Gadgetopia

Movable Type Open Source: I d never thought I d see this day in the five years I ve been using MT. As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose.

Learning Movable Type: I didn't dig too deep into these, but they look good. Via Lockergnome. Learning Movable Type is a growing set of tutorials aimed at helping beginners to the Movable Type content management system. These tutorials are geared for those with a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, ...

Movable Type is organizing a Worldwide Meetup. "The first Movable Type Meetup is scheduled for Monday, August 11 at 7 pm, and future Meetups are planned for the second Monday of every month after that."

Yahoo offers Movable Type for bloggers: Good for Yahoo -- instead of building their own blogging software, they just partnered with Six Apart to offer Movable Type to all their hosting clients who want to blog. Pre-installed, even. Yahoo will effectively act as the preferred provider of Movable Type for ...

Job Listings Roundup: Movable Type has posted a list of two dozen blog-related jobs around the country. Very cool. If you're local to Los Angeles, check out the Freelance Blog Designer position that's available as part of a new professional blog network that's launching on the Movable Type platform. [...] ...

movabletype.org: News: Six Apart clarifies Movable Type licensing: "...for personal, non-commercial users, Movable Type is free to download and use. We don't consider an Amazon wishlist link or a PayPal donation link to be a commercial use of your site, so you're free to update your weblog and maintain your ...

Blogging Solutions for Business - Movable Type Enterprise: I guess the only big differences I'm seeing from the standard version are LDAP integration and Oracle as a possible data backend. Of course, these are both huge for a lot of companies. The most popular platform for business blogging now offers ...

Developing Movable Type Plug-ins: The ease of developing plugins for Movable Type and their consequent ubiquity is one of the things that's made it so popular. If it doesn't exist, someone will invent it. "Movable Type provides developers with a framework to easily and elegantly extend the base ...

Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition review: Here's a review of MT3 with something I've been looking for: lots of screenshots. The new interface is nice very TypePad-ish.

Movable Type's Spam Hole: Six Apart is getting a little heat for not being more aggressive in notifying people about the recent MT spam vulnerability. The question does arise though, with literally tens of thousands of MT users affected by this vulnerability, why didn't anyone at Six Apart think that ...

Movable Type Enterprise is out after years of rumors. A few big new features that make it enterprise-friendly: Support for Oracle DB: Supports version 10g. [...] LDAP Authentication: Single sign-on using your existing LDAP or Active Directory database. Movable Type 3.3 is also out, which includes tag support (we've talked ...

I'm curious to know who has the biggest Movable Type installation these days. So this is a call for numbers -- if you have or know of a big, big, big Movable Type install, let us know how big in terms of posts and comments. As of this writing, Gadgetopia ...

The Tags Power Tool for Movable Type: Movable Type has jumped on the tagging bandwagon with this plugin. It gives you a field for tagging, and publishes tags as their own category archives. From a user interface perspective, Tags is implemented as a replacement for the Keywords entry field. In ...

How long before someone issues a Movable Type "distribution," and how would Six Apart react? Movable Type is so customizable, that a lot of users have custom preferences, myself included. Whenever I do a new MT install, I find myself loading the same plug-ins, building the same templates, changing the ...

So who has the biggest Movable Type installation, measured by number of posts? As of this writing, Gadgetopia has "just" 3,615 posts. According to this entry, Boing Boing has over 17,000 posts. Can anyone beat 17,000 on an actual, public, functional installation?

Hooray for knowledge!: This is good news. This used to just be for paid licensees. With the release of 3.2, we're making the Movable Type knowledge base completely public. (Sneak peak). Like the user manual, it is also completely powered by Movable Type and has comments enabled on every single ...

Pocket SharpMT is a Movable Type client for the Pocket PC that features a lot of the same abilities as most desktop MT clients, including the ability to upload images. As mobile blogging becomes more and more popular, I expect we'll start to see more tools like this. If you're ...

MT Consulting: Adam is certainly the one to do it. We'll see more of these in the coming year, I'm sure. MT has become so much more than a blogging tool. "Between this site, various other sites I run that are managed with Movable Type, and the variety of MT ...

Fast track into the MT admin interface: Great post from Jay Allen on some simple hacks to allow one-click access from a published post to its edit screen in Movable Type. Nearly four years ago, I posted a silly little hack to have MT itself publish the entry's edit URL ...

