Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

RDF versions of your blog entries

I seem to be on an XML kick lately, lol. The latest thing I've been playing around with is semantic weblog posts. This involves creating an RDF version of your blog entries to support the Semantic Web. Basically, it involves creating an alternate format of the entry that presents the data in a structured way that is meaningful to computers, similar to RSS feeds. An example of how this can be useful is Piggy Bank, a Firefox extension that allows you to view RDF data in a nice format in your browser and do things with it. I started with the template at HubLog, but then decided to modify it based on an article about adding more metadata with Movable Type. I made a few tweaks because of an issue with dynamically-generated pages in MT 2.661. Because I'm using MT 2.661, I used this method for dynamically generating the RDF files. The template is at "rdf" here. Check out the finished product. To get the full effect, you would need to be using Piggy Bank in Firefox (note: what you would need to do is go to the regular entry page in Firefox and click the data coin icon in the status bar. For me, the data from the RDF file is on page 4). Later: I made a few more modifications after looking up the RSS 1.0 specs, especially the modules. Check the template file for the latest.

RSS feeds for tags

So you've got your blog set up with tags. A neat way to expand this is to offer RSS feeds for each of your tags. Visitors can subscribe to these feeds and be updated when any new entries are posted that are tagged with that particular keyword/subject. You'll need to make another alternate search template. My template for an RSS 1.0 feed is at "Keyword RSS Template" here. Link to it in your templates with <$MTCGIPath$><$MTSearchScript$>?Template=rss&IncludeBlogs=<$MTBlogID$>&SearchField=keywords
&search=<$MTSearchString$> where "rss" represents the name of your template in mt.cfg (for some reason, I found that putting the items in the URL in a different order produced a feed that didn't display properly as RSS in the browser; however, this order works). I link to it on each tag's page. If you're linking to it elsewhere, replace <$MTSearchString$> with the template tag that you use to call the particular keyword tag. I also created an Index of Tag Feeds to list all the available feeds. I did this by hacking the code for the tag cloud page; this requires PHP. I'm not sure why there's a blank tag at the beginning or why the feed for it is empty. I'll have to look into that further.

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.

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.

creating a backup blog

I realized that I had never documented a feature that I make good use of for backing up all my blogs. It's an export blog. You'll need the OtherBlog plugin. What I did was to create a new blog just for this purpose. It has no entries, just a bunch of index templates (I deleted all the standard ones since they're not needed). I created a series of index templates that will create an export file for each of my blogs. You can get the export file template from the "export blog" link above. The output filename is set to a name based on the blog's name (for example tips.txt for this blog). The "export blog" link above suggests using an automatic rebuild script and/or cron job, but I had problems getting those to work on my server, so for right now I rebuild the blog manually. Also because of server limitations, I found that the exports from Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs and another large blog that I have would time out when rebuilding. This would also happen if I tried to use MT's built in export utility on these blogs. To get around this, I created multiple export templates that each create an export file for a certain number of entries. Use the lastn and offset attributes for this. AMIB has no fewer than five export files now, two for the veiled4allah category, two for The Clipboard category, and one for A Quranic Journal category. This is not something you can do with the export utility so that's a big benefit of creating export files this way. In addition to having export files, my backup blog also backs up my templates. I'm using a plugin called ShowTemplates for it; however, this plugin no longer seems to be available so you might try the Template plugin instead. By using the ShowTemplates plugin, I now have a series of index templates that create pages displaying my templates for all my blogs, as a backup. All of this in one place to handle backups for six blogs. Pretty cool.

show active discussion threads

This one is straight out of the manual but it's not something I see used on very many MT blogs and I only recently added it myself. MT allows you to list blog entries in the order of which have been most recently commented on. Note that if ten comments have been added on one blog entry and one on another, each entry will only be listed once. I think this is why most people don't use it. However, I decided to add it to my main index portal page as a good overview of what people have been discussing recently. Here's the code: <MTEntries recently_commented_on="5"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a> (most recent comment in this thread was by <MTComments lastn="1"><$MTCommentAuthor$> on <$MTCommentDate$></MTComments>)<br></MTEntries> This lists the five blog entries that have most recently been commented on and for each the author and date of the most recent comment on that entry. Note: A really creative use of the recently_commented_on attribute is to display your blog like a discussion forum.

a year's worth of calendars or more

One of the nice features about MT is the ability to display a calendar that indicates on which days of the current month you posted entries and to link to an archive of that day's posts. By default, the calendar displays the current month, but you can specify a month if you wish. Some people have devised methods of automatically generating a year's worth of calendars but since it's something that only has to be done once every 12 months, I do it manually. My By-Date Archive Index gives an overview of every date that I posted entries to Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs and takes you right to the daily archives for that day.

linking to the entry before the oldest one

On the veiled4allah index (and that of the other categories), when you get down to the bottom of the display of blog entries, you'll see a link to the entry immediately previous to the oldest entry on the page. On an ordinary blog, you could use the <MTEntriesFooter> container as is described in the manual. However, I wanted to limit it to the previous entry in the specific category (part of my strategy to treat the three categories like independent blogs). Instead I use a second MTEntries container with an offset. This is the code: <div class="blogpost"> <span style="text-align: center; padding: 5px; border: 1px solid black"> Previously: <MTEntries category="category name" lastn="1" offset="15"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></MTEntries> </span> </div>

show the most recent commentor

One of the little tricks I've implemented is to show the name of the last person to comment on an entry next to the number of comments. This can be done entirely with standard MT tags, although I'm using the MTEntryIfComments plugin to only display the "last by name" part if there are any comments. Here's my code for a comments pop-up. The part that generates the comment author's name is in bold, and the plugin tags are in red. It's actually pretty simple to do this. <MTEntryIfAllowComments> |  <a href="<$MTCGIPath$><$MTCommentScript$>?entry_id=<$MTEntryID$>" onClick="OpenComments(this.href);return false">Comments (<$MTEntryCommentCount$><MTEntryIfComments><MTComments lastn="1" sort_order="descend">, last by <$MTCommentAuthor$></MTComments></MTEntryIfComments>)</a> </MTEntryIfAllowComments> Note: The MTEntryIfComments plugin also allows you to display a different phrase depending on the number of comments, although I'm not using that functionality myself. Added: A related trick allows you to "plug" the people who commented on the previous entry. You'll need the Glue plugin. Here's the code to put right below your <$MTEntryBody$> tag: <MTEntryPrevious><MTEntryIfComments><i>Thanks to the following people for commenting on the previous entry: <MTGlueContainer><MTComments><$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email="0"$><MTGlue>, </MTGlue></MTComments></MTGlueContainer></i><br><br></MTEntryIfComments></MTEntryPrevious> This adds a line at the bottom of your entry that says: Thanks to the following people for commenting on the previous entry: name, name. The Glue plugin is used to avoid having a trailing comma at the end (see here). The code sets up the context of the previous entry, then checks if there were comments on the previous entry. If so, it displays the plug line and the names of each commentor in turn.