosspost, since it can act as a trackback-based cross-posting tool.

Currently, entries are created AND pings are received and recorded by default. In v0.6, actual ping entries can be optionally turned off. So if you turn off pings, TrackbackEntry will only record a new entry. Personally, I can't...

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Nofollow

The nofollow plugin is intended to help search engines understand which portions of your page are written by you and which are written by other people. The important element of this content is the hyperlink.

Many search engines use links between sites to understand how they relate. Comment/TrackBack spammers looking for higher placement in search engine rankings seek to exploit this heuristic in order to make their sites more relevant by linking to them from blogs.

By marking which links are part of your site versus part of third-party submissions, search engines can...

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As we've just announced, we'll be supporting the new rel="nofollow" attribute for comment and TrackBack links with our platforms.

With the introduction of the new spec, it's worth reviewing the initiative for Professional Network members who'd like an overview of the entire effort. • What is nofollow?

The HTML specification allows a tags for hyperlinks to include a rel attribute. This attribute is used to specify a link type describing the relationship between the document hosting the hyperlink and the document that is the target of the hyperlink. • Is this valid HTML?

Yup. Though the rel attribute has been relatively obscure (it's used in XFN and Technorati's tags, but...

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This section of the appendix details all configuration directives that can be defined in mt-config.cgi. Through use of these directives, you can control numerous aspects of the system.

Except for those which define things specific to your system (e.g. CGIPath and your database settings), all of them have defaults set by Movable Type. This means that not every directive will appear in mt-config.cgi. If you wish to override the default for a setting which does not appear in the file, simply add it and the desired value to your mt-config.cgi.

...

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09.13.2005

Movable Type 3.2 is huge in Japan

Our Japanese Six Apart team has released Movable Type 3.2 Beta. Featuring all the improvements and new capabilities in Movable Type 3.2, this version is completely localized in Japanese and supports all of the plugin functionality and templating options of the U.S. version that was released a few weeks ago.

Posted by anildash in Movable Type at 05:53 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

09.11.2005

New Blog Job Listings

Over on the Professional Network members blog, we've been regularly posting even more job listings for people with experience on Six Apart platforms, especially Movable Type. In the past week...

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