Recently in MovableType Category

Well Temper seems to help look at which files are getting rebuilt and has cut my rebuild time in half (still a long way to go). Looking at the activity log I have gone from 197 seconds and 34 entries in the activity log down to 108 seconds and 22 entries in the log - each rebuild was for an edit of the previous post.
I took out the rebuild of my style sheets, mt.js and the monthly by author and monthly by category archives as the first two are basically static, I only have one author on this blog - me, and the monthly by category is not really important as I don't have that many entries per category.
What I still don't understand is why I have 7 entry listings and 5 category archives for the previous post as it was only posted under 1 category (although it did have a couple of keywords in it - I can't remember how many though). This entry has no keywords and only one category.

This entry mainly serves as a test for the Temper plugin that should hopefully tell me why it takes about 3 minutes to post an entry on this blog when the save button is pressed. I've been playing around with Wordpress and it is *so* much faster and efficient than this version of MT. Speaking of which there is a security patch that is available to fix a XSS flaw. Hopefully all the MT users have already seen this in a news feed or in the management console.

It looks like several things were missing after the MT upgrade and now I have fixed the archives. Basically the archive templates were missing for some reason, but fortunately I had archive templates in a test blog. So I switched to the test blog, went to Design then templates then archive templates. I then selected the code for the category archive, went to the same location in the live blog and pasted the code into it. After saving the code I created an archive mapping that pointed to category/sub-category/index.php and then rebuilt all of the category archives - it then worked. Unfortunately I've just realised that the template links back to the atom.xml file and not feedburner so I have to republish again - I'll be doing that tonight :-(

Well after being thrown in the deep end I think I have ironed out most of the kinks and I've learnt a lot about the various Movable Type tweaks needed. A lot of the old plugins have been ripped out and I've discovered that using widgets to include code as needed in the site will make it a lot easier to migrate in future - no need to go hacking around in the template files to remove references to plugins that are not used any more (the chief culprits for this were the scode and comment challenge plugins).
The header image was taken by Tim Perdue and was drastically cropped to give an image of the Columbus skyline. It was hard to find a picture that was sufficiently wide enough to give a recognizable skyline when cropped.

Well the upgrade seems borked somehow - the comment links are broken. I thought I would use the refresh template option to restore the templates back to the factory default (and then edit my changes back in again but when I try to use the Refresh Template option I get the message "Error creating new template: Template with the same name already exists in this blog."
Unfortunately it doesn't mention which template has the problem and I can't see any of the templates that it is trying to replace. A bit of troubleshooting guidance to mention which template would not have gone amiss in the software.
In the end I had to use the "Delete all templates" option, but it was able to backup the templates for me. Doing the refresh option did not work.

Well I took the plunge and upgraded the site to MovableType 4 this afternoon. The whole process took about 40 minutes and most of that was trying to unpack the tar.gz file as I was using the AIX commands to extract instead of linux ones! I have a new layout design from my beta tests of MovableType so the design of this website may change drastically over the next couple of days. If you see anything broken then please let me know.

Ok - the problems were with some of the plugins that needed changes made to the template code such as my captcha plugins. As these plugins were not installed in the new installation some of the pages wouldn't work and I was actually unable to publish documents until I stripped out the scode information (which was actually fairly easy due to the comments placed around the required code).

Hopefully you'll be able to post comments to this blog with ie7 now. I had to remove the css styling for the fields and make it into a table as I couldn't work out which bit of css was breaking in ie7 (but working in ie6 and firefox)

Unfortunately I've had to disable the ability to search the comments on this blog as apparently the script was using up too much memory. I ran a search this afternoon and ended up with the generic 500 Server error page. Looking through the error log (which can be found in ~/logs/errors/domain name/http/error.log for dreamhost users) I found that mt search page was being killed before completing but only if I used the SearchElement=both on the absoblogginlutely blog (the other blogs are fine). I must admit I am a bit surprised at that as I only have 3103 posts and 1446 comments so I wouldn't have thought this would put *that* much strain on a server. Dreamhost just said that I was "using too much memory" and to check the MovableType forums for support :-( I did a quick search and that recommended fastsearch, but this doesn't support searching comments either, so for the time being the search will only do the content (although interestingly I can search with no errors from the admin interface).

