I already posted the first Reader Question regarding a problem after a WordPress upgrade.. I hope that you guys are able to help out on that one b/c I’m clueless.

What do you guys think of this new addition to the blog – the occasional posting of Reader Questions or even any articles or opinion pieces? I’m all ears!

Getting back to this blog, right now I need to focus my time that I’m able to be at the computer (which is limited b/c of my back) working. This leaves me with no time to work on How to Blog right now, which makes me really sad. I think it is a wonderful resource and needs to be kept going. So, readers…are any of you interested in contributing to the site with informative posts on aspects of how to blog?? Tips and tricks, guides, walkthroughs, suggestions, experiences, blogging software comparisons, plugins, templates and themes, updates to my comprehensive wordpress theme list, any of these things would be wonderful additions to How to Blog and greatly appreciated!!

Please comment below or email me at howtoblog(at)gmail.com if you are interested in contributing! Help me to help this blog get back to it’s roots of helping new and experienced bloggers alike! Thanks so much in advance!!!!

Please read the following and sign the petition to preserve Network Neutrality

Do you blog, buy books online, use Google, or download to an iPod? Everything we do online will be hurt if Congress passes a radical law next week that gives giant corporations more control over what we do and see on the Internet.

Internet providers like AT&T are lobbying Congress hard to gut Network Neutrality—the Internet’s First Amendment and the key to Internet freedom. Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which websites open most easily for you based on which site pays AT&T more. BarnesandNoble.com doesn’t have to outbid Amazon for the right to work properly on your computer. What they’re talking about here is having website owners pay ISPs for the “right” for their sites to load as quickly as their competitors. If you don’t pay a fee to AT&T and other internet providers, they could make your website or blog load slower for all of their customers.

If Net Neutrality is gutted, almost every popular site—from Google to eBay to iTunes—must either pay protection money to Internet companies like AT&T or risk having their websites process slowly. That why these high-tech pioneers and others are opposing Congress’ effort to gut Internet freedom. But ringing even closer to home, individual bloggers and small businesses will likely not have the funds to pay to ensure that their sites load as quickly as other sites. Why should anyone have to pay to have their site load properly???? Its like having to pay a dirty cop to do their job and protect your business. How dare these ISPs think they should be entitled to charge companies and people for the right to have their site load as fast as their own webserver is capable of serving up the page?? What are they, Mob 2.0?

And what about the users of these internet providers? Should they all of a sudden have certain websites load slowly for them because that website didn’t pay a ‘protection fee’?? Every single person’s internet experience could be drastically negatively affected by this, whether they have their own website or simply enjoy surfing the net.

You can do your part today—can you sign this petition telling your member of Congress to preserve Internet freedom? Click here:

http://www.civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet/

I signed this petition, along with 250,000 others so far. This petiton will be delivered to Congress before the House of Representatives votes next week. When you sign, you’ll be kept informed of the next steps we can take to keep the heat on Congress.

Snopes.com, which monitors various causes that circulate on the Internet, explained:

Simply put, network neutrality means that no web site’s traffic has precedence over any other’s…Whether a user searches for recipes using Google, reads an article on snopes.com, or looks at a friend’s MySpace profile, all of that data is treated equally and delivered from the originating web site to the user’s web browser with the same priority. In recent months, however, some of the telephone and cable companies that control the telecommunications networks over which Internet data flows have floated the idea of creating the electronic equivalent of a paid carpool lane.

If companies like AT&T have their way, Web sites ranging from Google to eBay to iTunes to your blog either pay protection money to get into the “fast lane” or risk opening slowly on your computer. We can’t let the Internet—this incredible medium which has been such a revolutionary force for democratic participation, economic innovation, and free speech—become captive to large corporations.

Politicians don’t think we are paying attention to this issue. Together, we do care about preserving the free and open Internet.

Please sign this petition letting your member of Congress know you support preserving Internet freedom. Click here:

http://www.civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet/

Please feel free to forward this on to everyone you know that loves or relies on the internet!

Much thanks,
Emily

By pagination, I mean the and buttons that many bloggers and blog readers are accustomed to seeing at the bottom of a blog page (a feature that is built into WordPress, for example). TypePad gives you the option of customizing how many posts appear on a page, but no way to easily navigate to posts beyond those appearing on the front page. For example, the oldHow To Blog site is set to display 10 posts on the front page. But when users visit the site and read through those posts, and want to see the rest of what I’ve written, they have only 2 options, neither of which is optimal:

1. View each category one at a time
2. Go through the monthly archives

I had put it on my personal ‘to do’ list to figure out how to add Next and Previous links to the buttom of my TypePad pages, and when I finally decided to tackle the project and couldn’t figure it out on my own, I submitted a support ticket to Six Apart asking for help with it. I wrote:

WordPress has built in previous / next page links at the bottom of every page. This makes their blogs much more easy to navigate, especially for beginners. As each page only contains a certain number of posts, without having next and previous buttons it’s hard for people to easily navigate the blog.

In addition to making this a feature request, I’d also like to know what code I should use in my advanced templates in order to implement this on my blog on How to Blog.

Your prompt attention to this matter is greatly appreciated.