The Feedback Rating System in Movable Type 3.2: Movable Type 3.2 is due pretty soon, and they're adding some great features to it. Here's a welcome addition: a comment (and trackback) rating system. [...] the system isn't just for fighting spam: Any feedback item can be have a positive score ...

About.com has re-launched all their "guide sites" as Movable Type blogs. This means they all have RSS feeds. Joy. Trivia: I was hired by The Mining Company (as they were known then) in 1997 to be a guide for James Bond, but they retracted their offer when I signed on ...

Word docs from Movable Type: I have to say that Microsoft is doing some great things with the new underlying XML format in Office 2003 and up. Using that functionality, the guys at Movable Type's Pronet published a simple template that outputs Word ML, and thus creates what's essentially a ...

Six Apart ProNet - Plugin Directory: The Movable Type plugins directory has really grown up. If you haven't been there for a while, it's worth stopping by and browsing. Lots of new stuff. I maintain that the quality of plugins for MT is far and away its strongest asset and ...

Six Apart Professional Network Overview: This looks like a bribe to get you on a mailing list. The Six Apart Professional Network consists of a number of benefits designed to help you get the most out of Six Apart's Movable Type, TypePad, and TypeKey platforms. Whether you're a consultant, designer, ...

Gallery Link Plugin for Movable Type: I knew it wouldn't be long before these two platforms came together. [This plugin] allows you to add graphical links to photos on your Gallery website in a way that required much less cutting and pasting and will probably save you much headache if ...

Password protect your blog: Good documentation on a long overdue hack. I've got a new project, let's call it Project X, and one of the things I needed to do was set up a password-protected blog on an existing installation of Movable Type. Everyone that has a user account in ...

Here s a fact: intranets don t have to be crazy-complicated. Intranets are fundamentally about sharing simple information, which is not as hard as some people make it out to be. As simple as this is, most organizations either have no intranet, or a smattering of HTML pages someone threw together ...

Plugin Contest Entry 1: Tiny Orwell 1.0" href="http://www.timaoutloud.org/archives/000357.html">Plugin Contest Entry 1: Tiny Orwell 1.0: Password-protect your Movable Type blog using this plugin. Tiny Orwell is a simple TypeKey-like authentication system written in the spirit of the Trackback reference implementation and blosxom. This script provides an alternate to TypeKey for ...

GetXML Plugin for Movable Type - Staggernation.com: Very interesting plugin for Movable Type. This would let you extend MT with arbitrary data stored as XML somewhere. It might be a hassle for every entry, but I'm running into a problem with this site whereby I'd like to store about six ...

CustomFields: Here's a plugin for Movable Type that may address some (all?) of my "open vs closed content management" ranting. CustomFields is a plugin that allows you to define custom fields that will appear on the entry editing screen and author profile screens. This allows you to store far more ...

MovableType Madness: Dean over at blogs4God presents a really good wrap-up of the furor over the new Movable Type release. Unbeknowst to me, Six Apart made a change over the weekend to say that mutiple Weblogs in MT used to create one site (for instance, if you have another blog ...

Ajax-ified Weblog: This is a neat example of Ajax-ifying Movable Type comments. if you try to submit a comment now, the form fields will go "dark", and you'll see a progress bar as your info is sent to the server. When the server gets the data and processes it, it ...

Movable Type Hosting Partner Program: Movable Type has two "hosting partners" offering pre-installed MT hosting: $5.95 and $9.95 a month.

The Movable Type Community Pack: This is interesting. Probably the first big cultural shift I ve seen in MT in a while. They ve been focused on incremental interface and functionality improvements. The Movable Type Community Pack brings exciting, new levels of public participation to your Movable Type powered website. Beyond simple ...

Six Apart ProNet - Plugin Directory - Built for 3.2: If you're on the latest version of Movable Type, take a browse of the plugins built to take advantage of the new API hooks in that version. There's some really great stuff here: Ajaxify Ajaxify is a set of plugins ...

Alpha Testing to Begin Soon: I would apply, but I've hacked up this installation so much, it may not be worth the trouble. We're starting to coordinate our round of alpha testing for Movable Type 3.0 that will occur prior to the public beta. If you're a Movable Type ...

Movable Type 3.0: Great list of new features, and it's still free. Movable Type already has awesome plugin support it's good to hear they're taking that even further. Plugins will now be able to hook into many more pieces of Movable Type, including adding callbacks for saving and ...

Workflow for Movable Type released: A notice about this has been staring back at me on the Movable Type menu for about a week and I looked right past it. This fills a huge functionality hole for MT users. Workflow lets you limit control of publshing rights to certain authors ...

