It's hard to work in the web business nowadays without hearing about Perl. (It's hard to work in the web business nowadays, period, but that's another story.) Perl is one of the most popular languages in use today, is completely free, open sourced, and supported by an extremely enthusiastic community.

In addition to the core features of the language, numerous modules and scripts are available on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network ( CPAN).

These ready–made scripts include everything from streaming MP3 servers to hooks into news clients, while the modules offer powerful generic functionality for almost any task imaginable. Everything on CPAN is completely...

continue reading ...

3.16 (2005.04.13)

Security

• Made several important improvements with regards to application authentication and security.

Notifications

• Fixed ``Send Notifications'' feature for multiple recipients. • Fixed a bug where comment notifications weren't being sent for some moderated comments.

Error checking

• Improved validation of user input in many places. Leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed from author names, category names, and blog names. None of these can be left blank except for a known issue with editing the...

continue reading ...

The Movable Type team has been hard at work and we have some very exciting things coming in the 2005 release schedule. To kick things off we are proud to introduce Movable Type 3.16.

Movable Type 3.16 sports significant improvements to application security and over one hundred other fixes which really make it a highly recommended upgrade for all users.

Movable Type 3.16 is a simple drop-in replacement for any user who is running version 3.1 or higher. As long as you are running one of these more recent versions, there is no need to run an upgrade script or do anything other than upload the files in the upgrade distribution. Of course, if you're running a version older...

continue reading ...

Page: 1 1 Page.

Hacking Movable Type

I finally got my copy of Hacking Movable Type and finished reading it last night. Written by the biggest names in the Movable Type community, the 300 pages of Movable Type goodness guide you through getting the most out...

Continue reading "Hacking Movable Type"

Posted on 08/21/2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Firefox Search Plugins

I had forgotten to share these little goodies that I frequently use. The little search bar in Firefox is indespensible for me and I have all sorts of search engines there including many Movable Type resources. Here are three...

Continue reading "Firefox Search Plugins"

Posted on 03/20/2005 |...

continue reading ...

by Category | by Date

Anti-Spam

Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist - MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist Birdhouse notes on Comment Spam - Why this web host is forcing comment registration Blacklist to Mod Security - by Peter Wood Brad Choate: SpamLookup - anti-spam plugin Interview with a Comment Spammer - The Register's interview with a blog comment spammer. MT-Approval Plugin - Prevents comment spam from spam bots MT-DSBL Open Proxy Comment Filter - from Brad Choate MT-Moderate - Plugin for moderating trackbacks and comments from Chad Everett Mod Rewrite to Block Bot Spam - Mod Rewrite method to divert comment spam bots to a 403...

continue reading ...

This plugin has been deprecated. The Santize plugin was incorporated (and extended) into Movable Type 2.6. For more information about this and how you would go about uninstalling this plugin, please read this article.

Sanitize is a Movable Type plugin that allows you to clean HTML and other markup that might exist in an comment entry. Read on for more information about how it works and what it's for. If you're using Movable Type and allow HTML comments on your site, you really need to read this...

...

continue reading ...

The protection of your privacy is important for me. The following declaration shows my information practices and describes which data is collected and stored. Furthermore addresses are given, in case you want to contact me concerning questions of data security.

Data Security

All pages of this website can be read anonymously. You do not have to identify yourself at any time or give any information about yourself.

I emphasize that data sent voluntarily is treated confidential. None of this information - including in particular all personal data as for example first name, surname, address, email - is given to other parties and not handed over for their use.

You might give personal...

continue reading ...

Updated. Originally posted April 3, 2005.

If you are using a MySQL database and your blog is PHP enabled (see Converting to PHP), you can use PHP scripts to pull blog data from your database to add customizations to your blog. For example, say you would like to have on your sidebar a quote, randomly pulled from a selection of quotes, with a new quote displayed every time you refresh the page. You can accomplish this by creating a separate weblog for quotes, then using a simple PHP script to pull the data from your MySQL database, and using a PHP include to put the script results into your main weblog page.

PHP scripts are a level of difficulty up from Movable Type, and require...

continue reading ...

Running Movable Type with suexec or cgiwrap

Problem

You want to make your Movable Type system more secure with suexec or cgiwrap.

Solution

Run the system under cgiwrap or suexec.