Thank you!
Emily Robbins

The response I got back from TypePad Customer Support was astounding (bold added by me):

Hi Emily,

Currently TypePad doesn’t offer pagination (Next Page and Previous Page links), so there isn’t any code that I can offer you to do this.

Thanks for the suggestion, though. We are always looking for ways to enhance TypePad for our users, so we will keep this in mind as a possible future feature for the system.

Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you.

Thanks,
Kymberlie

Excuse me for the double-take, but NO CODE AVAILABLE TO DO THIS? How can this be when SixApart themselves acknowledged the importance of pagination features in their own article on Six Apart Pronet entitled “Building on Movable Type Part 3: Creating Pagination Controls”, wherein they say (again, bolding is from me):

Pagination controls are sufficiently ubiquitous that our own developers saw the value in creating a reusable mechanism for creating the links developers should all be too familiar with: “next page,” “previous page,” “last page,” “first page” and “you are viewing results X to Y out of Z.” This reusable framework is not only accessible within Movable Type, but by plugins as well.

So apparently Six Apart thinks that pagination controls are so ‘ubiquitous’ that we’d be ‘all to familiar’ with them, and they are not only built into the functionality of Movable Type but also accessible by MT plugins. GREAT. For Movable Type users.

So how come when SixApart created (and updated and updated) TypePad, this “ubiquitous” functionality was somehow forgotten?

Update: for those of you who click the link to my old blog at typepad to see the lack in pagination functionality, the template for the site has been changed to make it easier for folks to see the full URL for my new posts at the new site, making for a pretty ugly site. It didn’t use to look like that, but it’s okay that it’s ugly – none of you are supposed to be using that site anymore b/c I moved over here, remember

Once you post the specifics of the project you need help with, coders will then bid on your ‘job’ and you can decide who you want to hire based on their bid, the feedback they received from other users on other projects they’ve completed, etc.

From their website:

Need a coder to help you create the next ‘killer app’ or answer questions? Just post your program or question here and coders from around the world will email you bids on doing the work.

You can review each bidder’s resume and reputation online, and when you’re ready to make your decision, you can rent your personal, expert, coder with just a few clicks! Its that simple!

Posting a bid request is free, and you are under no obligation to accept any bids sent to you unless you choose to. Once you accept a bid, you will place your payment into escrow. The money is not released to the coder, till they complete the work according to your original specification. There are no service charges or finders fees for buyers.

On the flip side, got skills? Flaunt ‘em and earn cash!

Looking to earn extra income using your hard-won technical skills? Rent a Coder lets you locate and bid on coding projects and questions from around the world! By completing a free registration, you can publicize your skills on the online resume system and receive emails as new bid requests come in.

So those of you who are creating all those great free themes and plug-ins (which I hope you’ll continue to offer for the sake of the blogging community), you may wanna consider listing your talents at Rent A Coder and earning some extra $$ through freelancing.

I just did.

So I just got a slew of emails allerting me to the huge load of comment spam that just arrived on my demo MovableType site over at Online Travelogue.com (which I haven’t put more work into developing b/c I’ve decided I prefer WordPress to MT when it comes to hosted weblog solutions). I don’t know why these guys even bother – I have it set so every comment must be manually approved, so their spam never shows up on my pages. BUT ANYWAY, I digress..

So I click the link in my email to ‘edit this comment’, and since I’ve switched from using Internet Explorer to Firefox, of course this launched a window in Firefox prompting me to log in. So I log in (AND, I check the checkbox for “Remember Me”). I click on the comments link – and it starts asking me to login again (didn’t I justdo that?). So I login again, and now it shows me the page of comments and I click ‘check all’ and then click ‘delete’ and guess what? It asks me to login again. Which I do. And then it asks me if I’m sure I want to delete 1 comment (I’m trying to delete 20), and I click yes, and guess what???? It asks me to login again, which, after doing, prompts me with another ‘are you sure you want to delete 1 comment’, after which I decide it’s time to launch IE. Sure enough, I login with IE once, and everything goes smooth as silk. With so many users switching to Firefox these days, how is it that something as popular as movable type doesn’t work in that browser (at least not the UI for the blog owner).

Anyone else have problems using MT with Firefox?

From their website: Works with all leading weblog services:

Blogger b2evolution Blogging.com BlogHarbor Blogware DasBlog DeadJournal DearDiary Drupal LiveJournal Manila

ModBlog Lockergnome.net MovableType pMachine PUSHlogs Squarespace TypePad .Text WordPress Blogger API MetaWeblog API

Right now I’m using it to post to my ‘How to Blog’ blog on TypePad (the post you’re reading right now, actually). You can download a free trial copy of BlogJet here.

