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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Well, it looks like this weblog is becoming just a Movable Type how-to blog. Well, in keeping with that theme, here's a little "part two" companion piece for Doing your whole site with MT (one of my worst blog titles, ever).

Now that you've got your whole site MT-powered, what about your RSS feed? Chances are you, have one for your weblog, but what about one for everything? I've created one for my site, called sitewide.rss. It lets folks keep track of every update that happens to my site, whether it be part of my weblog or not.

To get it to work, you have to do a little bit of...

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<MTOnThisDay> Movable Type Plugin

The plugin support for Movable Type 2.2 is fantastic! And now we can develop the stuff that Ben just hasn't gotten around to yet. Here's one-- I've created a container tag that lets you pull entries that match the current system/entry month and day.

If you want to read more about it, visit the MT Plugin support forum page I've set up for this plugin.

To download the plugin, click here.

Updated on July 5. See included readme.txt file for details.

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UPDATE: If you have any feature request I'm all ears. Gearing up for the release I want to see if there are any feature requests I can implement, I think I've fixed all the bugs that were reported so expect a release in the next few weeks.

I had released this to ProNet a few days ago but have not gotten much feedback. That can be either that people are waiting for the point release and don't want to install a beta or that there aren't many bugs in this beta. Either way I want to open up testing for MT Blogroll 2.0 (I'm still thinking about that version number). I'm going to copy my post to ProNet here to save me some time.

I've re-written Blogroll to use its own tables in the DB so...

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Matt Haughey has a great article on how he uses Movable Type to do it all (apparently, Kottke does too… can't wait to see his article).

Anyhow, I wanted to share a tidbit in that vein. I've just set this up recently, and I'm in the process of moving the rest of my static content to use it. What I did: • Created a new Movable Type blog and named it "bradchoate.com: Static Content". • Deleted all the Index templates. • Deleted all the archive templates, except for the Individual archive template. • Made sure individual archives were enabled. • Made the archive path the root...

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There are two methods to create a random entry, pulled from your weblog database (if you aren't using dynamic publishing). The easiest is David Raynes' MTRandomEntries plugin. However, MTRandomEntries generates a random entry only when you rebuild the page on which the MTRandomEntry code is located. If you want a random entry to be generated each time the page is refreshed in a browser, you can do that with a PHP script that pulls the data from your MySQL database. For this method to work your blog needs to be PHP enabled and you need to be using a MySQL database.

This tutorial will outline variations of a PHP script you can use to generate random entries, similar to what can be seen...

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Updated June 12, 2005. Originally posted in Spring of 2004.

The default Movable Type installation automatically publishes RSS feeds for your weblog. The three formats supported are Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. You can find the templates associated with these syndication formats in the templates section of your MT edit screen.

The default RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 syndication feed templates for MT version 3.x produces a feed with the content in your MT entry body. The default Atom feed template produces a feed with both the entry body and the extended entry. The default RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds in MT version 2.661 generated feeds with only the entry excerpt.

You may or may not want to...

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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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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...

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In creating templates for your Movable Type installation, you'll find that the <MTEntryCategories>, <MTCategories>, and <MTParentCategories> container tags have a "glue" attribute. The glue attribute is used to separate items with a string. For example, joining category/subcategory names together with a comma or slash to create breadcrumbs (a path tracing your entry's hierarchy). A simple example of breadcrumbs might look like this:

Category Subcategory Entry

Often it is desirable to use an HTML tag as the "glue," though quickly trying it you'll find it doesn't work. The extra greater-than and less-than signs...

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Multiblog is an indespensible plugin that allows you to display content from other blogs. Unfortunately, in its current version it doesn't work with dynamic publishing. A few days ago I was investigating the best way to duplicate MultiBlog's functions in the dynamic templating system. As it turns out, Movable Type's powerful dynamic templating system makes it easy to include content from other blogs.

With dynamic publishing all you need to do to pull content from other blogs is to change the blog context of the page. Every tag is parsed within a context which affects the content it outputs. For example, with the MTEntries tag the correct entries are outputted because Movable Type...