Hopefully this won't be the same in MovableType4 which I might get around to upgrading too one day.

Thanks to Neil and Bryan, I've solved the problem I had and got Windows Live Writer working with MovableType now. When you set up a user in MT you set up a Web Services Password for each user. This is not the same as the one used for your standard login. The details can be found by going to the Main Menu, System Overview, Authors and then selecting your username. Down at the bottom is the information required with a reveal button to show the password. Thanks guys!

For some reason, my installation of Windows Liver Writer will not allow me to select any of my other MT blogs (apart from the main one) when I go to set up an account. Instead I get the not useful error message "An error occurred while attempting to connect to your weblog: Blog Server Error - Server Error 1 Occurred Invalid Login You must correct this error before proceeding."

I know the password is correct as I've just used it to log into the system.

Another annoyance is the version number of WLW. Help/About displays the following version - 1.0 (12.0.1183.516) - nowhere does it mention that this is beta2. As the WLW website also doesn't tell you which build Beta2 is, it is pretty hard to tell whether you are on the latest version or not.

The first hurdle of installing MovableType beta4 is that the download page does some fancy redirection to push the download to your browser which is not helpful if you have disabled ftp upload up to your dreamhost website and want to download it via wget from within a shell. However there are a couple of sites that point to a direct location that was made public when the beta was first released so you can get it (for now) from sippey. There is a nice tutorial on installing MT4 on dreamhost

Interesting to see that MovableType beta 4 is released. This came the day after I spent some looking around to see how to get a static page built into MT for an "about me" page for this website. I want to be able to edit this file from within MT (for ease of use) and then publish the updated contents. Apparently that is only really possible through the use of pulling in another blog until version 4 comes out....So I might be upgrading to 4 beta soon. Alternatively if I have to go through the pain of migrating again it may be worth upgrading to Wordpress instead (which seems to be where most of the development is taking place now)

I'm not sure if moving to the new host is the reason, but I've had a lot of comment spam come through MovableType today (all of which was moderated) but annoyingly I couldn't permanently delete it as my computer did not have the new ip address for the domain name!
I have added another captcha, Comment challengeto our blogs. Hopefully it is not too difficult for you to answer the question correctly.

I can finally select my blogs within MovableType and not get the Can't call method "entry_id" on an undefined value at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 1956 error message. Although drastic, the solution was to truncate the mt_tbping table as per the instructions in the MovableType forums. Unfortunately I missed the solution on the forums until someone posted on the page yesterday.

Finally got around to upgrading to version 3.x of MovableType. I saw the notice that they had an important security fix come out just before we went on holiday and today has been the first day I've had a chance to sit down and look at the upgrade path. Almost everything looks good (the interface looks REALLY nice but when I click on Kristen's or my blog in the main menu page I get the error message

Can't call method "entry_id" on an undefined value at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 1956.

Neil pointed out that typekey id's (used for MT commenting) can now be used with livejournal - so I can now comment on Pauls blog without being anonymous.

I've just tried to get MovableType working on Uniform Server (using Mysql as the database) and it doesn't work. The installation check routine fails because dbd::mysql is not installed and it needs the dbi module installed. This does not come with Uniform Server and is not going to be present until version 3.3 comes out (if then). This is a shame as I was hoping to try an installation of MT and import of my data to my local machine to test my backups and DR capabilities.
Plan B is to install MT over on my over hosting company but thats a project for another day as I'm sure my eyes are going all funny now.

By following the clues at movalog I've managed to get a static page working with MT which means that I can write individual pages that include MT layout and data. This allows me to create pages such as About Me, Contact etc.
Note that I'm still using the static pages I've had for these examples but eventually I'll get round to updating them.

Twice today I've tried to comment on a blog hosted on typepad.com and when I post the comment I get an error message back saying

An error occurred...

Invalid URL 'http://absoblogginlutely.net'

Please correct the error in the form below, then press Post to post your comment."

Now that we've actually moved to the States, new posts on the move and our new life will be under the "Settling in" category as opposed to "Moving to the States" category. This will probably only affect those of you who are looking at the category archives. Regular rss readers and website readers will not be affected.

Movalog: Firefox Search Plugins allow you to search for MT content from the quicksearch button within firefox. Very handy!