I’m only just starting to tool around with it, but my first impression is a good one! Make that great, actually. Because I think it may provide me with the best of all worlds interface-wise. For example, one of my gripes about TypePad is that you have to pop open a new window when you want to select multiple categories for your post (which, for me, is all the time). WordPress, on the other hand, has a bunch of checkboxes and you can check as many as you want w/o having to open another page (it’s just faster, and hey, doing things inefficiently is a pet peeve of mine..). Well, using BlogJet to compose this post, I notice there’s a drop-down box which – surprise – provides checkboxes next to a list of all my categories. One less TypePad gripe. Make that three – I can now change fonts mid post (except it’s a little buggy because I actually changed fonts and switched to BOLD, and clearly this text isn’t bolded when viewed from my actual TypePad site)

and I can(NOT) modify the alignment of the post (or a part of the post) w/o editing the html, so for example, this paragraph happens to be centered – at least in BlogJet, but as you’ll notice when this gets posted (meaning, as you read it), this sure isn’t centered – it’s aligned left just like the rest of the post. Darn. And while I’m bitching, how come there’s no ‘strikethrough’ option for text?

On the flip side, one of my gripes with WordPress is that they don’t have a rich text editor – you can’t just copy something from your browser and paste it into WordPress’ edit post textbox and expect it to preserve it’s formatting (and linking) structure. But BlogJet does have this funcationality – and so now you could have rich text editing and a WYSIWYG display for your WordPress posts. Which might sway me towards choosing WordPress as the ultimate blogging tool (when used in conjunction with BlogJet) because the features, plug-ins and customizability of WordPress are the best I’ve seen thus far.

Initially I though BlogJet had a huge drawback – no place to enter URIs for sites you want to send a trackback ping to. And a search through their online help (at the BlogJetWiki) for ‘trackback’ came up blank. But on a lark I clicked the ‘Properties’ tab at the bottom of the window, and lo and behold, there are all of my advanced post options, including Trackbacks! It’ll be interesting to see if and for how long I’ll actually be using BlogJet to create my posts. As always, I’ll keep ya updated (oh yeah – BlogJet’s got tons of built-in smiley’s, if emoticons are your thing…)

It will also be interesting to see how BlogJet compares with it’s competition – w.blogger, which calls itself “The best interface between you and your blog” and is Freeware (vs. the free 30 day trial I’m using of BlogJet). Oh, so much to do, so little time!

Update 3/22 – I’ve done all of my latest posting using BlogJet, and one of the things I’m really liking about it is that I’m not limited to a small edit box for creating/designing my post. Hell, I can go full screen if I want to. On the other hand, I’ve noticed yet another bug in the product — my posts are appearing in the reverse order of when I’ve created them for each particular date. In other words, I publish Post 1, then later I publish Post 2, and then even later that same day I publish Post 3. In the blogosphere, posts that are archived by date should be displayed in the following order: Post 3, Post 2, followed by Post 1. For all of my posts created on 3/22, they’re showing up in the reverse order of when they are published – Post 1, Post 2, Post 3. So my newest post isn’t at the top. That’s no good… Hopefully w.blogger won’t have this little glitch… (I still haven’t had a chance to try it)

Update 3/31 – Inconsistent behavior when dragging and dropping from IE 6 pages – sometimes is retains formatting from original site (and linking), other time not. Sometimes crashes (I was trying to retrieve my list of posts and got the following error, “Access violation at address 00435113 in module ‘BlogJet.exe’. Read of address 00000000 Class: EAccessViolation” — note that this has only happened once in the entire time I’ve been using the software, and shutting it down and relaunching solved the problem..). Can’t create new categories from w/in their interface – must log into your blogs control panel to do so.

But both WordPress and MovableType require you to know CSS (cascading style sheets) in order to customize the look and feel of your blog and your templates. While I’m quite certain I could learn it, Elise Bauer has written a great article about using TypePad styles with MT (MovableType) that indicates I may be able to use the simplicity and grace of TypePad’s interface to customize my templates and use those templates in MT. Since I’m already paying for a webhosting company for some of my other websites, like Hotel Reservation Network.com, it would be cheaper for me to use a hosted solution rather than paying another monthly fee for TypePad — after all, I’ve already prepaid for the bandwitdth with my webhost.

As soon as I have a chance to test out this trick, I’ll post a link to the demo and my impressions of its ease of use (as well as exactly what I did and how).

Trackback and commenting go hand in hand, especially in the weblog community, but unfortunately, there hasn’t been an easy way for Blogger, Blogspot, Diaryland, Diary-X, iBlog, Newspro, Pitas, and many other weblog users to implement trackback capabilities until now.

HaloScan fills this need by providing you not only with the (free) commenting services we have provided for the last one and half years, but also easy, seamless integration of trackback services (both incoming and outgoing ping support) to all existing and future Haloscan members. All this at the unbeatable price of $0.00–FREE. Getting started requires minimal work–sign up, log in and follow the simple, two-step directions to install trackback and/or commenting into your weblog. We highly recommend that all existing and new users install both the commenting and trackback services but you can also install just one or the other as needed. If you have trouble with any part of this process, we’ll be glad to help! Also, be sure to send a trackback ping to this post if you install the trackback system or write about us in your weblog.

Hmmm — so many things on my plate, but I can’t wait to try out Blogger combined with HaloScan’s free remote commenting and trackback system. Could this make Blogger a true competitor to TypePad (or perhaps even superior – given that its FREE)?

I’ll post my findings soon!