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It's a shame MT doesn't provide year-based archives because some of us have enough entries for them even if Movable Type hasn't been out that long! Here's what my 2001 blogging year looks like. Well, you can create them manually-- and since you only have to do it once a year, it isn't too bad. Click the 'more' link for details...

All you have to do to build a year archive is create an index template...

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We've worked hard to make sure all the configuration settings for your weblogs are more intuitively organized and simplified, while still retaining all the power and control that Movable Type affords.

New in Movable Type 3.2 is a reorganization of weblog configuration into a few weblog settings screens. One of the most notable is the Feedback settings, which govern comments and TrackBacks. At the simplest level, there's a blog-level on/off switch for both comments and TrackBacks, and the options for each have been reduced to cover all the common scenarios for enabling feedback on a blog. You can easily require authentication, make it optional, or not require it at all, and it's...

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Do you use a commercial web host to host your Movable Type installation? If so, are you happy with your host? Unhappy? Please take a minute to fill out a few questions related to your web host in this very short survey. The answers will be compiled and used to update the LMT tutorial on MT Friendly Web Hosts. Thanks so much for your time!

Update: The survey is now closed. Results can be found at Movable Type Friendly Web Hosts. Have you found the tutorials at Learning Movable Type helpful? Please consider linking to LMT at http://www.learningmovabletype.com/ . Thanks!

Posted by elise on October 05, 2004 to Announcements | Email to a friend | Printer-friendly version ...

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The idea is pretty simple: returning visitors get to see only new content, not the old stuff. After all, if they're returning, that's probably what they want.

Using a cookie, I can track when you've last visited the front page. If any content is newer than the cookie, it gets published. If not, a "no new entries" message gets displayed. And so I dubbed it "Cookie Publishing."

You'll need to be able to use PHP to implement this feature. Visit danandsherree.com's front page to see it work - first a cookie will be set, then refresh to see it in action - or keep reading for details of how to set this up yourself.

2005/08/02...

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There's a whole range of new ways to work with and manage your photos in Movable Type. First, if you're using Flickr to manage your photos, MovableTypeFlickrPhotosets will let you fetch a list of your Flickr photosets to include in your weblog.

To work with photos within Movable Type, you'll want to try MT-PhotoGallery. There's a straightforward set of instructions on the plugin page for integrating the system with your existing Movable Type installation.

If you'd rather work more with Movable Type's built-in functionality, you can follow either of two excellent tutorials from Nicholas Findley and Elise Bauer. There's also a list of photoblog tutorials on the Movable Type wiki which...

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UPDATE Fixed a bug with moderation set on Typekey users. Bit to be edited is the code in edit_comment.tmpl

The moderation queue is one of the most powerful features that MT 3 has, and some advocate an aggresive use of it when paired with plugins. Currently, you are able to approve a comment but not unapprove a comment. This hack will add an unapprove button to the edit comment screen that will throw the comment back into moderation.

Open lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and around line 32 find

'approve_comment' => &approve_comment,

and add beneath it

'unapprove_comment' => &unapprove_comment,

Next find

sub list_commenters {

and add above it

sub unapprove_comment { my $app = shift; my $perms = $app->{perms}...

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I really like the "Build All Templates Statically" option on the Templates page, however I really wanted a Build All Templates Dynamically option. I posted a feature request on the subject but I don't think it was taken any further, so I took the matter into my own hands, see the screenshot (click for larger image).

Open up MT/App/CMS.pm and search for the following block of text, line #4842.

} elsif ($dcty eq 'archives') { require MT::Template; my @templates = MT::Template->load({ blog_id => $blog->id }); for my $tmpl (@templates) { $tmpl->build_dynamic($tmpl->type ne 'index'); $tmpl->save(); } } elsif ($dcty eq 'custom') {...

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As the image above shows, $40 (20% of the Dropcash campaign) has been donated to the American Red Cross to help with the victims of Hurricane Katrina. A big Thank You to all the donors of the CustomFields Dropcash campaign that made this possible.

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Evolt's Ten CSS tricks you may not know is exactly what the title suggests. Worth keeping around for future reference.

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