GetXML Plugin for Movable Type: Ouch, this is a good plugin. There's no limit to what you can do with this. This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for retrieving data in XML format and displaying the data on your MT-generated pages. [...] The plugin will work ...

Bayesian filter for MT: This looks promising. Hope it works as good as Bayesian spam filter for Outlook. "...I spent the last 2 days working on a bayesian plugin. To cut the story short, the plugin will allow you to train your movabletype blog to automatically identify spam comments and ...

Movable Type is great software, but there's one aspect of it that makes a site get more and more inefficient as more and more entries get added: index pages. Whenever an entry is modified added, edited, or commented MT rebuilds every index page on the site. The longer ...

I've installed the Movable Type 3.2 beta, and there are a bunch of interface improvements. That's the big focus of this release -- ease of administration. They've worked very hard to make the admin side scale to thousands of posts and comments, and they've done a wonderful job. The listing ...

The time for my custom-built blogging app is over, I think. This site runs off a PHP/MySQL-based app that I wrote, but I'm tired of dealing with it. It's stable and everything, but to get to the functionality that, say, MoveableType offers would be more work than I'm interested in ...

I played with the Movable Type Tags plugin tonight. It was...almost a great thing. I can see where it would work well for a lot of things, but ultimately, I uninstalled it. The tag concept is actually very simple: it replaces "keywords" with a field called "tags." Then, whenever you ...

movabletype.org: News: The new version of Movable Type includes spam fighting features. As a stopgap before we release comment registration in Movable Type 3.0, we've released version 2.66 of Movable Type, which includes some protection against comment flooding. We've included a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP ...

Movable Type Plugin directory update: The list of Movable Type plugins just keeps getting better and better. Here's a big list of new ones, including a few for Google Maps integration, del.icio.us integration, and more. A good plugin API is an amazing thing, sometimes.

Movable Type 3.11 Released: Bugs fixed: If you were waiting on upgrading to MT 3.1 like I recommended, v3.11 has been released which should address the bugs. Now we just need "Movable Type 3.11 for Workgroups." Ugh they should have skipped that version number altogether.

I find myself in a constant struggle between accepting Movable Type for what it is, and working to extend it. There are a few cases where I want to do interesting things with entries, but I don t want to hack into Ben s Perl code. I solved this problem by inserting ...

Zempt :: Multi-platform posting for Movable Type :: Zempt: I'm writing this from Zempt, so if you see it on the blog, then it worked. Zempt is a desktop client for Movable Type. It's not WYSIWYG, but it still seems very competent. HTML edit buttons, spellcheck, tabbed preview, etc. The ...

Integrating the Flash Photoblog World Map with Movable Type: I never felt this post got the credit it deserved. Finally, someone does something with it. [...] most of the credit for this goes to Deane at Gadgetopia for the instructions on adding custom fields to the Movable Type entry interface ...

Frequency: This one supports Blogger, Movable Type, Radio, pMachine, GeekLog, and EraBlog.NET. Frequency is a desktop weblog client. If you have a weblog you manage with Blogger, Radio, Movable Type, or other Blogger API or metaWeblog API system, you can use Frequency to add new posts instead of logging into ...

Media Manager: This is a pretty hardcore Movable Type plugin. The Media Manager plugin allows users to manage and review a list of CDs, DVDs, Books and/or any product from Amazon's product catalog using a fully integrated, simple to use interface. It seems simple on the surface, but look at ...

Why your Movable Type blog must die: This is a really great rant about (1) blogging in general, and (2) Movable Type in particular. Very funny. You are all pretentious twats Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on ...

Here s a request for all software developers building software that does batch processing: PDFMoto, Movable Type any program that re-publishes as a single event. Include functionality to allow me to call an arbitrary script before and after the batch process. There are a lot of things I may want ...

CirculaFloor is a fascinating project being demonstrated at Siggraph that provides an innovative way to walk forever while going nowhere. CirculaFloor is a locomotion interface using a group of movable tiles. The movable tiles employ holonomic mechanism that achieves omni-directional motion. Circulation of the tiles enables the user to walk ...

Cruft-free URLs in Movable Type: Mark Pilgrim has created a great URL scheme in Movable Type for the cleanest URLs I've seen yet. Clean URLs are an anal-retentive obsession with me. I found this via a great page at Brainstorms and Raves devoted to URL beauty. Mark is using MT ...

