If you are putting hours into writing content for your blog, you may want to make a few bucks (or more) to help pay for hosting charges and other costs associated with running it. Some bloggers find that they can make more than just small change, but most not enough to quit their day job. In any case, here are a few of the more popular methods.

Several ways by which you can make money with your weblog include Google Adsense, Amazon Associates, various other affiliate programs, advertising, and donations. Keep in mind that the success of these programs is highly dependent upon your content and the level of traffic you get to your site.

Google Adsense

Since its launch in the spring...

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For more than a year, ominous rumors have been privately circulating among high-level corporate leaders that Mozilla had been at work on what was darkly hinted to be the Ultimate Weapon, a Doomsday device. Intelligence sources traced the site of the top secret Mozillan project to the perpetually smog-shrouded wasteland known as Mountain View, California. What they were building, or why it should be located in such a remote and desolate place, no one could say.

How General Ripper was Driven to the Edge of Madness

U.S. General Jack D. Ripper was busy coding the Burpleson Air Force base website when he began experiencing problems. His fonts were serif where they were supposed to be...

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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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Fortunately for those of use who use Movable Type, there are several folks who devote much of their free time to understanding, exploring, and extending the capabilities of MT, and are willing to share that knowledge with the rest of us.

Here's my roundup of good sites (in addition to LMT) to investigate while learning how to use Movable Type (I will add to this list over time): Movable Type Support Forums - The MT Forums should be your first stop for questions regarding Movable Type. Before posting, read this thread which will explain general rules of conduct and the best way to find answers. Generally, play nice, read the MT Manual (3.2) ( for 3.1 and earlier) first, and try a search...

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If you spend much time working with JavaScript, there will eventually come a day when you need to know the value of a variable (or an object's field) as the execution of the script progresses, or why a script terminates unexpectedly. In simple scripts, you can accomplish this with JavaScript's alert() function, which instructs the browser to create a dialog box with the argument set as the box's caption. The message can be anything that helps you understand your script's operation.

For example, the statement: alert( "Node #" + i + "'s class is:" + nodes[i].getClass() );

might produce something like the following when executed:

When alert(...

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• Once an entry or category has been set to receive TrackBack pings, disabling pings for it through the UI will not actually refuse pings to that item but will suppress display of those pings. • Rebuilds will fail silently after saving an entry if a problem exists in your templates (for example, mismatched tags or a missing include module). An error will be shown, however, upon manual rebuild using the "Rebuild Site" functionality. • The nofollow plugin will cause a spurious warning for users with older versions of Perl upon running mt-check.cgi, mt-testbg.cgi or any of the...

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Being a web developer is a tough job. Not only do you have to steer clear of the traps and pitfalls the popular browsers think up for you on a daily basis, you also have to keep at least half an eye on all kinds of developments that may (or may not) have an impact on your job. Having hardly mastered style sheets and DHTML, new techniques clamor for attention. Which ones are important right away? Which ones can you dismiss for now?

This article gives my view on the language the W3C has developed to succeed HTML: XHTML. Agree or disagree with me, at least you'll have something to think about and to help you decide.

First I'll explain what XHTML is, then I'll give...

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Providing contact information on your weblog can be useful to your site visitors who may want to email you directly rather than submit a comment to one of your entries. You can choose to write out your email address, provide a mailto link (see MailTo Syntax for how to write out a mailto hyperlink), or you can provide a contact form. Contact forms are often preferred because they can easily hide your email address information from the spammers who regularly scour the web looking for email addresses to harvest.

I have researched and tested two free PHP-based contact form scripts - TheSiteWizard Feedback form and DodosMail - either of which you can easily implement to add a contact form...

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What Zen was to the 70's (most famously with motorcycle maintenance), the Tao Te Ching was to the 90's. From Piglet and Pooh to Physics and back, many have sought sense in applying the Tao Te Ching to something (the Tao of Physics), or something to the Tao Te Ching (the Tao of Pooh). It can be a cheap trick, but lately it has struck me that there is more than a little to be understood about web design by looking through the prism of the Tao.

Daoism is a philosophy, like Buddhism, a way of living, of being in the world, which stems from a text of great antiquity, the Tao Te Ching, whose 81 "chapters" enigmatically sweep across human experience, but with a strong...

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The Web Standards Project's ( WaSP) Browser Upgrade Initiative ( BUI), has spurred many a designer to move towards more standards compliant web design, using CSS rather than tables for layout to save user bandwidth while enhancing underlying semantics, accessibility, and reach.

"Tables are dead..."

Several designers have taken Jeffrey Zeldman's lead in posting tutorials that have helped us get over the initial hump of table-less design. The first efforts have focused on creating two or more columns using CSS positioning instead of tables, thus allowing for a (complete) separation of structure from presentation. These broader techniques have been documented and...

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About a year ago, I wrote an article, introducing a method for displaying a random image every time someone visits a web page. Administration was simple: just add or remove images from a folder on the server, and they would appear (or disappear, respectively) from the pool of random images being displayed on that page.