Update: It’s not as simple as it seems. According to their tutorial on sending a trackback ping, each time you want to send a trackback from Blogger (or similar tool), you have to

1. login to HaloScan
2. click ‘Manage Trackback’
3. click ‘Send a trackback ping’
4. Paste the TrackBack ping URL into the edit box for ‘URLs to Ping’
5. Fill in your blog name
6. Paste YOUR permalink URL
7. Paste a copy of your Post Title
8. Paste (or write) an excerpt from your post
9. Click the ‘Ping Now’ button.

Yikes – that’s more work/typing/copying & pasting than I want to bother with.

There’s a thread in their forums about adding some code to your Blogger templates which enables auto-discovery of TrackBack URLs (something that tools like MovableType and TypePad already do), which, if it works, could save some time – but as you’ll see in the thread people have found it difficult to implement. Your mileage may vary.

Sounds like I’m gonna need to get myself a copy of the Movable Type 3.0 Bible Desktop Edition! Of course, once I do I’ll post my own review at How to Blog

Some of the deciding factors for him were the better templates that Movable Type comes with (as well as the ease of editing them without having to know cascading style sheets and PHP), a larger base of existing plug-ins (for now) and better documentation.

I’m curious to see if MovableType has been (or will be) updated by Six Apart to improve it’s interface to allow for rich text editing (WYSIWYG publishing) and a spell checker like they’ve done with TypePad. As I already pay for my own dedicated server, I don’t like having to pay extra fees to host my TypePad site elsewhere, so if I could have typepad’s functionality and ease of use hosted on my own server, in the long run that’ll be more affordable for me.

Neil Turner has blogged about his experience with experimenting with Feedburner, and while his post doesn’t reference the ability to incorporate amazon links, he does show you how he’s spliced in his Flickr photostream.

Here’s how the service works:

FeedBurner detects your feed categories and then asks you to assign an Amazon store to any category for which you want to include the Amazon Associates program. For example, you might choose to associate the music store with your music category, DVD’s with your Pop Culture category, and nothing at all with your Personal and Family categories. You, the publisher have total control over the frequency with which Amazon Associates links appear, and whether they should appear alongside really short posts or only very detailed posts.

FeedBurner then leverages the latest 4.0 release of Amazon Web Services to match your posts to relevant Amazon content for that store, and FeedBurner transforms that link and content from Amazon Web Services into a simple linked GIF tied to your feed item.

Publishers have total control over which (if any) parts of their feed get amazon links, which amazon stores they want to map to their content, and how frequently they want these associate links to appear.

I’ve been poking around in MovableType and WordPress, but haven’t yet discovered how to make your blog private on those platforms — I’d imagine you could password protect a directory by modifying the .htaccess files, but I’d like to see ability to make a blog private incorporated into the blog tools interface.

This is where TypePad excels. Simply create a new blog, and 1) mark it as private (which only stops them from listing your blog on the ‘Recently updated blogs’ lists ) and make sure the boxes for notifying third party services when you update your blog are unchecked AND then 2) go into the Control Panel and click the link that says ‘Password Protect a Site’ and then enter the shared username and password that you will provide to only those you want to access your blog — this allows you to limit access to your blog, or part of your blog, so that only you or those you choose can read your posts.

In Blogger, go to Settings | Basic, and make sure to pick ‘No’ from the dropdown box entitled ‘Add your Blog to our listings’. Note that A Public blog appears in your Blogger Profile. If you select ‘No’ they will not show your blog anywhere on Blogger.com, but it will still be available on the Internet. As such, if you host your Blogger blog on their free hosting site, BlogSpot, from what I can tell you will not be able to keep your blog private or prevent it from being spidered and indexed by the search engines. If you’re very careful not to link to it from any external site, theres a chance it will never be found..but you’ve no guarantee of preventing unwanted eyes from reading your private blog. If you host your blog on your own ISP or web hosting provider and FTP your blogger pages to them, it’s conceivable that you could password protect the directory, again by modifying the .htaccess file.

Again, not having yet installed b2evolution or blosxom, I can’t comment on those platforms. However, I checked out blosxom’s website and it appears that they have several Blosxom plugins that you can use to password protect your site.

So, at this point, it would appear that TypePad is the only blogging software I have tested that allows you to make all or part of a blog private from within the TypePad control panel.

While TypePad doesn’t officially support customizing pings, there is a workaround, albeit a bit tedious – simply paste the list of URI’s into the box entitled ‘Send a TrackBack to these addresses’ in the edit post screen (yes, this means you need to do this for each and every post you create). If you don’t see the field for sending trackbacks, make sure you’re using the advanced or custom post editor by clicking the link on the create/edit post page entitled, ‘Customize the display of this page’ (it’s below the preview and save buttons).

Not surprisingly, Blogger doesn’t support customizing of pings and since they don’t support trackbacks either, I haven’t figured out a way to get this working on Blogger. I don’t yet have b2evolution or Blosxom blogs installed yet, so I’ve no idea whether they support pings or allow you to customize them..

