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 content. Templates describe where you want...

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A great way to easily customize the look of your Movable Type weblog is to replace the default title banner with a banner image. There are two basic methods for adding a banner image - adjusting the CSS or adjusting the index and archive templates.

Before making template adjustments, you first need to prepare your banner image. You might choose to use an image that will take up the entire banner space, or you might want more of a logo-like image that would only take up a part of the banner space, with a solid color making up the difference. Photographic images that extend to the edges of your weblog's container work best for banners in "fixed width" styles, such as in the default...

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On th' other side up rose BELIAL, in act more graceful and humane; A fairer person lost not Heav'n; he seemd For dignity compos'd and high exploit: But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear The better reason, to perplex and dash Maturest Counsels: for his thoughts were low; To vice industrious, but to Nobler deeds Timorous and slothful: yet he pleas'd the eare, And with persuasive accent thus began.

– John Milton, Paradise Lost

Please allow me to introduce myself.

I am the cancer that has riddled the formerly healthy body of the Web.

I am the darkness that has spread forever across...

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When I started to work with fulltext search in Movable Type, I enhanced my Movable Type Weblog with a native MySQL fulltext search engine. Later I created a new website called MTLookup, which could be used for searching several websites at the same time.

After MTLookup was released, the search within the Movable Type Weblog was still based on the initial release: no Google-like keyphrase, only my weblog being indexed, some of the most recent articles not included at all.

Starting today, the search within the Movable Type Weblog will be powered by MTLookup, making all the enhancements of MTLookup available within the Movable Type Weblog.

Some more details

Although both websites - the...

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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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If you don't know what style sheets will do for you and your audience, you can review the spec online; or see Dr Web {Dr Web is now off-line - Ed.} for a quick tutorial. We'll be here when you return.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) save bandwidth, vastly reducing the size of your files when compared to old-style <FONT FACE> markup. With styles, your sites load faster. You work faster, too. Styles shave grueling hours of grunt-work off your design workload: one brief CSS document can style an entire domain; and when it's time to redesign, you can execute site-wide changes in minutes instead of days.

Style sheets bring genuine leading and sophisticated...

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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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This plugin allows you to define search and replace parameters for elements you produce from Movable Type templates. Keep reading for the details.

More details forthcoming-- for now I'm just providing the download link. The readme.txt in the zip file has all the relevant information.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtregex-1_61.zip

...

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Chuck recently asked about adding a blogroll to MT. I pointed him to this tutorial rather than pointing him to Blogrolling.com.

Ever since Blogrolling changed ownership, I've felt that the service has been going downhill. A few months ago, when I removed the blogrolling php code off my site load times drastically decreased. One of my main peeves with blogrolling was that it was located on a remote server. During the transition period that server was often down, and caused load times on my site to shoot up - so high that my site was nearly unaccessible. Another problem with the Blogrolling involves the site Blogshares.com. Some script that were heavily relied on were deleted and caused...

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You probably already know how to use media-specific CSS to provide a suitable layout for the printed page.

But how great would it be to be able to go further and provide a better print alternative through the use of specific high-resolution images specifically for print? Awesome? Here's how.

HTML image sizing

HTML and CSS allow us to force images to display in a different size than their native dimensions. I recently began wondering whether higher resolution devices like printers might be able to use the pixels omitted by the relatively low resolutions intended for screen viewing

So I began an experiment to compare the way resized images look on screen to their appearance in...

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The world is afire this morning with talk of the announcements by Six Apart and the three major search engines ( Google, MSN and Yahoo) to support a new HTML attribute named nofollow (in full, rel="nofollow"). By adding this attribute to your link anchors, the search engines will no longer consider the linking page as a component of the linked page's rank.

The idea is a simple one: Add this attribute to all link tags that you don't want to contribute to the rank of the linked page. For instance, comments and trackbacks, which are submitted to your site by users, are by their very nature considered "unknowns". Adding this attribute to those tags means you don't "stand up" for the value...

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After talking to Brad about the new version of MT, I felt it deserves a whole blog post about it just to talk about how amazing it is and get rid of all this excitement building up in me

First of, David's Subcats being built into the application. Well I knew it ! In #mt-plugins, David told me and a few others that he would not be entering his plugin into the contest - on further questioning he said that there was another party involved. Well once he said that it wasn't too hard to guess the right answer and we were helped by the fact that when he guessed it he either changed the topic or kept quiet ! Never-the-less I am very excited about this because Sub Categories are vital for many...