I found mt-rebuild which allows you to schedule a rebuild of an entry/page/index which is just what I needed to force a rebuild of my main index page on absocachinlutely to include my latest finds in the side bar of the page. I had to rename my Main Index to MainIndex and then include the blog id, set the mode to index and provide the template name in a cronjob as follows:-

/full-pathname-to/mt-rebuild.pl -blog_id=9 -template=MainIndex -mode=index

I stumbled across the Wordpress CSS guide a while ago which is really handy for understanding how Wordpress reads the CSS and applies it to the blog but I really wanted a MT version. Although I've not quite come across the same thing, the following posts help a great deal.

• Boxpunch demo
• Learning MT - css
• mediatinker's Illustrated MT Templates
• Printer friendly pages (which I already do)

There's a Patch for all MT versions that stops spammers sending out mail through the server. Worth fixing asap.

i'm not lost and I've upgraded my install to include the nofollow tag after downloading and reading the instructions from movabletype's announcement. What they don't make clear is that if you are running v2 of MT then you only need the file in the plugin directory, you don't need to worry about the php file. (The document refers to one file being needed and then gives you two to install!)

Google announced yesterday that they will not consider links in a webpage if surrounded by a nofollow tag. The upshot of this is that comments can be surrounded by the nofollow tag and google will not consider these links in pageranking. When I first read this it sounded a great solution to the commentspam problem. If everyone follows this solution, then there will be little point in doing the spam and hopefully it will stop - but therein lies the problem - everyone needs to follow it. Scoble reports that already MSN and yahoo have announced they will also use this tag. Also interesting that they've done this in a couple of days/hours as opposed to having to use a committee to do it.
It will be something that I'll be looking at putting in my MT implementation soon (details from their news page on how to do this) - when I get some time!

I'm trying to work out how to include a RSS feed into an index page of one of my blogs and came across Learning Movable Type: Simple RSS Customizations. Although it has not yet provided me with an answer, it has provided me with some more reading to do on other rss matters.
rssparsers might be handy for doing work outside of MT but the best source I found so far was mt-rssfeed plugin but I have not got that working yet. But it's late and I need to go to bed so I will try again another night.

I was speaking to the new conscriptvolunteer last night about how we were going to move the Wheelock Heath Baptist church website forward. The main criteria is easily updatable. The site needs to be updated by someone with little or no html experience and needs to be quickly updated so we don't get stale content.
I remembered reading in my feeds that this had been done, so I just had to find out where. Redland Baptist is the end result with a very interesting page with HOWTO links at Heal Your Church Web Site: Beyond the Blog and other links on making MovableType a Content Managment System. Now I just need to check that the web host for the church website includes MT compatability - PHP and Mysql (its a IIS based server)

I also came across the pretty cool Milonic menu system that looks like a very versatile and adaptable system.

Other links I need to note are also at Beyond the blog, Redux, Part Deux

Just tried to post a comment on Iconoblog and realised that the system asks for the captcha code but doesn't display it. Doesn't do it on Kristen's either....That and if you use internet explorer then the comment page seems to be missing text until you scroll down and back up again and it all re-appears.... (i'm sure i've had that and fixed it in the past though)

MT-Blacklist v1.64 released and updated on here. Its a one line change to fix a potential major spam hole.

As the several million other MT users have already blogged, MT3 was announced a day or so ago. I tried to read the site but it was being swamped so I only got to see it this evening. Everyone seems to be complaining about the cost of running a blog with more than one author or more than 3 blogs (I have 6 blogs with 3 authors). Interestingly, Mena's justification for the pricing system contains the text

Based on surveys and user feedback, we are fairly comfortable these licenses will meet the needs of over 85% percent of our current users

I changed the menu on the right hand side to put the archives in a nifty drop down menu, and added a category selection too. Code was taken from une very stylish fille: Drop down menus in TypePad but you can actually use the code as-is in MovableType - no changes necessary. Thanks Daisy for posting the link

For ages now, I've been getting the error message "MT::App::CMS=HASH(0x83a8228) Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 2420." when I post a blog entry. It doesn't always happen but only sometimes. The last couple of posts are examples of where it happens. This morning I did a bit more digging and apparently it occurs when there is a problem with pings. I'll do a bit more digging later but at least it doesn't mean "error out of cheese, formatting hard disk"

As Neil has reposted/boasted :-) about the link to his blog from one of MT's authors on pinging various services, it prompted me to setup the pings on this blog. I've got most of them in there now so it will be interesting to see how long it takes to post an entry. I do wish there was a way to not ping hosts like weblogs.com if you've already pinged them as its annoying getting the error message in the logs and a "request timed out" from bloggar.