Anyhow, here’s my comprehensive list of ping services to ping to tell them that you’ve updated your blog:

We’ll soon see how easy it is to post, customize templates, etc. with WordPress cuz that’s next on my list for my tool and hardware review blog

Obviously, my TypePad site is my How to Blog weblog that you’re reading right now. Notice how the header is truncated b/c the templates that come with TypePad don’t appear to be rendering correctly in IE6 (update – I decreased the wording in my header so this doesn’t happen because it just looks too unprofessional and I couln’t find another workaround yet). I’m not sure if this is a CSS problem, and since I don’t know much about cascading style sheets yet I haven’t mucked around too much in the TypePad templates to try to fix it. I’ll create a post on how things look in other browsers in the future.

My Movable Type blog is located at Online Travelogues, and is also a work in progress and needs serious modifications to the index page so that it only lists all of the categories and to the individual post pages, so that it doesn’t list the title of all the other posts in the sidebar (which messes up my adsense relevancy).

I’ve been testing out Blogger for my weblog about Red Eared Slider Turtles.

My 1st WordPress blog is going on my Tool Reviews site.

Blosxom and b2evolution blogs are soon to come.

Once I’ve got one of each, I can work more on the tweaking of the templates, etc, to see which will eventually be my blogging tool of choice – and also so I can better understand which features I consider to be most crucial (as mentioned many times already, we already know I can’t go with Blogger because it doesn’t currently support TrackBacks, nor is there any indication that they intend to do so anytime soon).

The problem is that all of these other tools have a decent sized learning curve, particularly if you are interested in customizing your templates, which I very much am. So if I’m going to invest all this time in creating my perfect blog, which means learning the software which powers it, I want to make sure I don’t waste too much of my time on a platform that doesn’t have as much community support or won’t necessarily keep up with new technologies as they emerge (like the way Blogger doesn’t support TrackBacks, for example)

It occurred to me to just do a google search for each of the tools in question to get an idea of how many pages reference those tools. Now, Movable Type has been around for a LONG time, so it’s likely that that will be the most popular of searches – yet, as mentioned in a previous post, there is concern in the Movable Type community that it’s creators might not put as much effort in keeping it up to date now that they have their new baby, TypePad.

In any case, here are the number of results that turn up when you search for the following terms in Google (the most popular search engine out there):

Movable Type = 1,610,000 results

blosxom = 13,700 results

b2evolution = 104,000 results

WordPress = 1,450,000

While I’m at it, might as well check Google PR (Page Rank) for each of the above mentioned sites to gain another sense of it’s popularity (or, as Google puts it, to gain a measure of the importance of a page):

WordPress has PR 7
b2evolution has PR 6
bloxsom has PR 8
Movable Type has PR 8
TypePad has PR 8
Blogger has PR 10

Hmm. Blogger has PR 10. Man, I wish they would implement the latest technology into Blogger so one can use it, because I really suspect google gives some level of priority in ranking to blogs created using the software THEY own and hosted on their server (blogspot). Anyone else ever wondered about this?

Here are the links to articles that will (hopefully) help me (and you) to get MT working in a more robust capacity:

Brad Choate’s Doing your whole site with MT allows you to ‘make use of Movable Type’s search feature to search any page f my site instead of just my weblog content. I can also enable comments, trackback or whatever for any page I’d like.’

July 14, 2003, by Matt Haughey

I’ve spent the past year and a half playing with the possibilities in Movable Type (MT), through my personal and client sites. Like all weblog management tools, MT is basically just a lightweight content manager, but it’s power is in its flexibility. This article is aimed at people comfortable with HTML and creating their own MT templates, but if you’re new to the tool there might still be some tips worth picking up.

The template system is the core feature of MT I’m tweaking in all the following examples. MT came onto the scene in Fall of 2001 and introduced a feature not many other blogging tools shared (then and still now), and that is the flexible way templates are handled. Instead of just skins for your weblog, or a predefined limit of templates for your index and archives, it not only ships with templates for every aspect of a weblog, you can have as many additional templates as you want and they can do any number of things you need.

Easy tweak: publishing the rest of your site in MT

It’s pretty common for people new to weblogging to embrace the simplicity of publishing, and crave it in the rest of their tools. Once you start blogging and the pain of FTP and hand HTML coding is gone, many people start wishing their blogging tools could handle other pages on their site, but virtually none of them do out of the box.

About six months ago, I was asked to help with some updates on Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society site, and I learned that the entire site was editable in MT. It was so extensive and powerful that I spent a couple days making layout, content, and site-wide navigation changes and didn’t even have a server FTP login. The ever brilliant Kathryn Yu used a combination of server side includes (to hide redundant markup) and MT templates to control every single page on the site (both static and weblog). Then she gave some people rights to modify templates, in order to let them edit the text of static pages. As you’ll find out, it’s pretty effortless to power a site’s about page, a resume, and/or a contact page with MT.

The secret is simple: create new templates that hold your static content. Although templates were designed to feature output by the MT weblog content engine, there’s no requirement for that, and this is a easy tweak of the system.

Example: adding an About page to an existing MT-powered blog.

Log into Movable Type and select ‘Templates’ on in the left hand menu.

To make things easier, you’ll want to copy the design of your Main Index template so the HTML is identical on your About page. Click on ‘Main Index’ to get the template edit screen, then copy all of the template code. Hit your back button to return to the list of templates.

