majordojo

Recent Entries in Movable Type

• Media Manager works with Amazon. Again.

  Not too long ago Amazon made some important changes to its API to improve security, but this change had the unfortunate result of breaking Media Manager. My knee-jerk reaction was to just go into my code and implement the API...

• Media Manager users: thank Amazon.

  I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon right now as they recently made changes to their Amazon Product Advertising API that has broken Media Manager. Now I have numerous users tapping their feet anxiously waiting for an update, during a...

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  Still Making Things

  As my life has been slowly re-attaining equilibrium after having a second child, I have still somehow managed to find time to make things. Thank god, because making things keeps me sane when life wants to dog pile my schedule,...

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  Meet Melody

  People who know me, know that I love Movable Type. In fact I have devoted much of the last five years to the product and its community. Therefore it gives me great pride and much relief to be a part...

• Understanding Movable Type Template Sets

  Since releasing the Hybrid News Theme I have been contacted by a number of people on the ProNet mailing list asking me to shed some light on the process of creating template sets, or themes as most other products call...

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  Increasing your site's page views with photo galleries

  In my on-going blitz of plugins and enhancements for Movable Type I am adding one more to the list: upgrades and enhancements to the Photo Gallery plugin, which you can already see on my personal photo galleries. A screenshot of...

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  Teaser: Hybrid News Theme for Movable Type

  The most common request from people contacting me is for a redesign for their web site. While I am happy to work with them to completely redesign their website and engineering one exclusively for them, but rarely do people have...

• A quick pagination hack for Movable Type

  One of the most common feature requests for Movable Type is entry pagination. It is actually a sticky problem for a system that utilizes static publishing like Movable Type though. As an aside, I am become very unfond of the...

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  Everything you wanted to know about Movable Type's Publish Queue

  I recently added the following chapter to Movable Type's Open Source Operations Manual and wanted to publish here for review by the community and feedback. About Publish Queue The Movable Type Publish Queue is an essential component to any large...

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  An Open Source Movable Type Operations Manual

  The Movable Type Jumpbox is a great solution for many people who want to get started quickly using Movable Type or who don't have time to build a system themselves. For tweakers like myself however, this is not sufficient. I...

• Easy, easy, easy contact forms for any web site.

  One project that I had always hoped to find time to work on while at Six Apart was a plugin that provided Movable Type bloggers with a capable and easy to use contact form solution for their web site or...

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  Using jQuery Lightbox for Your Images in Movable Type

  In yet another example of just how flexible Movable Type can be, I have assembled this simple tutorial which can help you make more compelling and interesting pop-ups for the images you insert into your blog posts. This simple recipe...

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  Movable Type System Architectures

  Movable Type is renown in operations circles for a number of its "abilities," mainly its scalability, availability and reliability. The larger your site gets however, and the more readers you have creating content for you in the form of comments...

• jQuery Dialog Theme for Movable Type

  Since leaving Six Apart I have been having fun working on a number of projects I just never could find the time for while working there. Of course, I am even more privileged to be working with iThemes who have...

• The Ultimate Guide to Installing Movable Type Plugins

  Without a doubt the most common support request I receive from users of my many Movable Type plugins is around installation. If you are having difficulty or getting frustrated the first and most important thing to realize is that it...

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  More Publish Queue Manager Enhancements

  Publish Queue Manager was received well by the community and as a result, I got a lot of bug reports and feature requests for this little plugin. So I spent some time today working on an update that includes: a...

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  Introducing Publish Queue Manager for Movable Type

  An essential component of any large scale Movable Type installation is "Publish Queue." Publish Queue is a system by which files published by Movable Type are published in the background at the next available moment, as opposed to slowing down...

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  Photo Gallery plugin for Movable Type gets some love.

  Finally, the Photo Gallery plugin has been upgraded to work with Movable Type 4.2. At first I considered just upgrading the photo gallery templates, but after such a long time, I figured my patient users deserve a little bit more...

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  Introducing Super Page for Movable Type

  Following the release of Movable Type 4.2 I wanted to take some time to focus some concerted energy upon an area of Movable Type that needed a great deal of love: documentation. In about a week I had managed to...

