January 18, 2005

Yahoo Acquires Movable Type

Google owns blogger.com, how about Yahoo? Within six months Yahoo will acquire Six Apart - the owner of Movbable Type and TypePad. Here is an interesting analysis of the blog world.

If you have a blog, I bet you want to say something to the comment spammers, how about these words?

Posted by dvd software at 07:58 PM | Comments (0)

October 08, 2004

Comment System Works Again

I have no clue how the comment system was suddenly broken. Anyway, a blog without comments can't be a blog and must be fixed. I asked on MT support forums and want to get some possible reasons, but no luck, it's normal because I thought it's a weird error.

After tried several hours (basically recover old files and templates), I almost wanted to setup the blog from scratch, suddenly it works again. I don't know exactly how it was fixed, the most probable reason is that some file attributes (e.g. mt-comments.cgi) were changed somehow, but I failed to reproduce the error.

Posted by dvd software at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

October 06, 2004

Comment System Doesn't Work

I just noticed the comment system stopped working, really have no idea how this could happen since I didn't change anything :-(

Posted by dvd software at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2004

I Found Some Of Your Life

A blogger claimed he found a digital camera card in a taxi which stored 227 pictures. He publishes one picture per day, pretends to be one of persons on the pictures and narrates their lives.

You are unknown to me.
Your camera's memory card was in a taxi; I have it now.
I am going to post one of your pictures each day.
I will also narrate as if I were you.
Maybe you will come here and reclaim this piece of your life.

This is an interesting blog, although I'm not sure if it's true. Maybe we can tell from the habit of using digital camera - usually take two or three pictures for the same occasion.

Posted by dvd software at 05:08 PM | Comments (2)

September 12, 2004

Blog Entry Link

You may have noticed that I modified the blog entry link, the default link text is the post time, now I use the post title as link text. The main benefit is search engine ranking, when user searches the title, this blog will be ranked higher on Google or other search engines.

Posted by dvd software at 10:26 PM | Comments (0)

September 11, 2004

Make Blog Links Open in New Window

Blog often links to external web pages, it's better to open the link in a new window and keep the visitors stay on your Blog. I don't want to add the html code "target=_blank" every time I insert a URL, it should be possible by modifying the movable type templates.

According to my last post: Movable Type Templates, I searched MT support forum and found the thread, but this thread only works on old versions, you should follow it if you use MT 2.x.

In MT 3.x, I found all the JavaScripts moved to a central file "mt.js" under the root directory, open the file and find the following line:
setSelection(e, '<a href="' + my_link + '">' + str + '</a>');

Modify to:
setSelection(e, '<a href="' + my_link + '" target="_blank">' + str + '</a>');

Then upload this file to your web server, it will add "target=_blank" automatically when you insert a URL.

Posted by dvd software at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)

September 09, 2004

Blogs may be good for business

Blog is getting hotter and hotter, the following text are from an interesting article on USA Today.

• As a Web site. For a consultant, freelancer or very small business, a blog may be a free way to get a Web site fast. Just post your business description or resume and give out the blog Web address to prospective clients or customers. You can have this up and running in less than a half-hour (15 minutes if you don't add photos).



• To create a stronger personal connection with customers. Most of us in small companies have strong personal ties to our customers, but if you conduct business primarily on the Web or over the phone, a blog might be something to try.



• To share images with clients. Many small businesses need to send or share photos, artwork, diagrams and such with clients. Some customers don't want to receive large graphics files as e-mail attachments. A blog lets you upload them to the Web.



• To develop a following. If you are an expert in a specific field, it's possible your blog will develop a following of devoted readers. This is certainly true in technology, but it's possible if you've got expertise in any specific area, and you're willing to add new entries to your blog regularly.

Posted by dvd software at 01:44 AM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2004

Movable Type Templates

I'm a very new blogger, it's normally quite unusual for a computer nerd to flatter this hot baby so late :-). Now I have been onboard for two weeks, how do I think about this blog program - Movable Type 3.01D? In simple words, very powerful but very difficult to customize.

Let's focus on the templates in this post, before I started, I thought the layout could be customized easily in the control panel, for example, add link section, define logo, etc., unfortunately I only found some templates which are definitely difficult for normal computer users to manipulate. Then I reckoned there must be lots of ready-to-use templates on the Internet and started searching with Google, but found nothing really useful or meet my requirement, I have to admit that I didn't extensively look for it, just spent about 20 minutes every time when I was bored.

As a result, my blog was still using the default templates after 10 days, even didn't have a link to the homepage. I can't bear it any more and decided to look into the manual, IMO, Movable Type documentation is very poor, it's not very helpful if you have little experience before, but the good thing is MT has an active support forum, by reading the manual and some old posts, with almost one day, I eventually managed to customize the layout as exactly what I want, which looks the same on IE and Mozilla, I thought it should be 5-minute work.

I'm quite satisfied with the result, but not the procedure. Movable Type really needs a good and useful documentation, some easy to follow tutorials even for new computer users, and the most important, add functionality which make the customization straightforward, this should be very easy from technical point of view. I'm a Java programmer and a part-time C++ programmer, reading documentation is my daily task, if 20% of them are like MT, my work would be a nightmare.

So if you want to customize your blog layout, what should you do? My suggestions: search MT support forum first, you may find ready-to-use scripts and insert into your templates. If you are not lucky enough, then you have to read the poor MT manual and try again and again, till everything works fine.

Posted by dvd software at 05:37 PM | Comments (0)