Follow the link to create a new Index Template. Give it a name like ‘About page’ and an appropriate filename. Paste the Main Index template code into the textarea. Remove everything between the MTEntries tags, including the tags themselves. In the place of the weblog code you just deleted, enter your About page content, with appropriate markup as necessary. Figure 1 shows a conceptual diagram of how this works.

Figure 1. Conceptual diagram of how a normal weblog page works in MT and how a static page works.

If you want to make things easy on your server, check off the option that says rebuild this template automatically, since it won’t have any weblog data that will be changing constantly (otherwise it’d just be wasting server resources every time you posted a new blog entry). Whenever you do want to update the page, edit the About page template HTML and make sure you rebuild just that template by clicking the Rebuild Template button below (note: not the rebuild link that will shown above your template information, the form button at the bottom).

While it’s a slight bit tedious to setup each static page in this way, you will gain the convenience of being able to update any page on your site directly within MT. You can continue creating as many pages as you need, such as a page for your resume, a page linking to your photo galleries, a contact page, a search page, and/or a links page. I’ve converted all the static pages on my site using this technique and find I only have to update a static page once a month or so, but having them all accessible from a web browser makes updates easier and I find I make changes more often.

More Advanced tweak: using MT as a simple database application

While movable type was designed to handle all the data associated with weblogs, you’ll soon see that MT can also be used to create a photo gallery, power a design portfolio, keep a recipe catalog, or anything else you can imagine.

I’ve been building database-backed websites for the past four years and there’s one simple reason I love building them: once you’ve done the extra work and created the code to output a single page, you can then output ten thousand pages. After building site after site like this, I’ve found one of the problems is that coding the database layer and scripting layer is time consuming and requires a lot of work. Then I realized that I could use MT for simple database needs.

It all began when I starting thinking of how I could convert this featured essay section from a system I built myself to movable type. My custom application used these fields to describe each essay: title, subtitle, image, the essay itself, and the date. I realized there were at least that many pieces of data in a movable type blog and went about converting things over.

Basic database concepts

I tend to think of databases a lot like simple spreadsheets. If you imagine every piece of data a Movable Type blog can have, it looks something like the table below.

Note: You might not be able to see all these data fields in your Movable Type installation, make sure you have the latest release (2.64 or later) and be sure to click the ‘Customize this Page’ link on the new entry page, then enable everything you can in the ‘Custom’ view.

In the table above, the title, body, extended body, and keyword fields are totally open-ended text containers. For this section of my site devoted to featured essays, I re-used the data in the following way.

As you can imagine, Movable Type’s weblog engine can be re-used for all sorts of pages. I am currently using MT to power my press list at MetaFilter and the press at Ticketstubs, it powers my mobile phone photo gallery (Additionally, I’m using a piece of email-to-MT software that saves the images and puts the image names into MT fields), and it also powers my list of photo galleries (I designed a separate app to host the images — eventually I’ll move that to exported iPhoto galleries).

Example: Creating an online portfolio with MT

I use a database application whenever I have content that repeats and follows a distinct pattern. For this example I’ll create a portfolio of web sites I’ve designed. A portfolio generally follows a pretty set pattern where you have a screenshot, description of the site, and associated data (name, date, etc). I’ll start by listing the bits of info needed for each entry in my website portfolio.

Looking at the available fields in MT, I’ll map them as follows:

Keep in mind that for media files like images, audio, or video, I typically put simply the filename in a MT field, then build a link in the template like so:

‘>

and I upload the images separately into the folder. To be honest, I’m still working on my portfolio pages and can’t show you the output with a link, but Ryan Schroeder recently emailed me to show how he’d done his portfolio in MT here.

You can see that he’s using categories to split his type of work into Web Sites, Print, Presentations, and Identity, and each entry features screenshots and text (probably all within a single entry field I’m guessing).

Caveats and limitations

Now obviously MT can only go so far with this, and you’ll have to limit any site to six different types of information, but it should be clear that for a lot of websites it’s all the complexity you need. Anything you want to keep track of online that is limited to several properties can be handled by MT.

The other major downside to repurposing MT is that you’re still stuck with the MT posting interface that clearly asks for all the pieces of a weblog, even when you’re using it for posting recipes (which, by the way, could be done using category as the meal type, the name of the dish would go in the title field, the instructions in entry field, and the ingredients in extended entry). I know the Movable Type folks have talked about creating a developer program and after doing things like this with MT, I would suggest that MT someday become flexible enough to where a developer could customize the interface to posting for client sites. I’d love to deploy a site intended for an aspiring author to track all his articles written, books reviewed, and favorite sites, but give them a custom backend that clearly labels each thing appropriately. Sort of like a template system for MT itself. Just the other day I noticed that Jay Allen has done just this for one of his clients.

So what have we learned?

I learned these techniques slowly, and as the lightbulbs went off I thought it might help to share it and hopefully spark ideas in others. I didn’t realize what a flexible and powerful system I had right under my nose and now that I’ve started playing with the possibilities, I can’t wait to see what others come up with.

