All roads in weblogging lead to posting entries, for without posted entries there is no weblog. It should come as no surprise that the Entries Listing and New/Edit Entry screens are where most users will find themselves when working with Movable Type.

In these screens a user can view what entries are in a weblog, filter them based on certain criteria, make new posts and edit existing ones.

Entries Listing

The Entries Listing screen displays either all the entries for the weblog or just the entries made by you. What gets displayed depends on whether or not you have been granted Edit All Posts access.

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It's been a slow year. With the Internet economy taking a bit of a tumble (perhaps you've read about it), new clients just haven't been calling like they were. So what's a hapless web designer with a family and a modest mortgage to do? Use the downtime to re-tool, re-learn, and switch over to Standards Compliant Design of course (wild cheers, whistles, deafening applause).

Done! Ummm, just one small problem. How do I convince my clients to go along with it? They may not be tech savvy, but they are well-versed in the mantra of designing for the least common denominator. Full access for everybody is the battle cry of the small business, and what's worse,...

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There are several ways to get statistics about your Movable Type weblog. Most web hosts give you access to some statistics regarding your site as a matter of course - referral logs (list of sites that link to you in which someone has clicked on the link to get to your site), number of hits, number of page views, etc. If you want more information, i.e. the search terms used to find your site, the most recent entry pages to your site, the mix of browsers and OS platforms of those viewing your site, the length of time people spend on average on your site, you can use a site statistics service, also known as a hit counter. These services work by having you put a small piece of code on the...

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2.6 (2003.02.13)

• Added Text Formatting options. Instead of a simple Convert Line Breaks checkbox, you can now set a different formatting option for each entry. Plugins can add new options to the Text Formatting menu, which allows for greater integration with the formatting within the system (for example, Text Formatting will be applied on the preview screen). • Added PostgreSQL and SQLite database drivers. • Incorporated Brad Choate's Sanitize plugin, adding an mt.cfg setting for a global default and a per-blog setting to override it. Sanitize is turned on...

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With broad platform integration of all the leading open standards, Movable Type has the potential to do much more, given additional expertise and knowledge on the user's part.

This chapters covers some of the more advanced features in addition to providing a starting point for more advanced topics not covered in this publication.

Architectural Overview

Movable Type is written in a highly modular Perl object-oriented style with an open code base (it's not open source -- an important distinction) that makes the browser-based tool quite flexible and easily modifiable, allowing it to adapt to any number of...

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Despite the enormous enthusiasm XML has aroused in fields from literate programming to database management to business interchange, it has so far mostly missed its original target, the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C) designed XML for the web, but its early promise has been held up by the lack of a few key standards - notably XLink, its hypertext link mechanism - and limited browser implementation. XML has barely moved out of the starting gate as a medium for web development.

Fortunately, new standards and new browers are finally making it possible for web developers to take XML seriously. While there are still obstacles, XML is finally reaching the...

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While entries make up the content of a weblog and templates control how these entries are displayed, it is the process of publishing that makes a weblog go. Movable Type refers to the process of publishing as rebuilding -- a reference to its static page generation roots. When a rebuild is performed, templates and your content are merged to publish a page that visitors can view in their browsers.

Choosing Between a Static or Dynamic Publishing Model

Movable Type provides the flexibility to choose between either static page generation or dynamic pages to optimize weblog performance on a per-template...

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Yes, I realize Movable Type is not a general-purpose content management system, but if you're in a pinch it can do wonders. Especially with this plugin, which allows you to associate other bits of data with your entries which can be extracted conviently in your templates. (Click the more link for more information.)

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtkeyvalues-1_53.zip

Installation

To install, place the...

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Introduction

Movable Type is the premier weblog publishing platform for businesses, organizations, developers, and web designers. Powerful customization gives you control over everything you publish and the elegant interface keeps things simple and clear.

Features

• Unlimited Blogging

Movable Type offers the ability to publish an unlimited number of blogs quickly and easily through a single installation of the application. And the platform supports posting by as many authors as you need, with no limit on the numbers of entries, comments, or TrackBacks the system...

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Ok, my games index is now live. It's a fairly complete list, although I know there are a bunch of DOS games that aren't on there just because I don't have them with me anymore (they're at home with Mom and Dad collecting dust). Anyway have a peek. If you're geographically nearby let me know if you'd like to borrow something. (While I'm at it, I might as well make this a Movable Type tip-- click the 'more' link for the goods.)

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Updated April 30, 2005

TrackBack is a feature of Movable Type (and Typepad) that allows you to let other sites know that you have linked to them, and lets you know when other sites have linked to you.