From Moveable Type: I can't wait... "A small sampling of some of the features that will be in Movable Type Pro: Improved author management, Remote publishing, Custom entry fields, Integrated spellchecker, Registration for comments and posting." Here's some more information from the official Six Apart press release: "Along with its ...

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things: Boing Boing has switched from Blogger to Movable Type. After over four years with Blogger, Boing Boing is now a Movable Type blog! Blogger is an excellent tool, but we'd outgrown it and it was time for a change we're immensely grateful ...

Action Streams: An interesting new plugin from Movable Type that will aggregate your actions from 75 different social networking services and publish them as a feed from your MT install. The Action Streams plugin is an amazing new plugin for Movable Type 4.1 that lets you aggregate, control, and share ...

Flickr: Photos tagged with pimpmycms: A Flickr tag for screencaps (and one digitial picture) of customized Movable Type interfaces.

Six Apart released a Developer Edition of Movable Type 3.0 today. While I haven't been able to find a detailed feature list of what's new in 3.0 it looks like they've made significant changes to their licensing scheme. Apparently one of the big improvements over previous versions is an improved ...

Movable Type Style Generator: Semi-WYSIWYG editing of a MT layout. Fiddle with it via th DHTML menus, then download it.

The Webby Awards: 2003 Winners: The Webbies are in. Movable Type won an award, as did Cockeyed.com, a personal favorite of mine.

Movable Type doesn't have a content review system. You can write an entry and leave it in "Draft" status, but no one knows about it unless they go looking for it. In practice, this can be a pain. New authors to Gadgetopia are told to leave their first dozen or ...

About Ben Hammersley: Here's a nice little addition to a site the complete code of all the Movable Type templates to make it work.

Movable Type 3.1 Launched: We mentioned some of the big changes in MT 3.1 a few weeks ago. It's now in the wild. The most prominent new feature in Movable Type 3.1 is the dynamic page functionality, allowing you to choose between static page generation or dynamic pages on a ...

I've complained off and on about the lack of user-defined fields in Movable Type. Today was finally the day I got off my high-horse and messed with some code. Here is a method to add a new field to the MT database. The field can store whatever you like, can ...

Comment Spam: Six Apart is looking at the problem of comment spam on Movable Type blogs, and they offer some solutions. In particular, I'm encouraged by the new MT-BlackList plugin.

What do you do with category archives when you get too many posts? That's what I can't quite figure out what to do with this site. We have over 4,000 posts. This means that I have categories with 500 entries or more. This is way too many entries to list ...

MT Wiki . MT . WebHome: This note was posted on the front page of the Movable Type wiki. Depressing. THANKS TO EVIL PEOPLE, SEARCH HAS BEEN DISABLED AND PAGES ARE NO LONGER EDITABLE - NOT MUCH FUN HUH?

When I was deciding whether or not to move off my custom-built blogging system, I flirted briefly with Radio Userland. What I really liked about that software was that it was a desktop app. I know that that's verboten in our Web-based world, but it was really handy having ...

TypeKey: Here's a pretty extensive FAQ on TypeKey the Microsoft Passport-ish blog comment authentication service from Six Apart. It's a central authentication service which allows you to log in to TypeKey and use that identitiy to post to multiple blogs. They provide a good example: Alice visits Bob's weblog ...

RightFields: My goodness, when it rains it pours. I mentioned the other day that I found a plugin that allowed you to do blog-specific custom fields in Movable Type, which is wicked groovy. Things like that keep me from ranting about things like this, which really makes everyone happy. Well, ...

> Features >> Fourth Annual Weblog Awards">Fourth Annual Weblog Awards: The Bloggie winners are out. No big surprises. Boing Boing picked up a handful, including Blog of the Year. Movable Type is the best tool, and Simple Bits won Best Design. Gadgetopia won, nothing.

Neil at PDFMoto and I have been talking about software development, and the differences between the big, enterprise packages, and software from smaller companies. He made a great point, and gave me permission to reprint it: "Like so much software that seems very simple, under the hood PDFMoto is extraordinarily ...

Blogging systems have always confused "posts" and "pages." We've talked about this before: what is the difference between a time-sensitive "post" and an "eternal" page? At what point does a "post" get re-visited and revised enough that it should become a page? We wrote about this at length almost two ...

How to write Firefox extensions: A pretty stunning tutorial on how to write extensions for Firefox, greatest browser ever. This is exactly what a lot of people are looking for. Now if someone would write something this good for creating Movable Type extentions. Via Phil Ringnalda.