Updates

This article has sparked some great additional hacks. Brad Choate, grand master of MT hacking, tells of a smoother way to add static pages to your site. Scott mentions how to tweak output paths. Doug Bowman explains exactly how he uses MT to control his portfolio, using a bit of PHP to go beyond just a handful of existing data fields. Some example sites I forgot to include, and from people that emailed me are below.

Some examples of innovative MT uses

Boxes and Arrows
An online magazine with over a year of archives and dozens of articles (with comments) that span multiple pages (how that was done). Looking at this site, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Wired News being powered by Movable Type someday.

The Morning News
Another magazine-like publication that uses MT for both articles and their front page’s blog-like headlines. Features nice use of categories for stories and a robust page for every author, with pointers to all their previous contributions.

Adaptive Path
A business organization’s site that features both static and dynamic content, AP’s newest site went through a recent redesign and is now entirely powered by MT (see comment #80 in that thread for pointers to how it was done).

About.com
I don’t know how they did it, but every sub-sub-sub category at About is running its own MT blog (with RSS!). Examples: index of a category, single entry

Redland Baptist Church
MT being use as a whole site CMS for a church’s small site.

Touch of Hope
Charity site built entirely with MT (info on the setup)

REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION using Creative Commons License from http://a.wholelottanothing.org/features.blah/entry/007162

Sending a TrackBack When you send a TrackBack ping, a link to your post and an excerpt of the post is displayed in the TrackBack section of the receiving site. This directs readers to visit your site to read more.

There are a few different ways to send a TrackBack ping:

Sending a TrackBack ping using QuickPost
First, configure the QuickPost bookmarklet by Setting Up TypePad QuickPost if you haven’t yet already. Select the TrackBack items for display on your QuickPost entry form.

Then, follow the steps for Using the QuickPost Bookmarklet to create a new post using QuickPost.

When composing your post, at the bottom of the QuickPost entry form, you will have a pull-down menu to “Select an entry to send a TrackBack ping to”. Use this menu to choose the post you would like to ping.

The TrackBack ping will send when you save the post.

TrackBack Auto-Discovery
With auto-discovery, TypePad will look for any links in your weblog post and determine if those links are TrackBack-enabled. If they are, TypePad will automatically send TrackBack pings to those sites.

TrackBack auto-discovery will be added to TypePad in a future update.

Sending a TrackBack from the Post Page
First, set the “TrackBack URLs to Ping” box to display on your post page by Customizing the Post Page Display.

Now, find the TrackBack URL on the page you would like to ping. Note: The TrackBack Ping URL is not the permalink for an entry, it is the special TrackBack URL for the entry.

Paste the TrackBack URL into the “Send a TrackBack to these addresses” field on your post page. You can paste more than one URL, separated by carriage returns.

The TrackBack ping will send when you save the post.

I’m guessing that instead of using the trackback link to LINK to a post, you use the post’s PERMALINK to link to it, and then in your own post you can choose to Send a TrackBack to these addresses, wherein you paste the trackback addresses. In order to even see this option, you must be using the advanced options in TypePad’s Compose a New Post.

I’m starting off with TypePad because it appears to be the quickest way to get going (I am now on the trial version). I was considering using Blogger, as it looks easy to customize and hey, it’s FREE, but was disappointed when I found out that they don’t have categories (a MUST for me) AND they don’t support TrackBack (Update – I just published a new article just comparing TypePad to Blogger dated 2/26/05 – check it out)

Originally, I was confused regarding whether TypePad and Movable Type are actually the same thing, with one being a hosted version of the other. Searches on this subject came up with articles (example) talking about how Six Apart, the company that makes both TypePad and Movable Type has some conflicts of interest, and there seems to be concern in the MT community regarding how much more effort Six Apart is going to put into Movable Type now that they have TypePad. As I’ve finally set up a MT blog for my travel guides site using Movable Type 3.0 hosted on my dedicated server, I can now say that while the interfaces are quite similar, Movable Type and TypePad are NOT the same thing. As you can see on my trip report site, I’m having trouble mucking around with the templates. And remember, TypePad charges per month even for only 1 blog. If you have 3 or less blogs, Movable Type is free. But it is VERY difficult to modify the templates that are provided with it (and there aren’t other sets packaged with it to choose from, like with TypePad). You can find free templates for Movable Type on the web, but even those are hard to figure out and customize. There’s gotta be an easier way. Not to mention that the templates that Movable Type installs with do not even create Category Archives — you need to modify the main page’s template yourself to add a list of Categories, and the posts themselves don’t even list their category — now what’s the point of the category if they’re not going to set the product up to use it w/o requiring users to muck around so deep in the templates? Hopefully I’ll be a lot better at Movable Type soon, thanks to Elise Bauer’s Learning Movable Type blog. She has a very informative article comparing Movable Type to TypePad, which sort of sums up what I’ve started to think all along — TypePad is MUCH simpler to use to just get your blog up and running — but if you already have web hosting company, and don’t want to pay an additional monthly fee OR if you want to run a more customized, robust blog, Movable Type has tons of plugins that provide additional functionality and while the learning curve is surely much steeper (now I’ve got to delve into CSS so I can understand how to make the templates, even?), the power it provides users with is almost limitless in comparison to TypePad. On the other hand, it does make TypePad a good choice for my blog on How to Blog since the point was that initially I didn’t know how to do it and I got this up and running pretty quickly, with the caveat that I still can’t get the ‘banner’ portion to display all the text of my blog description, and that portion renders oddly on many browsers, including IE 6. But here I am, w/o knowing how to make a blog, blogging away. I will say that it will NOT be my platform of choice for any future blogs. I’d rather put the effort in and learn a more robust, customizable system, as overwhelming as that seems right now.