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  Universal Template Set Hacks

  With the release of Movable Type Pro, and with us making is completely free to bloggers, the Universal Template Set has been quickly making its way into the hands of more bloggers. I often get asked by other UTS users,...

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  Putting the Universal Template Set to Work

  One of the primary design goals for the Universal Template Set released in Movable Type 4.1, was to create a template set that was not only compelling on its own, but also something that could be easily configured and modified...

• A look at Obama's IT Strategy

  From ZDNet, A look at Obama's IT strategy: The Facebook connection and the scale challenge Obama kept his IT strategy simple. The campaign didn't customize heavily and it didn't look for bleeding edge technology. It used the same stuff the...

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  Introducing Yahoo! OpenID for Movable Type

  Today I am happy to announce the availability of the first Movable Type plugin to make use of Movable Type 4.2's built in support for OpenID 2.0. The Yahoo! OpenID plugin for Movable Type allows users to provide Yahoo! users...

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  @Make: Introducing AutoLink for Movable Type 4

  Make is brand I adore because it teaches us in its many ways that the best way to understand something is to take it apart, and in some cases to build something else in its place. As a hacker,...

• Automagic URL redirection and SEO maximization in Movable Type

  Clean Sweep now allows me to change my URL structure without worrying about how Google might penalize me. Clean Sweep is a plugin I released in conjunction with Movable Type 4.0 to help users keep URLs and permalinks valid on...

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  Creating plugins in Movable Type, with NO PERL REQUIRED

  Not to long ago I began work on a very cool new theme, or Template Set, for Movable Type. I had built out all the templates and nearly completed all of my work without having to write a single line...

• Keeping a watch over customers using Twitter, and what it really means to be "open"

  Not too long ago I stumbled upon a user who was having problems with Movable Type who I later helped by working directly with his hosting provider. A couple days later he asked if I would like to do an...

• Podcasting for Movable Type just got better

  Podcasting support for Movable Type just got better. In this most recent release of the Podcasting plugin for Movable Type, iTunes support has been rounded making it easier than ever before to get your podcast listed and listed properly within...

• Promote This! Plugin updated

  Following the request of a user I have updated the Promote This plugin for Movable Type, the plugin similar to the Socialize plugin for WordPress to include support for Technorati and Ma.gnolia. Thanks for the suggestion cognitive dissident!...

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  Hemingway for Movable Type 4

  Following quickly on the heels of Cutline and 2813, I am happy to announce the availability of the popular Hemingway theme for Movable Type 4 users. For this theme however I can take no credit - I am merely a...

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  2813 for Movable Type 4

  A couple of days ago I released Cutline for Movable Type 4. Now I am getting around to re-releasing 2813 for Movable Type 4. It is a simple theme for simple sites and blogs. It is not done yet, so...

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  Finally: Cutline for Movable Type 4

  About twice a month for the last year I have been getting requests to update my port of the Cutline theme to Movable Type 4.x. Today I am happy to announce that I have a first draft of the updated...

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  Clean Sweep Updates

  A while ago I switched from Apache to Lighttpd and in the process I broke my very own plugin installed locally here on majordojo: Clean Sweep. Clean Sweep is a plugin designed to help put an end to 404's...

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  More Photo Gallery Enhancements

  Last week I began the long overdue process of upgrading the Photo Gallery plugin to work with Movable Type 4.1. A week later I have made a number of improvements and have gotten the plugin to a point where...

• Lessig in the News: Prohibition, Changing DC and a bid for Congress

  Law emerges from our need to re-enforce what we already believe, consciously or subconsciously, is right and wrong. I finally had the opportunity to watch the talk Lawrence Lessig gave this year at TED in which he draws a brilliant...

• Template Macros: The coolest template trick you don't know about

  Republished from Learning Movable Type, a great community resource to help people get the most out of Movable Type. Recently when working on updating the Photo Gallery plugin to work with Movable Type 4.1 I found myself neck deep in...

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  Movable Love

  Aaron Bailey just launched a beautiful new site devoted to all of the amazing blogs powered by Movable Type. It is called Movable Love and will serve not only as an index of blogs powered by MT, but will specifically...

