Question

My database has been corrupted. Is there any way to avoid losing my data?

Answer

This answer depends a great deal on the level of corruption, the type of backups you have, and how much information is still accessible from within your existing installation (as opposed to being in external files such as the static pages Movable Type has generated from the data).

Does your host maintain backups for your account?

If so, do they have any which would include copies of your database files prior to the time corruption appears to have occurred?...

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Many people wanted to know how I implemented these guicktags into my comments form. So here's a quick tutorial for that. In your comments form find

<p><label for="text">Comments:</label> <MTIfAllowCommentHTML> (you may use HTML tags for style)</MTIfAllowCommentHTML><br/> <textarea tabindex="4" id="text" name="text" rows="10" cols="50"></textarea></p>

and replace it with

<div class="quicktags"><p><label for="text">Comments:</label> <MTIfAllowCommentHTML><script src="http://www.movalog.com/mt/js_quicktags.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script type="text/javascript">edToolbar();<...

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Working with Style Catcher

With 3.2 came the very nice StyleCatcher plugin that allowed you to easily manage and apply themes or styles to your blogs. This tutorial will show you how to make your repository work Style Catcher. Note, this tutorial won't show...

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Posted on 10/22/2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

CustomFields 1.12

UPDATE: I've just pushed out a silent update that fixes a problem with custom entry field descriptions not showing. Thanks Nilesh! A new version of CustomFields is available that fixes four bugs that people found;CustomFields...

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I'm often confused by type choices web designers make. In my opinion, readability needs to be of utmost concern, not the look of the site. After all, how many sites do you visit that you don't intend to read? Readability of the type on your site can definitely affect how many returning visitors you have.

While I'm not a type expert, I have been working in the print publishing world for quite a few years. And because of that, I've been exposed to and learned more about type and readability than most would probably want to know. I'd like to share a little of that knowledge and epxerience.

Serif or Sans-Serif Typefaces?

There are two kinds of...

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Updated 12:30 am PST, Oct 4

Wednesday morning, September 29th, Learning Movable Type and some of the other MT weblogs hosted at elise.com were intruded by a spammer who placed popup generating code on the MT index and archive templates. Not being aware of the additional code on my templates, as I rebuilt the pages of my weblogs, the rebuilt pages included this code which generated an obnoxious spam popup window every time someone visited the page. I apologize to all who may have been inconvenienced by this, and thank those of you who brought it to my attention.

The good news is that the spammer could have done a lot of damage to the site, but didn't. The bad news is I'm not sure...

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Introduction

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...

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What do all these folders do?

This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog.

There are several folders in the default distribution of Movable Type. This tutorial will attempt to guide you through them all so that you feel more comfortable with what they do and contain.

extlib/

This directory contains perl libraries and files that support Movable Type. These are the modules that are needed by Movable Type to run (for example those modules listed in mt-check.cgi are normally found here) Some plugins also require some special perl modules to be installed, and normally you can install these perl modules into the extlib/ directory. For example, the BlogTimes plugin requires the GD perl module to be installed. Obviously you can get your host to install it and then that module would be available server wide. However, if you uploaded the files provided on the BlogTimes page into your extlib/ directory, you would have the GD module installed just for your installation without having to go to your host....

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Among the many websites that are out there, few are standards-compliant. Among those few, only a handful sport style sheets adjusted to the needs of handheld devices. Of those which do offer styling for handhelds, not all will fit the smallest, lowest-resolution screens without presenting the user with the ultimate handheld horror: namely, horizontal scrolling.

The Opera browser runs on handheld devices of all screen sizes and resolutions, some of them only 120 pixels wide. We work for the company that produces Opera, so we can offer a degree of insight into the functions of Opera for handhelds. In this article, we've prepared a set of general suggestions for creating a...

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You've seen them before: links that say "click here for printer-friendly version" or words to that effect. Every time you follow one of those links, you load a separate document that presents exactly the same information with a different layout, and probably different markup.

That means somebody (or a script) had to take the original document and convert it to a stripped-down version that's more suitable for print output. Maybe that somebody was even you.

Print style sheets to the rescue

One of the wonderful things about CSS is that it allows authors to create media-specific styles for a single document. We're pretty used to styling...

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Movable Type is being used to store a list of classes, and we need to make those class titles available in a form field (class registration) as a dynamically linked list box. The user will be presented with two list boxes, the first with a list of categories, the second (which is disabled until a category is chosen) with a dynamically generated list of the titles in the selected category.

Ingredients

We're going to need two important things here. First, a handy DHTML script from Xin Yang called Chained Selects that's going to power our linked list boxes. The script that you'll be dropping into your directory is called chainedselects.js.

Second, a javascript file...

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Looking around the web, you've run across plenty of URLs that look like: /content.cgi?date=2000-02-21/article.cgi?» id=46&page=1

Server side scripts generate the content of those pages. The content of a particular page is uniquely determined by the URL, just as if you requested a page with the URL /content/2000-02-01.html or /article/46.1.html. These pages are different than server-generated pages created in response to a form like a shopping cart, or enrollment. However, search engines will not index these content pages, because search engines ignore pages generated by CGI scripts as potential blind alleys.