There's a call for MT 3.0 alpha testers. I'm not going to be one of them as I don't know MT well enough and I need this installation to be stable.

MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: MT-Blacklist v1.63 beta is out and installed on this box which does include the throttling features (and a few more features too).

Chris pointed out that there is a slight problem with 2.6661 and MT-Blacklist in that there is no throttling due to the order of the plugins overwriting the new functionality. Thats a bit scary as last night I was reading up on (and saw) the effects of a in-the-wild hacking tool for MT and it looks like blacklist may not stop this. I'm hesitant to go into details here but email me if you want more information.

Thanks to the girlie matters tips and tricks I now have more than 5 comments, pings and entries displayed in each section of MT's menu by making three small edits to lib/MT/App/CMS.pm (which now means yet another file I need to NOT overwrite when upgrading MT!)

An upgrade to MovableType 2.66 2.661 is now available with some good hacks to stop comment spamming. I'm still getting about 1 a day on average which probably means these hacks won't stop my spammers, but it should hopefully stop them if I get targeted by the scums.

I've upgraded my MT to version 2.65 now which won't make that much difference to me, but will make the installation a bit more secure. I'd like to find out how to change the $MTVersion tag so that I can change this slightly, mainly so that hackers searching for a vulnerability in a particular version will not get my site. However I can't find (at a quick glance) where this data is stored.
Update Cheers Neil. The daft thing is that I did a search on all files and it couldn't find that string.

version 2.65 of MT has been released which fixes a security issue and also includes the anti-spam hack that had to be made a month ago. Looks like I'll be doing some patching real soon.

Movabletype have issued an official response to the spam bug which echos what most people have said - delete mt-send-entry.cgi but they also provide a fixed version in case this file is needed (which it isn't on default installations)

According to the MT forums, and zopenews there is a flaw in MT that allows spammers to send loads of rubbish via ms-send-entry.cgi Suggestions are to fix the line or just delete/rename the file

Further to my post about email address's needing spam protection Neil pointed me in the right direction. Spam_protect=1 needs to be set (it already was) but to avoid displaying email address's this needs to be combined with show_email="0"

Grrr - just realised my archives are really messed up. It looks like the import/export format and not what they should look like at all... Now to work out what I need to change!
Update Fixed ! <sigh of relief> I had to create an entry in the Weblog Config for the blog in the archive section. Under the monthly section I created a new filename for the Monthly Backup Template so that it wouldn't overwrite the standard date based archive. My config screen now looks like this(popup), but with the text actually reading something along the lines of andysmonthbackupfor-<$MTArchiveDateEnd$>.txt

As per Chris's request, my RSS Feed is now changed to send a complete feed instead of the first 40 odd words. All I had to do was change the line
<description><$MTEntryExcerpt encode_xml="1"$></description>
to <description><$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"$></description> in my template's.

Thanks to Jay telling me to RTFM in my previous post on searching the comments I've now read the manual and my searches now include comment fields.
This piece of magic was made possible by adding the text <input type="radio" name="SearchElement" value="both" /> to my search form.

I actually got this a couple of days ago in my email but had not had chance to read more details. But the new MovableType hosting has had more details and prices released.

Poor Kelly has been having some technical problems with her MovableType installation and now has a blank page on the site. The weird thing is that at various stages during the weekend the site has even come back with domain not found!
UpdateKelly's site is back online now although with a plain design at the moment.

Anyone (Neil?) know if it is possible to search the comments in MT?

