I am currently working on a new version of MTLookup, offering lots of new features. In a previous article, I wrote that it will probably be released in August. That schedule is still valid.

One improvement will be an extended database. More websites will be indexed, more articles will be included. For this, I recently described how to get indexed by MTLookup.

There are two ways for making your articles be included in MTLookup.

Two choices

The component, which is resposible for collecting articles, is the MTLookupBot. It reads your website and saves the needed data in the database.

The work, which is done by the MTLookupBot, is very similar to many other well-known bots - such...

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In what seems to be an increasingly popular idea, moreover is offering contextual ads in their free RSS feeds, which will probably spark the ongoing discussion around ads in XML feeds in general. According to their press release, "By working closely with the developers of leading RSS readers, Moreover is able to intelligently deliver contextual advertisements through RSS without filling a news folder with advertisements every time a feed is refreshed."

While they're not more specific about the details, it seems clear that some feeds in the future around going to include ads, which makes it seem likely that ad-blocking and filtering technologies that have been created for web...

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Great news today for geo-enthusiast geeks: Two new APIs launched today in advance of O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference, one for Google Maps and one for Yahoo Maps.

The services are fairly similar, despite some good-natured ribbing from some of the folks involved, and the truly exciting part is that there's now two powerful, free, simple services for adding mapping/location data to your web sites or applications. Especially in combination with the recently-revamped GeoURL service, there's a lot of new toys for blog developers to build on.

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John Gruber's got a great plugin that's sure to be loved by all of us who are meticulous about our site layouts: Kill 'nav-commenters.gif'.

John's plugin undoes Movable Type's habit of writing a commenter icon .gif to your weblog's root directory. If you've been bugged by the little guy with the talking bubble since version 3.0 came out, now you can have some relief.

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Robert Scoble's the most famous blogger at Microsoft, and he's got some good advice for those who are resisting adopting blogs because of fear about using the new medium in a business setting.

But the larger issue that becomes clear from Robert's post is that, like any new technology, the hard part of encouraging adoption is changing corporate culture to accommodate the new opportunities. Whether it's office productivity applications, accounting software, graphics and illustration programs or blogging tools, companies have to set proper expectations and guidelines in order to encourage smart use of blogs.

Groove Networks was one of the first companies to suggest a written blog policy, and other companies get by with just advising their employees to be smart about what they write. This seems like the kind of project that the blogosphere could do well to collaborate on, creating generalized guidelines for blogging at work....

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If you like to read MovaLog, you may wish to add this blog to your aggregator.

I quite like this tool because it allows you to output your rss in such a way that it is easiest for your readers. Currently the tool supports most popular RSS aggregators like Bloglines, My Yahoo! and Bot a Blog. Of course if you use some other aggregator - like Feeddemon - you could manually add the xml feed to your subscription list !

For more information on RSS check out http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/ and http://www.learningmovabletype.comsyndication.php

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Adding a New Notification Service to Ping

Problem

You want to automatically notify an additional ping service of an update to your weblog.

Solution

Add the notification service's ping URL to the list under the "Publicity/Remote Interfaces" section of the New Entry Defaults Settings tab.

Discussion

Notification services track which weblogs have been updated and when. This is achieved through alerts or "pings" to the service when they've been changed.

Movable Type has the built-in functionality to optionally ping these services with each new entry post. To manage these settings...

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01.18.2005

Movable Type 'nofollow' plugin

Today we are pleased to announce our full support for the rel="nofollow" attribute to hyperlinks introduced to address the main cause of weblog spam: the payoff of higher placement in search engine results.

This initiative, with announced support from Google, Yahoo, MSN (and surely more to come), will direct search engines to ignore links with this attribute set for the purposes of spidering or increasing search engine relevance or ranking.

For current users of Movable Type (note: this plugin is included by default starting with version 3.16), this support is implemented as a simple plugin ( zip [4K], tar/gzip [3K]-- tested on MT 3.x and MT 2.661). For most users enabling "nofollow" support involves placing a single file in your plugins directory. All links submitted by external users in comments and TrackBacks will then be modifed to add the...