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  Stop Design Photo Gallery Plugin for Movable Type 4.1

  In today's Movable Type hackathon I chose to focus on a Movable Type plugin of mine that has been neglected quite far too much since the release of MT4: the Photo Gallery plugin. I held off primarily because I knew...

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  Movable Type is whatever you want it to be

  What has always drawn me to Movable Type is its flexibility. Most of the time we, that is Six Apart: my employer and creator of Movable Type, talk and think about MT's flexibility in terms of the web sites it...

• Implementing Ping Back for Movable Type

  Years ago Ben Trott introduced one of the first seminal technologies and protocols that would shape the very nature of blogging and our industry today. Subsequently, WordPress released an alternate Link Back protocol, the umbrella term to refer to all...

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  Action Streaming: Blogging evolved

  When I started blogging 5 years ago I had a vision that majordojo would be the place where I would collect and share those things that I find online that interest and inspire me. It would be a soap box...

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  "Its all about flloooowwww"

  My friend Jim Ramsey just recently wrote an essay for A List Apart entitled Designing for Flow. In web design, when we think about flow we usually think about “task flows” or “flow charts” but there’s another type of flow...

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  Join the Movable Type team!

  This past year at Six Apart has been one of the best years of my professional career. The Movable Type team has risen to meet amazing challenges, and has helped to spur a renaissance within the Movable Type community:...

• "Blogging is Dead; Its Social Media Now"

  CMSWire recently published a video/interview with me about Movable Type 4, the Movable Type Community Solution and MTOS and the future of blogging and the future of products at Six Apart and... no that's it. During a recent visit to...

• Introducing a Podcasting Plugin for Movable Type

  So yesterday was a day just like any other day, except that I had the pleasure of listening to a Movable Type user rant about our claimed, but "lacking" support for podcasting. Man, it hurts hearing such a passionate user...

• Magnolia Support for Movable Type

  Another one of my hacks yesterday was to beef up Movable Type's support for the metaWeblog API. Of course many services and clients will likely benefit from this, but the inspiration for the hack was the shock and surprise that...

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  YouTube and Flickr support comes to Media Manager

  In yesterday's hackathon I took another whack at Media Manager 2.0 adding support for two of the web's most popular media sharing services, Flickr and YouTube. I have yet to update the documentation for these new services, so here are...

• My Hackathon Log

  Every Wednesday at Six Apart is a hackathon day giving engineers, and others for that matter, 20% of their week to work on anything they want. Today I am trying to knock off a number of different utilities, apps and...

• Documentation-Centric Product Design

  While the Movable Type product team has made great strides in making our documentation complete and keeping it up to date, we still have the perpetual challenge of actually getting the documentation ready in advance of the actual release as...

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  Demonstration of Amazon and Movable Type Integration

  Media Manager is still in beta for Movable Type 4.0, but it is still relatively stable and in use by a number of different users across the web. To help demonstrate how seamlessly Movable Type can integrate with a third...

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  The Story Behind TypePad and MT4's iPhone Apps

  Today we (Six Apart) announced support for specially crafted versions of TypePad and Movable Type for iPhone users. It will be easy for commentators and critics to get wrapped up in the design and features of these applications, and...

• Clean Sweep 1.0 Beta 2 Released

  Just finished making a round of enhancements to Clean Sweep and have released the second beta. In this release I have added the ability to map URLs to different HTTP status codes allowing you to signal to search engines and...

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  Introducing Media Manager 2.0 Beta 1

  Media Manager has been a hobby of mine ever since I first started working for SIx Apart; from my first release of BookQueueToo, which was an expanded version of BookQueue, to a nearly completely rewritten Media Manager for Movable Type...

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  Introducing Clean Sweep for Movable Type 4

  When I upgraded this blog to Movable Type 4.0 I wanted more then anything to completely start fresh. To rethink my URL structure, the use of hyphens vs. underscores in my file names and so on and so forth, but...

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  Movable Type 4.0: The Ultimate Peace Maker

  Movable Type 4.0 is most developer-friendly release of the Movable Type platform to date. We have devoted countless hours creating some of the best developer documentation Six Apart has ever produced, and even harder trying to build into Movable Type...