The people over at Movable Type are miffed that the new Google 2.0 bar doesn't support MT blogging the "Blog This" button goes to Blogger only. Anil Dash is asking people to report this to Google as a "bug." Maybe he's kidding.

NetFlix Suite: I'm continually amazed at the quality and depth of plug-ins available for Movable Type. ...the Netflix Suite. [...] Displays movies in your rental queue. [...] Displays list of movies you currently have on rental from NetFlix. [...] Displays movies you have recently rented and presumably watched. Closely related ...

The Good Book(s): Six Apart has a roundup of all the Movable Type books out on the market right now. There's a quite of a few of them, it turns out. This one is 432 pages. (What are you going to say about MT for 432 pages? They must dig ...

Solution for comments spams: Excellent solution. To cut the story short, I wrote a plugin to [Movable Type] that will verify if it is a human before it allows comments to be posted. The idea is pretty simple: Display an image with a Security Code and demand the user to ...

Spam Wait for Movable Type Comment Spam: Another graceful solution. [Spam Wait makes] it necessary for a person or robot to wait fifteen seconds after accessing a comment form to post a comment. As humans generally take time to read an entry and write a comment, this should be unnoticeable. ...

WordPress on Yahoo: As if Movable Type on Yahoo! wasn't enough, now you can have WordPress pre-installed. When we started, Yahoo asked "What would the perfect blog host do?" and their team has been really amazing in executing on a really kick-ass platform for serious bloggers. It took a little ...

WordPress : Looks like a good blogging platform built on PHP / MySQL, which is just so much more hackable than the Perl / MySQL backend Movable Type uses. GPL, even. WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a ...

Blogging Survey Results: Blog Search Engine did a survey. The 610 survey respondents were made up mainly of blog owners who have submitted their blog to the Blog Search Engine (over 2,800 blogs submitted) and other blog owners contacted through different channels. Only 13% of bloggers run ads. Movable Type ...

TrackBack and Corporate Secrets: A very good point here about Trackback. Something any corporate user of Movable Type should consider. The basic thrust of Bob's blog entry has been relayed to Scott and all of Scott's readers. It's public. Panic would follow, but Bob doesn't realize what's happened until Scott ...

MT Plugin Directory: Plugins Manager: There's a new add-on for Movable Type that will let you manage your installation's plugins through a browser-based interface. Sadly, I can't run it because my host doesn't have one of the required Perl modules (XML::Simple). It looks neat, though. Would someone who can run ...

Oracle snags open-source database company: Berkeley DB was the first data storage system behind Movable Type. Still gets used a lot for it. The purchase of Sleepycat, which has been rumored for weeks, gives Oracle another open-source product to accompany its proprietary database offerings. At an investor conference last week, ...

Sixth Annual Weblog Awards: The 2006 Bloggie nominations have been released (three days late...not that I was checking every day or anything). We didn't make the cut, but in looking at the names on there, we're not even in the same league. Dooce and Go Fug Yourself are the names ...

CNN.com - Web hacking contest claims 'no big names': I wasn't sick with worry, but I will admit to upgrading this site to Movable Type 2.64 (there's a security hole in prior versions), dumping the database, and backing up all the files on Saturday. "Computer hackers vying in a global ...

I was reading an article by Jon Udell about the legacy the tagging craze is going to leave behind. He says When the novelty wears off [...] I think that tagging will have altered the information landscape in a fundamental way. [...] it's the social dimension of tagging that really ...

Textpattern: Dean Allen of Textism has finally released his open-source content management system. I downloaded and installed it and was quite impressed. It's more flexible than Movable Type and actually slips out of the blogging format quite a bit. It's closer to the metal than some of the other systems ...

Format Offering Applications, Finally: I'd heard of Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) before, but there was no penetration, so I didn't pay it much attention. But now that TypePad includes FOAF by default, well, now you have penetration. And now that thousands of these FOAF files have been built by TypePad, along with ...

MT4 Beta Download Movable Type Beta: This is hot off the presses. I just got the Pronet email 30 seconds ago. True to my suspicions, MT is headed into the more traditional content management world. Create a dynamic website with powerful content management. MT4 s powerful templating system lets you output ...

Six Apart - Project Comet: It's vague like an Amway presentation, but the folks over there aren't dumb, so I'm sure it'll be huge. Project Comet will launch in early 2006 and will combine the publishing power of TypePad, the community aspects of LiveJournal and the years of insight garnered ...