Discussion

cgiwrap and suexec are special tools on the web server that allow your CGI scripts to be executed as "you", rather than as the web server. This simplifies Movable Type installation, because you no longer have to set permissions on your weblog or db directories, although you still need to set the permissions on the CGI scripts themselves. It is also more secure, because your weblog...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

Choosing the Right Weblog Platform

Problem

You are trying to determine whether Movable Type or TypePad is right for you.

Solution

Decide what is most important to you: simplicity or control.

Discussion

TypePad is a complement to Movable Type, not a replacement. The two tools share a common core designed to address the needs of users with different requirements and capabilities. So, the question that will often be asked is, which is right the tool to use, Movable Type or TypePad? The answer comes down to simplicity vs. control. TypePad's centralized design and focus on...

continue reading ...

The full URL (including http:// and your site's domain name) to your public weblog. This URL should not include the filename of your index file; for example, if your index file is located at http://www.example.com/blog/index.html, then the value for Site URL should be http://www.example.com/blog/.

This is a required field.

Example: http://www.example.com/blog/

You should never set your Site URL to the same value as your Movable Type application URL (i.e. your CGIPath). Publishing your weblog content to the Movable Type directory is a security hazard and can lead to numerous problems such as...

continue reading ...

The first thing you might want to do when customizing your Movable Type blog style is to change the color of the background, banner, headlines, or text. This is pretty easy to do; the adjustments are made in your weblog's stylesheet template.

Before you start, you should have a basic understanding of how colors are coded into a web page. Open up your stylesheet from the templates menu in your MT edit screen. If you scroll down you will see several instances of the word "color" followed by a # sign and six characters comprised of letters and or numbers. These six characters represent a color; the first 2 characters affect the RED tones of RGB, the third and fourth characters...

continue reading ...

02.17.2003

Text Formatting Plugins Available

As we mentioned in our original post on Text Formatting, we hoped that Text Formatting plugins would make it easier for non-technical users to author and format weblog content. We released 2.6 just last week, and already plugin developers have implemented some exciting new Text Formatting options: • Timothy Appnel released a beta of his TikiText text formatting. • Brad Choate released version 1.1 of his Textile plugin. • Gregor Purdy released a POD text formatting text formatting plugin. • And, since we forgot to mention it previously, Adam Kalsey released MovableJive, a "port of some classic text filters".

Posted by Benjamin Trott at...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

Configuring the System

Problem

You need to configure a Movable Type system.

Solution

Add to and modify the configuration directives in mt-config.cgi, the Movable Type configuration file.

Discussion

Configuration directives define the baseline information Movable Type needs to run in any given environment. These should not be confused with the system and weblog settings accessed through the MT interface. The configuration contains only the basic information that MT needs to get running.

The following steps detail the basic configuration each installation will initially need in...

continue reading ...

As you may have seen already, Six Apart decided to take additional funding from August Capital in a series "B" round.

When it boils down to taking funds, a venture firm believes that they will achieve a significant return on their investment. Venture funding isn't about charity. We believe that we have huge potential to do some great things. Ten million dollars is *a lot* of money -- it's a sort of figure that I can barely fathom when thinking about our roots. We'll use the money to bring the company to the next level -- a cliched phrase, I know. We're going to be competing with some of the largest companies in the world and it will take money to build the sort of features that we've...

continue reading ...

We've just launched Movable Type 3.16, which we previewed to Professional Network members on the email list and members-only blog last week. We've heard a lot of good feedback from you about Movable Type since the launch of the Professional Network a few months ago, and this release addresses many of your requests.

The focus for Movable Type 3.16 is on code quality and cleaning up little issues and bugs that have crept into the code base, either in the past year or, in some cases, since Movable Type was first released.

To get started, you can get Movable Type now, or log in to your account to upgrade. Or, read on to find out more details.

A solid, high-quality platform

First, above all you've told...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

05.31.2005

Movable Type Cheat Sheet

One of the great things about Movable Type being localized into a number of languages and having such a broad international presence is that we get great contributions from our community around the world. The latest contribution is Jörg Petermann's Movable Type Cheat Sheet, which he's published in both German and English.

The Cheat Sheet, available in both PDF and PNG formats, covers all the standard Movable Type template tags, as well as common attributes for the tags and the date format used for output. Most of these tags also apply to TypePad's advanced templates as well, so it's worth keeping a copy of the Cheat Sheet...

continue reading ...