blogtech

BlogData Tutorial

At the bottom (or top) of each post on this site (and almost all of my MovableType blogs) I present a set of icons which I consider the entry’s “blogdata”. I thought I would share with everyone exactly how I do that. MovableType is excellent for this sort of thing, and Ben and Mena deserve bundles of good karma (and cash, if you have extra).
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Well that was fun. Way back in March I implemented the PowerLinks MT hack from scottandrew.com. When I upgraded to MT2.11 I lost the hack, of course. So I re-hacked it. I played with it a bit and added a few more features.

• One thing I have wanted to do since day one was add the same PowerLinks to my bookmarklet, since that’s how I post 3/4 of the time anyway. So I did that by editing bm_entry.tmpl a bit.
• I hacked around with the end of edit_entry.tmpl so that I could use the PowerLinks in the “Additional Entry” section as well as the “Main Entry Text” box.
• I changed some of the formatting (width=”whatever” to width=”50%”) so that the buttons wouldn’t be aligned too far to the right of the textboxes.
• And finally I added a new PowerLink button to automatically link to a specific item at Amazon.com instead of just a search for the item.

Amazing, I know, but it all works perfectly. If anyone is interested I’ll see if Scott minds if I write a quick and dirty tutorial about how I did it. Mr. Andrew certainly deserves all the credit for it, though.

So … this is a test of my modified edit_entry.tmpl file …

Currently To Do:

• add a custom field to entries
• write a tutorial about adding a custom field to entries
• write a tutorial about the blogdata module
• change Media Obsessions to a generic review blog
• create a running media blog
• figure out a way to get updated Red Sox scores on my page
• redesign sidebar(s)
• do something with the OceanBlog
• Answer these questions:
   Why does bleach work so well? How the hell does it work?
   Does anyone watch “Ed”?

nf0 has written an article that describes How to Add the current Temperature to a Movable Type Blog Entry. (I cannot imagine why you would want to post the temperature which corresponds to a blog entry. But I’ve worked with databases and users long enough to know that no niche should ever go unfilled. Someone, somewhere is just dying to have this feature. I think that it is really much more interesting as a tutorial on how to add your own custom tags to MT.)

Scriptygoddess is another site dedicated to showing / teaching tips and tricks about MovableType. There are some really good ones there. Check ‘em out!

I’m honored to see that this little page and its MovableType category section have been included in the MovableBlog Resources area. The MovableBlog is a blog all about cool tips and tricks for maintaining your MovableType blog. Great idea!

Two Tricks from the MT Support Forum:

• How to Randomly Generate Entries
• How to Create a Printer-Friendly Template

Of course if you are using CSS to its fullest, you can create printer-friendly pages by simply changing stylesheets. There is a tutorial at Evolt that explains how.

[The girlie matters] has a cool collection of MovableType tips and tricks.

Sadly, she is another blogger that for some reason doesn’t ping weblogs.com when she updates. I wish *everyone* with a blog would ping … it would make using blogTracker so much simpler …

Several people have asked me how I did it, so I wrote a tutorial on how to create a pop-up ‘eMail This Entry’ window in MovableType. Here it is.

PLEASE NOTE:
This tutorial is based on MovableType Version 2.1 only. If you have upgraded to Version 2.2 I advise you to wait until I have had a chance to update the tutorial!

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Wow! Bloglet looks cool as heck. It allows readers to subscribe to your blog as an eMail service. At the end of each day, it will eMail subscribers all of your posts (or excerpts!) from that day. Currently it only works with Blogger, but I am hoping that Ben and Mena will add support to MovableType in a future release. I think that it’s definitely something I would use.

Here is the fix for the MovableType “unitialized value at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 999” error.

And here’s a special link from Microsoft that should be very useful to many people.

Webgraphics rocks. The tagline is, “a daily compilation of hypertext design resources, links, commentary and notes.” This is one of those sites that I’m going to have to read top-to-bottom; it’s full of great information and design tricks.

Cyber-Gish - not to be confused with Normal-Jish - has created a Forum for discussing blogging shtuff. You might want to pop over there and say hi.