The 2003 OSDir.com Editor's Choice Awards in Open Source: Here's a great survey of all that is good in the open source world. Movable Type made the list for Perl (even though it's not technically open source), and I was surprised to see Ruby in there as a Perl alternative. ...

Wiki: Posted here three years ago today. How quaint. I've recently become involved with a Wiki project. It's still under wraps but I have to say that I'm awfully smitten with the whole Wiki theory. A lot has been said since then. The project, incidentally, was the Movable Type Wiki, ...

I love Movable Type, but using WordPress on my personal site has highlighted two annoyances with the MT editing interface which are real problems. Rather than just being annoying, they really have an effect on the quality of writing and categorization. Semi-WYSIWYG editing. In WordPress, you can "Save and Continue" ...

why content management fails: So true. A lot of companies could do a great job by just issuing FrontPage or Movable Type to someone who knows how to develop Web content well. ...there is a larger issue at play. Even the most thoughtful projects may be misguided. Over and over ...

Edgeio: Taking Listings to the Edge: Edgeio is apparrently a sort of distributed classifieds system that scavanges your RSS feed for stuff to sell. If you are selling something and you own an RSS enabled website, it is just a matter of writing a classified ad and posting it on ...

How-to Change a Movable Type URL Structure and Survive to Tell About It: Oliver Travers has a good tutorial on changing your URL structure, and how to do it without losing any traffic. This is timely for me since I changed the URL structure of this site a few weeks ...

Invision Power Board: Forum Software Free to Use: I've used a lot of BBS software, but I've never seen one this good before. I first ran into this as the backend behind the Movable Type Support forums. It installs easily (one page of options to get it running), and the ...

movabletype.org: News: MT3 will apparently include something called TypeKey. From the context, I'm guessing that it's a system whereby someone can post comments under a certain identity by logging into a central authentication server. With a suite of comment management features and versatile comment registration utilizing a centralized authentication ...

MT Plugin Directory: ImageInfo: Movable Type plugins just keep getting better and better. Camera geeks rejoice (and by "camera geeks," I mean "Rob"). Display image EXIF data along with image on weblog page. Especially useful with digital camera pictures, which often store a lot of EXIF data (time stamp, f/stop, ...

I've never been happier to be wrong. Turns out you can install Movable Type on a commercial hosted Windows account. It just depends on the host. The big hang-up on Windows is the storage mechanism. Most Windows machines with Perl installed do not have the DB_File module which MT needs ...

Sun Embraces Open-Source Database: The only experience that I have with Berkeley DB is thought Movable Type, which uses it as its default data storage system. Odd that suddenly they would get a big contract with Sun. Good for them. "Sleepycat Software Inc. will announce on Wednesday that Sun, of ...

MT-Blacklist - A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin: Well, a new salvo in the war against comment spam has been launched. The idiot hawking tramadol has forced me to install MT-Blacklist. He was coming in about 10 times a day from different IP addresses, so I couldn't ban him. He seems ...

When you get neck deep into a content management implementation, you can lose sight of the actual publishing mechanism-- how the content gets from your system to the end user's browser. No matter how sophisticated your CMS is, at some point, a user enters a URL and some content comes ...

The Gutenberg Project: Gutenberg has been around since the Internet was very, very young the Web wasn t even born yet. It s an effort to catalog as many free books and texts as possible. Gutenberg has thousands of books from hundreds of authors; all in the public domain, all free. ...

After the spam problem of a few weeks ago, I took a single step that Adam Kalsey talked about a long time ago that has fairly well fixed my spam problem: I renamed the Movable Type comments script. I have had exactly one spam in the last three weeks. Spam ...

Sony Pictures - Casino Royale: Sony has put up a new site for the upcoming James Bond film , Casino Royale (to coincide, no doubt, with the selection of Daniel Craig as the new James Bond). But here's the thing: it requires Flash 8. This is the first site I ...

Using Perl code from PHP: The possibilities here make my head spin. Problem is, I don't know if it's spinning in a good way or a bad way. The PHP Perl extension was implemented to allow the usage of Perl code from within PHP. It is a wrapper that embeds ...

The State of Perl: Here's a great essay on the current state of Perl and where it's headed, including information on Perl 6 and Parrot. Why do we use Perl every day? Because Perl scales to solve both small and large problems. Unlike languages like C, C , and Java, ...

Mena's Corner: Support System: These three women were the source of a stunning number of posts on the MT support forums (one of them had upwards of 10,000). I worked with two of them (I don't remember which two, sadly) on the MT Wiki when it was first getting off ...