• It's a Whole New World: Movable Type 4.0 Launches

  Earlier tonight we released Movable Type 4.0. It is hard to describe the feelings I have for this release, perhaps because it is 2:30am and I still am online reading the reviews coming out; but most likely because this is...

• Where is Byrne blogging now?

  I typically wouldn't feel it necessary to post excuses as to why I am not blogging on majordojo, but what I have been consumed by for the last two months warrants some attention here, as it is near and dear...

• Single Sign On with Movable Type

  Last week I was in New York participating in a Movable Type Hackathon and Blogging Summit I helped to organize. While I wasn't planning on presenting at the summit, fate had another opinion on the matter. In the end I...

• My Hackathon Hacks

  Last week I went on a whirlwind trip to New York. I was there attending and presenting at a Blogging Summit I helped organize at the Affinia Hotel in midtown Manhattan. It was a two day event for developers and...

• One step closer to a blog HTML standard

  As a long time advocate for a blog HTML standard, it is exciting to see that Drupal has adopted support for the Six Apart HTML standard that I work really hard to get as much of Six Apart to adopt...

• The Crusade Against Nofollow

  I could not believe my eyes when I began reading this week of a growing desire to kill nofollow. The premise behind the argument is simple: nofollow doesn’t work. The truth is that is does work. It just didn’t succeed...

• How to increase advertising revenue with Movable Type

  Every once in a while a plugin is created for Movable Type that makes you wonder, “why hasn’t anyone created this until now?” And the most recent plugin that I have installed on majordojo is no exception. Andy Yako-Mink, inspired...

• Movable Type Plugin Survey Results

  Not to long ago I posted about a survey I conducted at Six Apart to better understand what plugins people use most often. The results of this survey will be used to help shape the next major version of Movable...

• Movable Type Plugin Survey

  Hundreds of plugins for Movable Type have been created by our developer community over the past five years. With so many plugins to choose from we/I/Six Apart want to make it as easy as possible for people to find, select...

• Is your Movable Type software Plugin Manager enabled?

  Recently I relaunched Plugin Manager's website. The new website has an awesome new design, compliments of Jesse, and perhaps most important to my users, it also has completely revised and updated documentation. The relaunch inspired a lot of people to...

• Major Relaunch of Majordojo's Plugins

  It is with a great sigh of relief that I am finally able to announce a major relaunch of [almost] all of Majordojo's Movable Type Plugins. This relaunch is primarily focused on improving the resources and documentation of the plugins....

• 2813 for Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal

  Before finishing my port of Cutline I got distracted by another one of my favorite WordPress themes: 2813, whose credits are relatively complicated, "Designed by Eli Foner and Paul Stamatiou. Optimized by Neil Patel," and began a port of it...

• Cutline for Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal

  As an exercise in seeing how easy it might be to replicate other popular blog designs using Six Apart's HTML and CSS Standard, I turned to what I think is a very simple and elegant design that came out of...

• One, Two and Three Column Templates for Movable Type

  I have long been advocating the adoption of an HTML and CSS standard for blogs. Movable Type has forever made its default templates that utilize just such a standard available on its website. But you will only find the "two-column-right"...

• Welcome to my dark corner

  I am always on the look out for interesting commentary about the company I work for, which is probably why I find myself drawn to The Blog Herald like a moth to the flame. I keep hoping that one day...

• Gravatar Plugin for Movable Type

  Gravatar is a userpic service that allows commenters to display avatars or userpics next to the comments they leave on a blog. The original Gravatar plugin for Movable Type was written by Tom Werner, the creator of Gravatar. But he...

• Less blogging, more programming

  Earlier this week I had the opportunity at the Movable Type Hackathon to dust off some of my "old" plugins and start working on them again. The plugin I chose to work on? Why Plugin Manager of course. It gives...

• TypePad Bookstore

  You know your company is getting big when it is fun to surf your own website because you know you will find something new and interesting. There was a time when every employee knew what every other employee at Six...

• Six Apart Podcast

  Earlier this week I talked about how I have been "experimenting" with podcasting. I wrote a little how to on the subject and introduced people to the Professional Network Podcast I produced a couple of weeks ago. Today I sat...

• Join me at the Global Movable Type Hack-a-thon!