Thanks to nfo I've discovered a perl module for use with MT. The documentation for it looks really good - very clear and even I can understand it and I've not done any perl coding....at least I *think* its in perl :-)

Thudfactor has had some problems with (dont)buymusic, which is what took me to the site in the first place, but the reason I posted is due to the skins. Some of them look very similar, but the bottom ones are completely different and show how skins should be done. The Retro look of the 1995 skin with animated gifs and the grey background really is the how the web looked in '95. I can remember spending ages trying to get my grey background of a picture the same colour grey as the background of the web page. You can still see my attempt (with animated gif too!) at my Geocities page. If you wait the 30 seconds or so the page should also refresh to the page with the grey background

Apparently adding the words "lastn=10" to the mtentries tag in the templates will ensure that there will always be 10 entries posted on the site (as MT will sometimes not display anything if you've not posted in the last 7 days).
Thanks to Thena for the tip off on this one.
It's been something I've been wondering about for ages and needed implementing on the Boring Bulb Blog as I hope I won't be changing lightbulbs more frequently than once a week!

This site is now appearing in the recently updated feed - Neil appears at the bottom of this screenshot.

To cut down on the load time of this page, I removed the text

<$MTEntryTrackbackData$>

Nothing back from Movabletype (which apparently is the correct spelling and I've had it wrong all this time!) for the Recently Updated list or from Bloggar to be added to the PremiumUsers list...still I guess it is early days yet - after all I've not accessed email for two days either!
UpdateMovableType key arrived in the email last night so this should now appear on the most recently updated webpage.

Decided to splash out and donate to both w.bloggar and MoveableType as I use both these tools to update the website on a regular basis. The bonus on donating to both sites is that my site will appear on the list of Recently Updated sites and also on the main w.Bloggar site. It will be interesting to see how many referrals I get from these two pages.

One for Neil this, but yesterday I noticed that this page has rdf comments in the main page for every single posting. I know that the rdf information is for the rss feeds but why it is put in the main web page I don't know. Seeing as though browsers are downloading this information it seems to be a bit of a waste of bandwidth (and download time) to say the least. I'm basically using the standard MT template, so it does seem strange that it is all included.....
UpdateLooks like I might not be using the basic default template as if I look at the source for Boring Bulb Blog it doesn't include these comments.

If I put in html tags - in particular a href ones, then they don't get converted
properly which is a shame...I need to learn more Perl before I can do some major
debugging on this too (as I'd also like to add category settings too).

If you can read this, then emailing my blog works. more details later.

Had my first spam comment arrive last night, at least I think it was spam....it was in a foreign language and to a post I wrote months ago. Its not there any longer! Thats not too bad considering i've had a blog for over two years now!

First (and i've used it for 30 minutes max probably) impressions of Zempt....At, the screen looks plain, but its nice as its a crisp plain and very easy to read. I'm pretty impressed and will use it for blogging for the near future at least. I am aware its still in beta and extra functionality (such as editing/retrieving existing posts) would be useful. Read on for more.

Although I'm not giving up on Bloggar there is a new application called Zempt that does a similar thing but also has an offline option so you can compose blogs whilst not connected to the internet. I've not tried it yet, but I'm downloading it now. Thanks to The Shifted Librarian for blogging it.

Anyone else get "Ping 'http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2' failed: HTTP error: 500 read timeout" when they post something in Moveable type?

Installed the Virtual Venus: Multiple Blog Suite this afternoon onto the website. This enables me to backup the config of the blog settings such as directory locations and template settings. It doesn't backup the content of the database, phpadmin is the tool to use for that. Although you can get most of this data already, its a nice easy interface to get it, and can then be typed back in again when creating a new blog. One thing to watch is that I was not able to install into the same directory as mt.cgi as I can't run html/php files in the cgi directory and I also had to modify the htaccess file so that only I can get to this script - I don't want just anyone backing up my configuration settings!

New version of Bloggar released.Not much difference for me, but the new version includes Title fields on Blogger Pro accounts, Proxy server authentication and extra blog services (livejournal, blojsom,RollerWeblogger and Lotus Domino - the last of which I didn't even know supported blogging!)

For some reason I am getting several requests for random MT pages that dont actually exist. Unfortunately the referer field is blank so I don't know where they are coming from. I've done a quick search of the content of the database and can't find any links that point to these requested pages and they aren't being requested sequentially so its not a dictionary attack.....Any idea's?

When I tried to post the previous entry I got an error message in bloggar which said the following:- "Your blog server returned the following error message: Application failed during request deserialization: not well formed (invalid token) at line 32, column 285, byte 734 at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/i686-linux/XML/Parser.pm line 185". The error message is due to the pound sign in the post although its not exactly obvious is it? Now i've just got to find out how to get MT to allow pound signs in entries from remote clients.