Another post I found on TypePad vs Blogger focuses more on the visual aspect of the design interfaces, and clearly chooses TypePad as its preference. Interestingly, that site is powered by Movable Type.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m creating this site in TypePad, but I’m noticing I’m really missing some things that blogger has and TypePad doesn’t.

First of all, Blogger let’s you edit the actual HTML of your post, which is a big plus for advanced users – why is this missing in TypePad?? UPDATE: you can type HTML straight into TypePad‘s edit post form and it will interpret it (although not necessarily the way you expect, as you can see by clicking the above link — interestingly, when I previewed that post the text that says it should be red was – but when I published the blog the text color remained unchanged – same for the line that’s SUPPOSED to be centered) – if you’re going to do this, you should probably go to the advanced section when posting and choose Text Formatting of ‘None’

And now for the Things I Like Better about Blogger’s ‘Create Post’ interface (assuming that one is not going to edit the HTML, so we’re just comparing the UI for creating posts btwn Blogger and TypePad here:

Blogger has far more formatting choices available to you, much like a regular word processor would. What’s so special that Blogger has and TypePad is missing?

- Bulleted Lists (which are indented, something I tried to accomplish by blockquoting this list created with hyphens, but it turns out that TypePad then puts all of the info in the same line and does not process the line breaks)

- Text Alignment (ability to center a portion of text, etc)

- Numbered Lists

- (this one’s a biggie….) ABILITY TO CHANGE FONT SIZE WITHIN A POST

- ability to change text color

- hell, just the ability to change the font being used so that the line above could have been Times New Roman and this line could’ve been Arial. Or whatever – changing fonts mid-post. Am I not the only one who sees these things as critical features?

So Blogger can make much posts that look more like what you want them to look like – and make them more easily. Their standard UI makes customizable formatting within posts a snap! UPDATE: TypePad now has rich text editing when you compose your post, so it is now on par with Blogger’s UI for post creation with the exception of the ability to change fonts w/in a post. For that, you’ll need to edit the HTML – another thing that TypePad finally allows you to do.

PLUS, the edit field in which you enter the text for your post is so much easier to read on Blogger’s site than on TypePad (no longer true – TypePad’s improved edit field is fantastic). Not to mention that if you want to host your blog elsewhere, and still use Blogger’s easy interface, you can! It will FTP your blog to your hosting provider. Or, if you don’t have one, it will host it for you at blogspot for free!

But Blogger doesn’t have a Category field, and for my purposes (actually a blog other than this one – this is my blog about me learning how to blog…), I *NEED* a Category field.

Blogger also does not support TrackBacks, which are one of the best ways of getting links to your site to appear on other sites that you’ve linked to and of letting sites you’ve linked to know you’re talking about them (and vice versa). Without Categories or TrackBacks, I’d only recommend Blogger to the absolute newbie who wants the cheapest (aka free), easiest, fastest way to start blogging without having to know anything about html, css, etc.

Is there any app that gives users the best of both worlds??? At this point, I’ve spent some time fiddling with both TypePad and Blogger, and neither of them gives me all of the features and customizability that I need in a single package.

Incidentally, I read an article somewhere that said that Yahoo was devaluing sites that used Google’s AdSense code in their pages (essentially punishing publishers for any affiliation with yahoo’s biggest competitor, google). As a result, another issue that’s burning in my mind is whether Google gives ranking preferences to sites which are hosted on BlogSpot (which they own) over those hosted on their competitors like TypePad?

Latest update: Does anyone have any comments on b2evolution?

David Dorward has an article on Replacing Movable Type – he will either be going with b2evolution or Word Press

It seems that I’m fairly late to the blogging game, and much of the Movable Type community is outraged that Six Apart has taken what was once FREE software and is now charging for it. Whilst a commercial license is not that expensive if you have 5 authors or less ($199) and allows for unlimited blogs, this was once free and now it’s not.

Mark Pilgrim wrote an entire article about why users should use WordPress instead of Movable Type

And I just came across a post from another person who chose WordPress over MovableType, after starting out with Movable Type. As you can see from the comments on his page, there are many others who feel WordPress, combined with its plugins, is simply the best blogging tool out there.

As you can see from my other posts on WordPress, I can confirm that installation takes 5 minutes(it is almost a joke in how easy it is to set up!) and the customization of categories, with sub-sub-sub categories, strong development community, full trackback support, customizable pings, and plug-ins that allow you to choose between static or dynamic pages may make WordPress my tools of choice, too. We shall see. We shall see…