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3-Column 404 Error About Page Absolute Pixel Sizes Accessibility Activity Log Add Your Links Here Adding An Author Additional Weblog Adsense Advertising Affiliate Programs Align Attribute Alphabetize Entries Alternative Search Template Amazon Amazon Web Services Archive Pages Archives Ascii Characters and Symbols Ascii Mode Audioblog Author Archives Authors Background Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Backup Banner Banner Images Berkeley DB Binary Mode BinHex Mode Blockquotes Blog Maintenance Bloglet Book Review Bookmarklet BookQueueToo Buttons Captcha Captions Categories Category Category Archive Category Archiving CGIWrap Changing Servers CHMOD Chron Job Clocks Closing Comments...

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Naturally not my first upgrade on my system - I seem to be doing that all the time. But my first upgrade for someone else! I just finished working with Reb Orrell on his blog, upgrading it from Movable Type 2.64 (I think it was 2.64) to 3.121. Reb was great to work with, the process went smoothly, and I think (hope) that all parties involved are happy with the results. I know that I am. If anyone else out there needs assistance, please let me know how I can help. I do charge for this service as a part of Everitz Consulting. Sorry.

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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...

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As many of you know, there are hundreds of plugins in the Movable Type plugin directory through which you can completely customize and modify the way that the application works. This has always been a great strength of the Movable Type platform and we put great effort in every release to give plugins even more ways to enhance the system.

What you may not know is that since the launch of Movable Type 3.2, dozens of plugins built specifically for v3.2 have been created. Some of the new capabilities of these plugins include plugin actions for acting on checked items in a listing screen, UI enhancements thanks to BigPAPI, feedback scoring and Junk processing.

We're happy to announce...

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When one decides to scrap the traditional hacks and kludges in creating an HTML page, and opts to instead format in CSS, the effects can be rather dramatic.

A certain Mr. Z. linked an interesting tool last night, the GetContentSize analysis utility. Stripping all extraneous CSS and Javascript, it will report the signal to noise ratio of your HTML.

mezzoblue, for example, sits at about 45% (which will inevitably change as new articles get posted and old ones removed), while Zeldman is a higher 60%. Both are CSS–only layouts that don't use table hacks. Let's look at a few examples of old–school HTML tabling to compare.

As tipped off in September, Microsoft...

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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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Learning Movable Type is now hosted on a new server and now has its own domain name - http://www.learningmovabletype.com. In the process of changing servers and changing URLs, we may have created some broken links or other site hiccups. If you encounter something that just doesn't seem to be working properly, please email me using the contact form.

Humongous thanks to Chad and Arvind for their invaluable assistance with this move.

If you link to Learning Movable Type (and we hope you do) please, please, please change the URL in your link to the new one. That way, Google will find us more easily, and those using Google to find things regarding Movable Type will find us more easily too....

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Yes, it's another anti-spam plugin. I would have called it MT-DSBL 2.0, but the feature set grew beyond the name, so a more generic name was chosen. This is a 2.0 release however… the plugin deserves more seniority than a 1.0 release, since it was built of the carcass that was MT-DSBL 1.1.

The first beta release is now available. Please visit the project page for SpamLookup to download it.

So, what does this thing do? Well, in a nutshell: • Filters inbound comments for all installed weblogs. • Filters inbound TrackBack pings for all installed weblogs. • Checks IP address of sender against DNSBL services....

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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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With broad platform integration of all the leading open standards, Movable Type has the potential to do much more, given additional expertise and knowledge on the user's part.

This chapters covers some of the more advanced features in addition to providing a starting point for more advanced topics not covered in this publication.

Architectural Overview

Movable Type is written in a highly modular Perl object-oriented style with an open code base (it's not open source -- an important distinction) that makes the browser-based tool quite flexible and easily modifiable, allowing it to adapt to any number of...

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10.29.2004

Firefox on the March

Red Herring's got an interview with Rob Davis, the man behind the campaign to advertise Firefox in the New York Times. It's especially good timing for promoting every geek's favorite browser, since the updated roadmap shows the browser scheduled for release on November 9th.

Posted by Anil in at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

10.29.2004

Advice to the bloglorn

Metaforix President Lois C. Ambash has some advice for those afraid of business blogging. It's a solid set of guidelines, but we also loved the praise for TypePad:

As a novice blogger, I chose TypePad for my own blog, and I couldn't be happier. The...

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