Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

allow people to import lists of links from your blog

Suppose that you wanted to display a list of links to all the entries in Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs. Given that there are well over 3000 entries, you would probably not actually want to do this. But suppose that you did. I've created a file that allows you to do this: OPML List of Entries. To create this, I modified template code from Niall Kennedy. I removed my email address from the template. I also had to add the title attribute after testing with TypePad (see below) to get it to play well there. You can remove the MTOtherBlog tags since that's a quirk of my own installation with multiple blogs. To see my code, scroll down to "OPML List of Entries" here. So, how do you display this? If you're using Movable Type, install the Outliner plugin. The following code works to create a list of links from the OPML file: <MTOutliner opmllink="http://www.muhajabah.com/islamicblog/index.opml"> <MTOutlinerItems> <p><a href="<$MTOutlinerItemHTML$>"><$MTOutlinerItemText$></a></p> </MTOutlinerItems> </MTOutliner> With TypePad, you can import the OPML file into a TypeList. I had to add the redundant title attribute to each item to get it to import the title of each entry, otherwise it came in blank. That wasn't so difficult after all, was it? If you use Outliner, every time that you rebuild the template with the Outliner code, it will pull the latest list of entries from the OPML feed. However, if you import the OPML into a TypeList, it will not update automatically, you'll just get what is in the feed at the time that you do the import. Now that I've figured out how to do this and what it can be used for, I'll look into adding some other OPML feeds for Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs, ones that are hopefully more useful than a list of links to more than 3000 entries. Later: A list of OPML feeds I have created is available at the Index of Feeds.

new way to open and close comments and trackbacks on many entries

Until the upgrade to 3.2, I used a script that allowed me to open and close comments and trackbacks for multiple entries at once. This worked great. However, because of the changes to the way comments and trackbacks are handled in 3.2, the script no longer functioned. Fortunately, there's the AcceptCommentsPings plugin to the rescue. After you install the plugin, go to your entries listing and select some entries. Then click on the "More actions" drop-down menu. You can select to accept comments, accept pings, accept comments and pings, unaccept comments, unaccept pings, or unaccept comments and pings. So if you need to open or close comments or trackbacks on a number of entries at once, just go to the entries listing, select all the entries you want to change, then choose the desired option and click Go. Very neat. I'm glad to have this functionality back. MT 3.2 has a kill switch that allows you to override blog and entry settings and shut down comments and trackbacks across the entire system at once. But if you just want to shut them off on some older entries, it doesn't work very well. AcceptCommentsPings does.

super-easy design changes

One of the best features TypePad has, in my opinion, is the Template Builder, which allows you to easily select from among a large number of pre-defined designs or to create a custom design using a GUI rather than HTML and CSS. Movable Type has now taken a big step towards that kind of ease-of-use with the StyleCatcher plugin. Now you can select from among a large number of pre-defined designs and apply it to your blog with just a couple of clicks. First, you will need to be using the new default templates for 3.2. Getting going with these is easy too, thanks to a built-in plugin called RefreshTemplates. Go into your Templates area, select the templates you want to update, and choose the Refresh Templates action from the drop-down menu. Your templates will be updated, with the old ones saved as backup templates. You can copy over any customizations that you had made (for instance, code from plugins) from the backup to the active templates. After this, go into StyleCatcher, load a library (the Six Apart library is the default choice), select the design you like, and click the button to apply it. Republish your blog and you're done. Six Apart has really taken MT to a new level with RefreshTemplates and StyleCatcher. Update: This blog has now been updated. Interesting new look, eh? I couldn't find anything that looked at all like what I was using before. Oh well.

MT 3.2 is out!

Six Apart has come out with a major upgrade of Movable Type, version 3.2. It looks like there are tons of new features to play around with. I didn't do any beta testing, since I just haven't had time, although I've had a chance to use it a bit for work. So there will be lots of fun coming up!