A search engine would follow a URL like

/content/2000/02/2...

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Movable Type comes with a default search capability that your site visitors can use to search for keywords in your weblog entries. You can add functionality to the search form that people see on your site, and make adjustments to the templates that govern how the results are displayed.

Keyword Search Templates

Suppose you want to change the way the search results look when someone uses the default MT search function to do a search on your website.

Movable Type's templates that govern the MT keyword search results pages operate differently than the other weblog templates. (You may have noticed this if you have changed the name of your default weblog stylesheet away from...

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The front end of a website consists of three layers. XHTML forms the structural layer, which contains structural, semantic markup and the content of the site. To this layer you can add a presentation layer (CSS) and a behavior layer (JavaScript) to make your website more beautiful and user-friendly. These three layers should remain strictly separate. For instance, it should be possible to rewrite the entire presentation layer without touching either the structural or the behavior layer.

Despite this strict separation, the presentation and behavior layers need instructions from the structural layer. They must know where to add that touch of style, when to initiate that smooth bit...

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To save space on your sidebar listing of categories or monthly archives, you might want to use a pull-down menu like so: Select Category Beginner Tips Categories Definitions General HTML and Javascript Install Marketing Reference RSS Security Servers Style Weblog Goodies

To do this for your category list, make sure that you have category archiving selected as an archiving option in your weblog config, and add the following code to your sidebar:

<form action="" name="pulldown1"> <select name="mypulldown1" onchange="document.location=pulldown1.mypulldown1.options[selectedIndex].value"> <option value="">Select...

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During my second lecture to an XML class at a local community college, I explained how XML lets you define your own markup language with custom tags and attributes. I had finished defining a simple markup language for use with a list of amateur sports clubs, and had displayed a sample document written with that markup. At that point, one student asked:

"Isn't it inefficient to have to type all those tags for every club? What good is this? It looks nice, but what can I do with this document? How can I put this in a web page or use it with other programs? Wouldn't it be easier to just use HTML or a database/word processor/fill-in-the-blank?"

The reason that we use XML...

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In the old days, before we thought much about web standards or the importance of accessibility, web designers used image maps to quickly divide a single image into regions, and link those regions to separate URLs. Traditional image maps, though, don't work well with text-only browsers, and they aren't as efficient or versatile as many newer techniques. You might still find them in use on an old web page or perhaps some kind of complex map, but most web designers would consider it an old technique. A dead one.

While collaborating on a horror fiction web project, I decided early on that I'd do my best to code the site using only standards-based XHTML...

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In our struggle to reduce the number of steps site visitors must take to accomplish their goals, we face a number of challenges. One of them is to provide a good way for users to choose from a list of hierarchical elements. For example, a list that serves as a diner menu, offering a selection of drinks, main dishes, salads, and desserts.

Two techniques might be used to solve this kind of problem: • The straightforward, step-by-step approach with reloads in between each page. This is the safest and most commonly used approach; but it increases server traffic and requires patience on the user's part. • Dynamic select boxes.

The complex solution

Dynamic select boxes, in which choosing an item in the first box changes the content of the second box, saves the user a reload - if she has JavaScript at her disposal. If not, we need to reload the page and populate the second select box on the server. Both options have several problems though:...

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Development of the Fahrner Image Replacement technique and its analogues is moving faster than the destruction of the Berlin Wall. This article provides some much-needed empirical data on how FIR actually works in screen readers.

Named after Todd Fahrner, apparently invented by C.Z. Robertson, and popularized by Douglas Bowman (see his site for full coding details) and Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards, FIR is a standards-compliant technique that uses stylesheets and ordinary HTML to provide a visible image, usually consisting of text. The designer specifies, through CSS, that the image will display in most cases; if it should not display for some...

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On semantic markup, conveying its usage to those who generally don't need to care, and a reusable markup guide for your enjoyment.

This is how I like to define the term ‘semantic markup':

Semantic Markup is the result of using (X)HTML elements for their proper, intended usage.

This is a pretty limited definition, better examples exist, and it's by no means the only viewpoint out there. The terseness is partially the result of HTML being semantically limited to begin with. We don't exactly have a rich vocabulary of element types capable of capturing the meaning and nuance behind every piece of text: We have code, but we don't have caption; We have...

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01.21.2002

MT 2.0

Development on MT version 2.0 is going smoothly and we're looking at a early March release. Can you believe it's almost February?

A list of definite 2.0 features: • Multiple category support: The ability to assign multiple categories per entry • Multiple archive template per archive type • Interface modifications, application navigation and icon improvements based on findings from professional usability testing • Power edit screen: Apply title, category or author changes to multiple entries -- using one screen and all at once • More sorting options for the MTEntries tag: alphabetical by title, most recently commented-on, ascending and...

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