Using MovableType
Just getting bounced around RSS-space is Phil Long’s Syllabus Feb 2004 column on TrackBack: Where Blogs Learn Their Places . Some are saying tat it explains Trackback well, but to be honest, you cannot really understand it until you use it. We are glad that Phil is giving TrackBack some limelight (waiting for those to […]
As the blog turns… Since our MovableType move last month to a new server, a shiny Apple XServe, I’d been noticing that email notifications of trackbacks and comments reported not the IP address of the person who had sent the comment/trackback, but the IP address of the server itself. Hard to block spam roaches by […]
On its own, blogging is nicely permeating among some of our faculty. At this Friday’s Ocotillo Online Learning Group meeting, we have 4 demos of different ways weblogs are currently in use at Maricopa.
A brief preview for those who cannot be at Phoenix College Friday…
Did you ever have one of those days where every piece of technology you touched went up in screaming flames and thick smoke? That was today for me. It began while trying to test the new 2.661 version of MovableType. Typically what I do is to create a copy of the MT scripts in another […]
Not that anyone but me cares, but number 4 (my French numbering skills went out the ouvre) in my recent spate of blog tinkering notes (1, 2, 3) was a recasting of the date-based archives, the monthly archives MovableType builds for you. With the out of the box templates, MT simply takes every blog entry […]
Ever since I launched this weblog April 2003, I have been talking up blogs quite a bit in my system. The usual heat seekers grab on to the potential and some of the more technology skeptical folks at least do not wrinkle their brows in confusion when I mention “blog”. I’ve run a few “BlogShops” […]
Another squirrely thing about MovableType right out of the box is that the category archive templates it create is more or less a never-ending appending of your posts to a long scrolling archive. It hardly seems useful once you have blogged say 10, 20 entries in a category, much less if you have written long pieces and/or embedded images.
Previously I wrote about my funky strategy for creating two sets of category archives, the recent 20 linked to “all the rest”, but I have modified the output templates to produce more or less a title/abstract view (example) rather than a mimic of the original post, with a link to the full post (the individual archive, old example)…
More changes I forgot in the MovableType structure of CDB. Previously, when I had a poor grasp on MT templates, I had separate index templates for each of my category RSS feeds, thinking there was not a way to generalize that. This was sloppy, requiring new templates for every category I decided to add, and the more index rebuilds you ask MT to do, it seems to get a bit clunkier.
Here is how I created generalized RSS feeds (okay, they are still RSS 1.0, but I’ve yet to figure out why I need 2.0 or pie or Atom or whatever else it is called these days. I am open to having my paw slapped)…
I’ve raved before about Kung-Log, Adriaan Tijsseling’s amazingly sleek Mac OXS application for doing just about all the MovableType composing and editing. Change is on the way and it is good- Adriaan is at work on a new version, re-named “ecto”. In fact, I am “ecto”-ing this entry now in beta version 0.1.5, and it […]
Ari Paparo assembled a longer than you might expected list of web search tools for specifically searching weblogs and/or RSS feeds. My new theory on blogging is that whenever I can’t find a particular piece of information on Google I should just create it myself. What’s the point of all this easy-to-use publishing technology if […]