RSS feed of trackbacks for entries

Some people are interested in creating RSS feeds for each of their entries to show comments to that entry; this is an easy way for people to subscribe to see when new comments are added. Phil Ringnalda has a template here with instructions.¹ Suppose you want to do the same thing for trackbacks. Actually, MT has done all the work for you; RSS files are generated for each entry the first time a trackback is sent to it. So all you have to do is link to it in your Individual Entry Archive template, like this: <MTIfGreater a="[MTEntryTrackbackCount]" b="0" numeric="1"> <p><a href="<$MTBlogArchiveURL$><$MTEntryTrackbackID$>.xml">RSS feed of trackbacks to this entry</a></p> </MTIfGreater> I'm actually using the MTCompare plugin so that the link is only displayed when there are trackbacks on the entry, since that's when the file is generated. Some people don't like these files and have turned off their creation, but I figure since MT is already creating them, why not make them available to anybody who might want to make use of them? Doesn't cost me anything! ¹ Even though I have comments turned off at AMIB, I went ahead and added this; see "commentrss" here. In case I ever turn comments back on.

creating a Google Sitemap for your blog

If you want to create a Google Sitemap for your blog, there are several templates available (1, 2, 3). I combined elements of all three of these for mine; the template is under Google Sitemap here.

tag cloud

If you're using tags, you may want to display a "tag cloud" that shows all your tags, weighted by frequency so that the more times the tag is used, the larger it appears (for an example, here's my del.icio.us tag cloud). You can create a tag cloud with MT. I started with this PHP script from Dan and Sherree but made some modifications to it so that it only lists my assigned tag keywords (instead of pulling words from blog entries as in the example), doesn't remove any, displays all tags, and links the tags to their pages (see Using keywords and tags to help visitors find related content). For the code, go to my templates page and scroll down to "Tag Cloud". Please note that the use of the <MTOtherBlog> tags in the template is because I created the template in a different blog than the entries (and their tags) are located in. I did this so that it doesn't increase rebuild time when I create new posts. If you're not doing this (and you probably aren't) then you can remove those tags. And here's the tag cloud page.

more fun with keywords and tags

Following up on Using keywords and tags to help visitors find related content, my keyword search template now includes a list of related tags. This is based on Ishbadiddle's semantic web idea. I've modified his code to match with the way I do my entry keywords, and am using the MT-Grid plugin to create a tabular listing of the related tags (keywords). Here's the code: <MTCollateCollect> <MTSearchResults> <MTLoop values="[MTEntryKeywords]" delimiter=" "><MTCollateRecord> <MTCollateSetField name="subject_keyword">[MTLoopValue]</MTCollateSetField></MTCollateRecord></MTLoop> </MTSearchResults> </MTCollateCollect> <p><b>Other tags related to <i><$MTSearchString$></i></b></p> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10"> <MTGrid num_columns="9" transpose="1"> <MTCollateList sort="subject_keyword:+:i:d"> <MTIfNotEqual a="[MTSearchString]" b="[MTCollateField name='subject_keyword']"> <MTGridCell> <MTGridIfLeftColumn><tr></MTGridIfLeftColumn> <td><a href="<$MTCGIPath$><$MTSearchScript$>?Template=keyword&search=<MTCollateField name="subject_keyword">&IncludeBlogs=1&SearchField=keywords" title="Index of posts relating to <MTCollateField name="subject_keyword">"><MTCollateField name="subject_keyword"></a></td> <MTGridIfRightColumn></tr></MTGridIfRightColumn> </MTGridCell> </MTIfNotEqual> </MTCollateList> <MTGridTrailingCells> <td> </td> <MTGridIfRightColumn></tr></MTGridIfRightColumn> </MTGridTrailingCells> </MTGrid> </table> (you can see the full keyword search template here) You will need the Collate and Compare plugins in addition to the ones mentioned in my previous entry. What it does is create a listing of all tags for all entries that are in the search results. It removes any duplicates and then the tag that is the search term itself. So what you end up with is a list of tags that were used along with the search-term tag. An example of how this works is my list of entries tagged with iraq. You'll see a list of all entries tagged with this word and then a list of related tags. Each of these tags was used in conjunction with "iraq" to tag an entry somewhere. Clicking on the name of the tag will bring up a list of all entries that use that tag.

3.16 released

Six Apart has released Movable Type 3.16. It's got more than 100 bug fixes. It's an easy upgrade if you're running MT 3.1 or later. If you want a better-functioning MT installation, upgrading is recommended.

new digs

As you can see, the blog has a new look. I finally had the chance to migrate it to my MT 3 installation. Enjoy! And let me know if you come across any bugs or other problems.