About three weeks ago, an upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type killed our comment spam filtering. I finally had an hour to track the problem down, and it turns out the upgrade cleared the WordPress API key that MT-Akismet needs to function. We ve restored the key, and comment ...

NewsGator Case Study: Triple Point Technology: This is a great case study by the guys over at NewsGator about integrating blogs and RSS into the enterprise. "Internal weblogs were created using Six Apart's Movable Type. Internal authors are accustomed to sending email, but now post certain information to their new ...

MT Extensions: MTPaginate 1.24: I finally broke down a paginated the category archives. If you remember, I lamented about massive category archives a few weeks ago. MTPaginate is a beautifully well-thought out plugin. Movable Type still writes all the entries to the page, but MTPaginate inserts PHP code to only ...

Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent Front Page: A very interesting angle on the Echo Project and what it means to blog platform vendors. "Given enough will, everyone could be embracing the same API - which would be marvelous for the user, but completely disastrous for many of the weblogging companies. An ...

So, I'm using w.bloggar, and some things are annoying me: (1) there's no column for Extended Entry, (2) it's not WYSIWYG when there are lots of ways it could be, (3) there's no way to assign multiple categories, etc. I posted a request on the Movable Type Support Forum ...

Interface Scalability A good article that speaks to basic usability. A lot of us develop applications within a facade of test data meaning very limited amounts of data. Then, when the app hits the client, and they start pouring data into it, you find that interfaces that worked great ...

A Line in the Sand: Here's a good, level-headed opinion on why the Movable Type 3.0 controversy shouldn't be one. People feel like they have been betrayed… with all this talk of people jumping ship. Half of you would still fall into the free release category! Doesn’t anyone realize what ...

I changed the URL scheme of this Web site over the weekend. I had been meaning to do it for a while, but some problems with Movable Type 3.2 kind of forced the issue. (I have got to stop rushing into every beta that presents itself...) To make everything backwards ...

movabletype.org :: Movable Type 3.1 has been announced and has some huge changes. These three alone will greatly satisfy the hoards. Dynamic PHP publishing, controllable on a per-template basis: You can control whether you publish a dynamic or static page on a per-template basis, letting you balance the publishing and ...

pop2blog: Speaking of Movable Type plugins, here's a great one. pop2blog, when executed, checks a given pop3 email account for email from a particular list of allowed senders. When email is found, pop2blog parses the email for text and embedded jpegs, and performs one of three tasks, depending on the ...

Well, comment spam has finally done me in. A big new wave launched about a week ago, and we're getting spammed about once every 2 minutes, 24 hours a day. I have to manually delete over 100 comment spams a day in three or four "shifts" at the MT interface. ...

R.I.P. Christine Clouse, aka "Crys Clouse", 1979-2004: I stumbled on this last week. This girl and I exchanged some emails two years ago and were involved in a handful of posts on the MT support forums about a plugin she wrote for Movable Type. Just a few weeks ago, ...

David Raynes: SubCategories 1.2: There was much complaining when Movable Type 3.0 came out that there wasn't anything new in it. To a large extent, the complainers were right there was very little new functionality...on the surface. The real gem of MT3, it turns out, is the new plug-in ...

MT-Keystrokes: This isn't a bad idea. This plugin counts the keystrokes entered in the TEXTAREA for the Movable Type comments form, and sends that number with the comment. the plugin does some arithmetic on it to make sure it roughly matches the number of characters in the comment. Based on ...

Builderoo User Manual: This is an apparently amazing plugin for Movable Type called Builderoo that let's you things with plain text markup that would be difficult with even WYSIWYG. Specifically: Change text filters in the middle of an entry using Roo tags [...] Use special purpose filters to generate sophisticated ...

Sitemap Protocol: Google just released this today. It's like robots.txt, except that it shows search engines (well, just Google right now, but others will follow...) how to get to URLs on your site that are not linked from other pages. Actually, you can put all your URLs in this file, ...

Blogs in the Workplace: A good article with a dozen or so examples of how blogs could fit into corporations: "Mr. Tang has also used blogs to coordinate group projects, like the recent process of interviewing job candidates for a programming position. The various people at the company who spoke ...

Once again, Matt Smith has come and rescued me from spammers. A couple of weeks ago, I was at my wit's end. Some commentors recommended Akismet, but I thought it was WordPress-only. Then Matt emailed me to tell me there was a Movable Type port. Given Matt's track record of ...

