One of my main reasons for using MovableType (MT) for blogging is that most of the blogs I read that seemed well designed, structurally and graphically, had MT under the hood. And the pages produced are clean HTML, even XHTML validat-able, and the templates use CSS sensibly too (as opposed to osme other blogs that are still publishing cruft table-laden HTML, full of extraneous divitis, font tags, etc).

But while they look great on screen, full of nice colors, MT blogs do not print well, especially if you opt for the cool grey background/white text style sheet (e.g. “stormy”).

Ironic isn’t it? An appication named “MovableType” is missing a key element to make it printable. Sadly, it is a fact, that despite our “modern” digital age, a lot of web pages are printed.

So in this post, I will describe how to add a print style sheet to your MT blog so that when the pretty pages are printed, they come out readable. And this is without needing a “print friendly” icon, just the brawn and power of CSS.

This came into play when I ran the workshop yesterday, our the “blogshop”, as I wanted to provide paper handouts for the step-by-step instruction sections…

Maybe a bit ambitous to call this a complete revision, but today I ran the second iteration of our weblogging workshop, or BlogShop 2.0 for a group of 20 faculty and staff at Phoenix College.

Pretty much the sections for using MovableType are the same, but I spent some more time trying to illustrate with more examples the potential of blogs in education.