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

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This morning I saw a flurry of new information from many sources about this thing called rel="nofollow" which is supposed to help stop comment spamming. Read about it's interaction with Movable Type at Six Log, Movable Type, and the Six Apart Professional Network, and a little more generic info is at Google.

Either I don't fully understand what nofollow is supposed to do, or it really is a dumb idea. I'm confident it's the latter.

Well, ok, those who implement nofollow will definitely help in not raising a spammer's Google PageRank. But that's the only benefit. As has been pointed out, a legitimate commenter's link won't count...

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Quite a high-threshold discussion happening on fellow Canadian Jeremy Shield's weblog.

Nothing really too new here, except for the observation that, with everyone's help of course, we've more or less made it impossible to argue that CSS design is inherently ugly.

…tableless design transforms the web into a library and less of a visual spectacle…

This is an interesting point, since, yeah actually - that's exactly what's happening. And it's good, remarkably good, for this to happen. Not only are table-less sites not boring, they're accessible. Keep in mind that all CSS Zen Garden examples validate to WAI AAA-level accessibility, although the individual designs can be more and less accessible depending on techniques used. Not only are they accessible, search engines love them. The Zen Garden is insanely high in Google thanks in part to well marked-up content. Not only are they search engine optimized, but they are, contrary to what you say, far less bandwidth hungry than tables. The average conversion of a site from tables to CSS-based chops the...

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Having recently installed Movable Type 3.11, I decided to have a look at the newly-available Plugin Pack for Movable Type. One plugin - MT-Blacklist - is very worth while; others are interesting but not particularly useful for me, and others don't even interest me.

I installed MT-Blacklist because this past week we've been getting assaulted by comment spam. Over the past year we've gotten one or two comment spams per week, but this past week we've gotten over 60! This plugin looks at every comment (and trackback) left on this site. If it's spam, it's never posted; if it's questionable it's put in a "moderation"...

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Most weblogs allow commenting an entry. Unfortunately, this good feature can also be misused. It is very important for a weblog author to understand this subject fully.

Important Note

Six Apart - the developer of Movable Type - is aware of the subject and has written the extensive article Six Apart Guide To Comment Spam. It is definitely worth reading.

What is Spam?

The word Spam describes unwanted email or simple text. Certainly, you have seen it yourself, either in electronic mailboxes or in discussion forums in the internet. Concerning Movable Type this means that a comment is not wanted because of its content or because it appears in multiple copies in a weblog.

For example, such comment...

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02.28.2005

TypePad UK Launches

We're proud to announce today that TypePad has launched in the UK. Though it was our least strenuous language translation ever, we're proud to have another country-specific offering to complement our current services in Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, Spain, and The United States.

Posted by anildash in TypePad at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

02.27.2005

Dreamforce, blogs for the Salesforce.com community

Salesforce.com is one of the most popular hosted business applications, with an active community of users and developers. One of the ways that they're keeping in touch with these diverse...

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09.29.2004

Behind the Scenes - Brenna Koch

Behind The Scenes is a new series where we here at Six Apart discuss what tools (software, technology, etc.) we use to do our work.

I'm Brenna Koch and I work in technical support for Six Apart. If you're curious, "Cook" is how you pronounce my last name. I usually hear "Cotch" since that's how it is said in some areas and I also hear more ah... interesting variations. But now you know.

We have many browsers around in the support department but my favorite is Safari. I utilize keyboard commands with my bookmarks bar for fast access on the sites I use all the time like my test weblogs and pages in the help system...

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10.29.2004

Firefox on the March

Red Herring's got an interview with Rob Davis, the man behind the campaign to advertise Firefox in the New York Times. It's especially good timing for promoting every geek's favorite browser, since the updated roadmap shows the browser scheduled for release on November 9th.

Posted by Anil in at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

10.29.2004

Advice to the bloglorn

Metaforix President Lois C. Ambash has some advice for those afraid of business blogging. It's a solid set of guidelines, but we also loved the praise for TypePad:

As a novice blogger, I chose TypePad for my own blog, and I couldn't be happier. The...

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