USAToday is really embracing the blog. Hip Clicks (now Pop Candy) -- their entertainment blog -- hit the Net 14 months ago. Shortly after that they started using RSS. Then they created blogs.usatoday.com a few months back. Now, they've taken all their news and have created "On Deadline," a "real-time ...

Harvard Weblogs: What makes a weblog a weblog?: Here's an awfully interesting attempt that succeeds in defining just what a "weblog" is. It's written by Dave Winer, who should know since he founded Userland. "At Berkman we're studying weblogs, how they're used, and what they are. Rather than saying 'I ...

What's the difference between a blog post and an "article" or a "story"? By those terms, I mean content that isn't as ephemeral as posts that hit the site every 15 minutes. Blogs are, by definition, transient they're time-based, and items get essentially dropped into a stampede that tramples ...

How DO You Serve Two Masters?: Dean Peters over at Heal Your Church Web Site is on vacation. so he asked a bunch of us to guest-write for this week. My day was today. I hope I didn't suck. [...] church Web sites have an interesting challenge in front of ...

I've finally found a legitimate, value-adding use for Ajax -- comment previewing. On this site, you used to have to preview the comment on a separate screen, remember what you wanted to change, then go back to the main screen and make your changes (I've complained about this exact model ...

BuiltWith.com - Web Technology Profiler: This is a very cool idea that isn t quite what I hoped it would be. Web Page Technology Profiler [ ] Find out what a site is built with. You can enter a URL, and it will contact that URL and do some analysis on what ...

I announced The Joshua Project over two months ago, and I've been awfully quiet about it ever since. Well, I'm proud to announce that Joshua has just released its first Web site. Command Two is a prayer ministry focused on recruiting prayer supporters in community neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. They ...

Here's something that may not be common knowledge to a lot of people: having Google Adsense ads on your page gets you indexed faster. Here's why: I made a post the other night about the PHP templating language Smarty. I published it in Movable Type, then viewed the permalink page. ...

One of the cool new things in Movable Type 3.x is that it forks processes to do stuff in the background. For instance, if you save an entry, you don't have to wait for it to rebuild. MT runs the rebuild process in the background, and the entry quietly rebuilds ...

Well, I went ahead and upgraded to Movable Type 3.1 with the free version I got from joining the MT Professionals Network (still trying to find a catch...). Note that if you're considering a 3.1 upgrade, wait there are errors in the upgrade scripts that Six Apart is working ...

We unleashed our new search page over the weekend. To make it work correctly, we had to retroactively keyword all past entries (a endeavor about which I will write more later). but with that done, it seems to be working quite well. The engine returns terms in two groups ...

Textpattern: This app has finally been released in "gamma," whatever that is. Sounds like a pre-pre-pre-beta, which is what I thought an "alpha" was... When it comes to publishing on the internet, beginners and experts alike are met with a bothersome paradox: word processors and graphics applications allow anyone to ...

Someone on the ProNet mailing list mentioned ecto today. It's a desktop blogging client seems like a good one. ecto is a feature-rich desktop blogging client for MacOSX and Windows, supporting a wide range of weblog systems, such as TypePad, MovableType, WordPress, Drupal, Nucleus, Blogger, and more. ecto is ...

Content Tools Expanded: Interwoven is doing something with TeamSite 6.0 that has been on my mind for a while now. "...allows content management features, such as workflow and versioning, to be accessed from within Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition and Microsoft Corp. .Net-based applications as WSDL (Web Services Description Language) ...

I don't mean to go on another rant about comment spam, but I'm suffering under another deluge on my personal site. While the Texas Holdem spammer was a blitzkreig, another spammer has deanebarker.net under slow siege. Someone out there is posting a spam comment to my site twice per hour, ...

We're trying something new around here. Since we have so many posts, there's a lot of internal linking between posts. This linking has value because it can point you to other things you may be interested in. You see, you can only link to something in the past -- it ...

This whole Aestiva thing has got me thinking about development platforms. Every week, there's a new one that claims to be simpler and faster than the last one. ASP is simpler than JSP, PHP is more capable than ColdFusion, HTML/OS makes developing apps faster than the others, etc. You know ...

I love plugin architectures. Having a well-done method for people to extend your system is a huge, huge benefit that we've discussed and lauded in relation to Firefox and Movable Type. But, there's a dark side. When you update software to a new version, you normally do a regression test, ...

Yeah, I'm pissed. Really pissed. When does comment spam become a DDOS attack? There's a fine l