If enabled, the TrackBack feature will place a direct link on your Movable Type entry to entries from other sites that are linking to your entry. Conversely, if you place a link on your weblog entry that links to another site's entry, a link to your site will show up on the other site's entry.

Here an example of TrackBack in action. In this entry you can see that 7 other weblogs are referencing this entry.

Clicking on the TrackBack link will show the list of other sites or weblogs...

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Introduction

Over time a lot of content will be generated by a site, especially a weblog or news-oriented site. Finding that content in a reverse chronological archive can be difficult and frustrating. Local search can make a site more accessible by providing readers with the means to dynamically zero in on the content they are looking for.

Built-In Search

Movable Type's public search interface originally began as an add-on to MT developed by Jay Allen before formal plug-ins existed. The code was later integrated into MT version 2.5.

The search engine provides a rudimentary...

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For more than a year, ominous rumors have been privately circulating among high-level corporate leaders that Mozilla had been at work on what was darkly hinted to be the Ultimate Weapon, a Doomsday device. Intelligence sources traced the site of the top secret Mozillan project to the perpetually smog-shrouded wasteland known as Mountain View, California. What they were building, or why it should be located in such a remote and desolate place, no one could say.

How General Ripper was Driven to the Edge of Madness

U.S. General Jack D. Ripper was busy coding the Burpleson Air Force base website when he began experiencing problems. His fonts were serif where they were supposed to be...

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Those of you who have been blogging for at least a few years will remember a time all permalinks to individual weblog entries looked something like "http://www.example.com/002911.html" where 2911 was the entry ID of the entry in question. This scheme was not only unfriendly to users but also to search engines. Fast forward a few years and now we see the proliferation of search engine- and human-friendly URLs like the one for this entry thanks, in part, to Movable Type's basename field.

The entry basename, introduced in Movable Type 3.0D, consists of the first fifteen characters of an entry title with punctuation and spaces converted to URL-compatible characters. The basename is used by...

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As discussed previously on A List Apart, Fahrner Image Replacement (FIR), a technique developed to allow designers to use image-based typesetting while meeting accessibility requirements, only serves its intended purpose when screen readers misbehave.

The premise of FIR is simple: set the text-containing image as the background of an XHTML element and hide the corresponding plain text by nesting it in a span and setting the span's visibility to hidden, or display to none.

Most screen readers, however, are clever enough to realize that text set to visibility: hidden or display:none should not be read.

That's why Peter-Paul Koch came up with the idea to use...

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XML (Extensible Markup Language) is the Eurodollar of web development. Both XML and the Euro bring order to chaos; both offer undeniable, wide–ranging benefits; both are poised, in 2002, to change the way we do things. Frankly, both scare the crap out of people.

For web developers, 2002 is a time to conquer fears and take their first hands–on approach to XML. It's time to examine XML and realize the practical benefits that it can provide to web projects today.

The bankers can fend for themselves.

XML, HTML & Databases

If you need a good analogy to describe XML to other people, don't mention HTML. Although XML looks a lot like HTML,...

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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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Web standards promised us improved multimedia delivery: the ability to optimize content for computer screens, handhelds, printers, projection devices, and other media.

The CSS required to accomplish this is simple. All you have to do is import a separate style sheet for each media type to override the style selectors for the primary medium. Check out Eric A. Meyer's fantastic and influential article " Going to Print" for an in-depth example of how to do this. (Warning: some media aren't fully supported.)

Most of the discussion thus far in the design community has focused on styling content for varying media. Specifically, designers have tried to improve the...

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01.18.2005

Movable Type 'nofollow' plugin

Today we are pleased to announce our full support for the rel="nofollow" attribute to hyperlinks introduced to address the main cause of weblog spam: the payoff of higher placement in search engine results.

This initiative, with announced support from Google, Yahoo, MSN (and surely more to come), will direct search engines to ignore links with this attribute set for the purposes of spidering or increasing search engine relevance or ranking.

For current users of Movable Type (note: this plugin is included by default starting with version 3.16), this support is implemented as a simple plugin ( zip [4K], tar/gzip [3K]-- tested on MT 3.x and MT 2.661). For most users enabling "nofollow" support involves placing a single file in your plugins directory. All links submitted by external users in comments and TrackBacks will then be modifed to add the...

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Some days ago, a new version of MTLookup was released. Please read Second version of MTLookup released for the announcement. I will describe the new features in several posts, which will be published here in the Movable Type Weblog.

Today, I want to tell you about stemming and how MTLookup benefits from this.

The Problem

If you already used the first version of MTLookup, maybe you saw this problem yourself: you had to write the search term in exactly the same way that the author wrote it.

If the author only used the word »template«, but you searched for »templates«, you would not hit that article. There was only thing that you could do: try different...

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