There are many benefits to randomizing an image on a web page, one of the most significant being the feeling of freshness it can add to an otherwise static site. Visitors returning to the page feel that, although the content might not have been updated, something has changed, and the site might be worth revisiting again in the future.

The Downside

Although the implementation...

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This tutorial is co-authored by LMT guest author Chad Everett of Everitz Consulting and Elise Bauer of elise.com.

Movable Type allows you to create categories and sub-categories for organizing your entries. The default MT3.2 Main Index template includes code to list these categories in the sidebar section. This tutorial will attempt to explain the tags used in this code and how they work together.

Categories, Sub-categories, Parent, Child, and Levels

The only difference between a category and a sub-category is that the latter will always have a "parent" category. The sub-category is still a category, and everything else remains the same as any other category. But by having...

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It can be difficult to move from a static, pixel-based design approach to an elastic, relative method. Properly implemented, however, elastic design can be a viable option that enhances usability and accessibility without mandating design sacrifices.

A pixel is an unscalable dot on a computer screen, whereas an em is a square of its font size. Because font sizes vary, the em is a relative unit that responds to users' text-size preferences.

It is perhaps easier to adopt a print-like, static approach to design because there is less to think about when dimensions don't change. To employ an elastic approach, however, is to fully exploit the capabilities of computer...

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Movable Type puts the BLING in BLoggING! ;-)

Movable Type 3.2 finally made its official debut today. Six undeclared favorite things notwithstanding ;-), MT's newest release was definitely worth the wait. The beta process was thorough (and thoroughly fun!) and the public aspect of the beta testing presumably yielded a wide variety of installation and publishing configurations, resulting in more bugs exposed and eliminated. In addition to a generous list of cool new features, MT's licensing is expanding to UNLIMITED weblogs for ALL licenses, including the personal free version. If that isn't enough, SixApart is discounting (through September) the Personal Basic and Personal Unlimited...

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When I started out as a web designer, accessibility seemed quite a simple and achievable goal: provide alternative descriptions for all your graphics, and make sure the background colour and text color have good contrast. Accessibility was easy, took little extra work, and the resulting page didn't look different from millions of other first-generation web pages out there, i.e., dull, grey and unattractive.

Time has moved on and accessibility on the web is no longer simple. From being a largely text-based medium that was easily accessible via a variety of high- and low-tech devices, the web has now become a rich multimedia environment.

As a result, much of it is now...

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Updated 09/05 - Search Throttle

The search form that comes with default MT templates is very limited in what it lets you do - basically it only lets you search the current blog and allows you to not specify any oother options. Here are some things you can do with searches. The code listed here can go into any template but the code must be placed within the search form ie <form>....</form>. Also each block of code is independent. You don't need to use previous code for it to work - as long as it is placed within the search form it will work no matter what other code you have or have not implemented !

Search Where ?

Replace the search form code you have with something like...

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2.0b1 (2002.02.18)

• Lots of changes to the UI: leftnav, topnav, edit-entry screen, new-entry screen, etc. • Blog Editing Menu has now changed greatly to provide space for a welcome message (editable in blog config), blog stats, and links to 5 most recent posts and comments. • Added the ability to do NFS-safe database locking using .lock files and link(). This is not something most people should worry about; if it affects you, it's likely that you will know it. :) Thanks to Kelsey Cummings for ideas and code. • Hold and Release are now Draft and Publish...

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If you're part of Google's AdSense program you can set up Channels to help track where Clicks are coming from on your web site. The obvious (and easy) thing to do is assign a different Channel to your front page from the rest of your pages, for example. Using Movable Type and different categories (and even archive types) you can further target who's clicking where. PHP use is required.

First, you'll need to create several Channels in your AdSense account. I created Channels for the most popular categories and a "generic" channel to encompass the other less-popular categories.

Add the AdSense code to your Individual Entry Archive template....

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Warning: main(/home/elise/public_html/mt/mt32badge.inc): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/eliseb/public_html/archives/001012multiple_authors.php on line 90 Warning: main(): Failed opening '/home/elise/public_html/mt/mt32badge.inc' for inclusion (include_path='') in /home/eliseb/public_html/archives/001012multiple_authors.php on line 90

With MT you can have multiple authors on the same weblog, making it easy to have a friend contribute to your blog as a "guest author" or to create a group weblog to which many people contribute. You can even customize to a small degree, aspects of the author-specific Individual Entry pages.

Adding an Author

To add an author in MT 3.2...

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I've worked with Flash for several years and have always been slightly dissatisfied with the markup needed to embed a movie in web pages. When I recently published a site in XHTML, my dissatisfaction with the markup grew as I realized that it simply wasn't valid in this context and was bloating my pages to unacceptable levels. A leaner, standards-compliant method of embedding Flash movies was called for.

The Twice-Cooked Method

Flash has always shipped with some method of generating an HTML page to contain Flash movies. Initially, it was a tool called AfterShock. Since the release of Flash 4, authors can export HTML pages with embedded movies from within the Flash...

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