I've just recently changed the contents of the <title></title> tags on this site. After seeing some search results and recognizing how unhelpful the title appeared, I knew I had to make a change. For example, Googling for something I knew was on this site, I found the title: "Computers > Movable Type> Alternate Temp…" Not readable. After a few changes, a search now shows this result: "Alternate Template Collection, in the Computers > Movable Type …" Much better! A default MT installation can show just as useless titles by first specifying the site name. It's easy to change, though.

A new MT weblog's title...

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Anil Dash has posted about my forums powered by Movable Type. I started doing this more than a year ago, and I have evolved it on some sites into active forums with additional features. For example, take a look at Seinfeld Forum. As you can see, this Movable Type-powered forum has over 4,000 topics (entries) and over 15,000 replies (comments). Features include a "post count" (using the CommentLeaders plugin) and an associated status level based on post count. I recently added automication pagination of threads using my MTDynamic plugin (although I don't think I have released that version of the plugin yet). I have also added a search function that searches only the forum section...

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Editor's Note: At our request, J. David Eisenberg, one of A List Apart's technical editors, wrote " Validating a Custom DTD" to accompany Peter-Paul Koch's " JavaScript Triggers," an article that demonstrated a means of abstracting a web page's behavioral layer from its structural and presentational ones. In their first article for ALA, the W3C's Quality Assurance Group breaks down the downside of custom DTDs.

In a previous issue of A List Apart, Peter-Paul Koch discussed the addition to his markup of non-standard attributes to create JavaScript triggers. J. David Eisenberg noted that since the attributes were not part of XHTML, the...

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Hi everyone, my name is Jay Allen and I am the Product Manager for Movable Type. I'm writing today to address - what else? - comment spam.

This is an issue that, as many of you know, I have spent several thousand waking hours working on since its first appearance back in the fall of 2003, both as the author of MT-Blacklist and as the maintainer of the Comment Spam Clearinghouse. This is an issue which Six Apart takes very seriously, as evidenced not only in the improvements in Movable Type v3.x but also, in some part, by my hiring to this position.

Over the last month, we have been devoting a great deal of resources to solving the comment spam problem once and for...

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In this tutorial, we'll use the event-handling capabilities of the Document Object Model (DOM) to make some minor improvements to the expanding menu that we developed in a previous tutorial. [Truth in advertising: these improvements are borderline cute; their real purpose is to serve as a vehicle to introduce the concepts of events and nodes.]

In the previous tutorial, we discussed using the CSS display property to make an expanding menu like the one below. In that tutorial, only the small plus or minus sign images were clickable. However, if you try the menu below, you'll see that all the words in the main headings are active and clickable; not just the...

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This plugin is designed to be used with MT-BlackList. The plugin gives you the ability easily see stats about what is being blocked by your blacklist, including the ability to summarize and rank blacklist entries.

BlacklistStats is an adaptation of the Searches plugin by David Raynes. 99.9% of the credit goes to David, as I modified only a very small portion of the code to create this plugin.

Instructions

1. Download the plugin: blackliststats.zip

2. Upload the "blackliststats.pl" file to the plugins directory in your MT installation.

3. Begin using the template tags described below

Template Tags

MTBlacklistStats - A container tag used for displaying statistics about your...

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Maciej Ceglowski has built a prototype for a semantic search engine. To adapt it to function as a Movable Type plugin, he needs sample content that he can test against.

If successful, the search feature would let you do a keyword search, and get back relevant results even when there was no exact keyword match.

If you'd like to help out, send him some content.

Previous Entry: Six Log - The Six Apart Weblog

Next Entry: Tokyo Movable Type Users Gathering

...

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Ben and I gave a talk at BlogTalk in Vienna on Tuesday. Unfortunately, because of jetlag and some bad timing, we weren't able to convey all the points we wanted to make in the talk itself. So, I'm posting a transcript of the speech we prepared.

I realize that we've never really communicated these messages. I feel strongly — and have always — that personal weblogs are often marginalized because of their presumed triviality. Weblogs are going to hit the mainstream and they're going to be a new method for communicating with small, intimate groups in a more optimized manner.

---

Good morning. My name is Mena Trott and this is Ben Trott, my husband and co-founder of Six...

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11.30.2004

Interview with Nick Bradbury

A good interview with Nick Bradbury of TopStyle and FeedDemon fame, with tips on becoming an independent software vendor:

If you plan to do this for a living, focus on building tools that make peoples lives easier or more interesting, and chances are youll last longer and find your work more fulfilling.

Posted by Anil in Blog Strategy at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

11.30.2004

More on the MT3 Bible

Rogers Cadenhead talks a bit more about the newly-released Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition, and is very generously giving away five author's copies to people who comment on, or link to, his post...

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01.12.2003

Tokyo Movable Type Users Gathering

Starting next Wednesday, Ben and I will be visiting Tokyo, Japan.

On Friday, January 17th, our host, Joi Ito and Neoteny will be hosting a Movable Type users meet-up in Tokyo. The venue will be determined once they have a good idea of how many people will be attending. Tentatively, the gathering is set to start between 6:00-6:30 and will be located near their Akasaka office. More details to come.

So, if you're in Tokyo, we'd love to meet you.

Update: Those who responded should expect an email with more information about venue and times. Thanks!

Posted by Mena at 08:57 PM | Permalink...

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We're proud to announce that Movable Type 3.2 is now available. This release improves upon what is already the most powerful blogging platform by offering a better experience at every step. This new version combines the strengths and innovations you have come to expect from Movable Type over the past four years, boosted by the addition of over 100 unique new features that will help your blogs truly shine.

Best of all, it's a free update for any licensed user of Movable Type 3.x. Personal users will be happy to find that the Free edition now offers unlimited blogs. And personal users who want a multi-user license and access to our famed technical support can now take...

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Sooner or later, you may be called upon to create or maintain an internal website. If you work for a major corporation, or are contracted at one (as I am), internal sites may comprise the bulk of your work.

Don't be afraid of internal sites. In many respects, they are very similar to external sites. There are two main differences though. • Internal sites tend to be much larger. • They're geared toward employees, not the great unwashed masses.

Let's say you work for Fergus & McFungus Associates, a major corporation that produces lots of useless things that people just can't get enough of. The CEO, Angus McFungus, approaches you in his usual...

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We believe in total empowerment of the user to decide what content they want to look at. – Microsoft Product Manager Shawn Sanford, as quoted by NewsBytes

Microsoft thinks they can improve my writing. This makes me want to get a gun and go to war. – Dave Winer, Scripting.com

Smart Tags can be developed by anybody, are completely under the user's control, and can do some very useful things. – Executive Editor David Coursey, writing for ZDNet AnchorDesk

This is exactly like what Microsoft did in the past...leveraging what they have on the desktop into another market... – Gartner analyst Michael Silver, as quoted by News.com

The dustup surrounding...

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An unauthorized companion to the Online Style Guide of the Branch Libraries of The New York Public Library

XHTML is the standard markup language for web documents and the successor to HTML 4. A mixture of classic (HTML) and cutting–edge (XML), this hybrid language looks and works much like HTML but is based on XML, the web's "super" markup language, and brings web pages many of XML's benefits, as enumerated by the Online Style Guide of the Branch Libraries of The New York Public Library.

If you want your site to work well in today's browsers and non–traditional devices, and to continue to work well in tomorrow's, it's a good...

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ClockLink Clocklink from www.clocklink.com is a free service that consists of a shockwave-flash application that you can embed into your website with a simple link. Pick your clock type and your timezone.

Copyright © 2004-2005 Elise Bauer. All Rights Reserved (unless otherwise specified).

Has this tutorial been helpful? Please consider linking to Learning Movable Type at http://www.learningmovabletype.com/ . Thanks!

Posted by Elise Bauer on March 08, 2004 to Weblog Goodies | Email to a friend | Comments(0) | Printer-friendly version

Search Engine Marketing, Inc. : Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site [Book] Buy Now from Amazon.com! $32.99...

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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 inform you about how websites are indexed and show how new websites can be included into MTLookup.

First Release

When the first version of MTLookup was released in June, just three websites were spidered. These were my own Movable Type Weblog, Elise's Learning Movable Type, and Arvind's Movalog. I talked to both Elise and Arvind before the first version was developed. Both looked at pre-release versions and gave important suggestions....

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Some people like Movable Type to separate words in a post's friendly URL by using hyphens instead of underscores, since some search engines seem to prefer hyphens to seaparate words. Good news from Cal Henderson: he's made dashify, a Movable Type 3 plugin which lets you simply use dashify="1" instead of dirify="1" in your archive path settings to make your URLs dashier.

Update: Oops! I forgot to mention Ian Fenn's DirifyDashes plugin that he'd made back in June. Along with DirifyPlus and Dirify for Unicode, most of your dirification needs should be well covered.

Trackbacks:

Warnadunia.NET Plug - Dashify - October 5, 2004 01:30 PMCal's dashify plugin. (via)...

Neil's Smaller...

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A few of us from Six Apart are at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, as mentioned on our Six Apart news blog, and if you're here, you'll want to check out Ben Trott's session on Making Web Services Personal at 2:35pm.

One of the coolest things we've seen since getting here is the announcement from Amazon's A9 search team of the new OpenSearch spec.

While we'd hacked together a solution for enabling OpenSearch on your Movable Type site while we're here (and got to tell an old Etech friend about the implementation), Niall Kennedy was busy posting while we were still in the panels, so he has a straightforward implementation of an OpenSearch template for Movable Type.

Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, our VP of...

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After having released MTLookup, I received a lot of suggestions about which websites to include in future versions. There was one suggestion that almost anybody mentioned: the Movable Type User Manual.

My initial plan was to keep the database stable in July and extend it next month together with the new version of MTLookup. I ignored this plan, and made the MTLookupBot read parts of the Six Apart hompeage. As a result, the User Manual and some other documents are now included in the index.

How is a Document included?

MTLookup is made up of two important components: • MTLookup is a standard SQL-based application. A user can enter some search phrase. Based on this, a result list...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for retrieving data in XML format and displaying the data on your MT-generated pages. It's basically a Movable Type interface to the extremely handy XML::Simple Perl module. The plugin will work with any well-formed XML document that can be retrieved via an HTTP GET request.

The GetXML plugin is extremely generalized, and to use it you'll have to understand the structure of the XML data you want to work with. There are specific MT plugins available for certain particular types of XML data, such as RSS feeds, Amazon content, and weather forecasts. If there's a specific plugin out there for the XML resource you're interested in, by...

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