  This coming Tuesday I am organizing a Movable Type Hack-a-thon at the Six Apart offices. A "hackathon" is an event in which a bunch of engineers get together and each commit themselves to build something. Anything. Whatever they want. And...

• Better instructions for Promote This!

  A recent comment on my post about Promote This! made me cringe. I'd actually love to use this plugin but the instructions are not clear. Remember the majority of us are idiots and not as well-versed in plugin installation as...

• See the Tag Widget in action

  Arvind just sent me a link to an updated screencast of one of his many Movable Type plugins called MTProtect. In this plugin Arvind utilized a Javascript widget/control that I created a while ago, the screencast he created shows it...

• Movable Type 3.3 and Photo Gallery Update

  In case you haven’t heard, the software that powers this weblog has been upgraded to the newly released version of Movable Type: 3.3 Beta 1. Now begins the process of ensuring that the many plugins I have written for the...

• Make your Atom feeds pretty!

  I have always been impressed with the ingenuity behind FeedBurner’s rendering of “burned feeds.” Using a simple XSL stylesheet, Feedburner instructs browsers to render unintelligible XML feeds into a human-readable HTML format. The tech is cool enough and easy enough...

• Announcing Feed Manager for Movable Type

  In my work with the Atom Working Group, which I admit, has been scant recently, I have become really impressed with the number of Atom Extensions being defined and developed by the community - a testament to Atom’s extensibility. One...

• Releasing Photo Gallery: a Movable Type Plugin

  I have been taking a lot of photos lately and have had to upload them for friends and family to see. I have been using a plugin for Movable Type that I wrote a while ago and have been learning...

• The Plugin of All Plugins

  I am the author of some relatively popular plugins for Movable Type, which is both a blessing and a curse. The “curse” comes from having to do the one thing most developers probably hate: support. And where do you think...

• Arin's got a whole new blog

  We started the project a while ago, but we are currently in a rush to get all our little projects finished before the Bug's arrival (scheduled May 9th, but I am rooting for a Cinco de Mayo baby) - expecting...

• Making Movable Type Scream

  A recent thread on the ProNet mailing list about ways to reduce the overhead associated with high comment and TrackBack loads inspired me to do something I have been meaning to do for a while: install Fast CGI. Fast CGI...

• Movable Type Widget: RSS Feeds using Feeds.App

  Tim Appnel just released instructions on how to create an RSS Feed Widget using his Feeds.App plugin - an essential plugin for any Movable Type user. His summary says it all: Here I thought I’d document how you can add...

• Movable Type Widget: Technorati Search

  Thanks to Niall Kennedy for sending me this cool Technorati widget. This widget includes a Technorati search box with an option to search only the current blog or all all blogs in the Technorati database. It also provides a...

• Movable Type Widget: Multiblog

  David Raynes has an excellent plugin called MultiBlog. One of the great things this plugin does is allow bloggers to share the content from the other blogs they may installed in the same instance of Movable Type on any...

• First MTAmazon 3.0 tagset complete

  So I am piecing together MTAmazon 3.0, and the first rough tagset is complete. I wanted to run it by the community and solicit feedback. The model is simple, there will be a container tag associated with each Amazon operation....

• Domino Effects and "MTAmazon 3.0"

  The holidays has seen a lot of development activity from me, and MTAmazon is not exception. It all started when a user filed a help ticket asking if I would support Amazon’s Access Key system, yet another incarnation of their...

• Movable Type Widget: Reading List

  The following requires that you have Media Manager installed, and if you are using a more recent version of Media Manager, this widget may have been installed for you. This widget displays a list of books labeled with a status...

• Movable Type Widget: Photo Galleries

  The following describes what is necessary to create a “Recently Updated Photo Gallery Plugin Widget.” Prerequisites: Photo Gallery Plugin...

• Documentation on how to install widgets

  It has been less than twelve hours since the release of Sidebar Manager, and I already have got some wonderful feedback and questions. One in particular I would like to highlight: I am, however, a little confused on how the...

• Movable Type Widget: Calendar

  This widget is usually installed for you by default when you install Sidebar Manager. This widget displays the classic Movable Type calendar sidebar widget....

• Sidebar Manager Screenshot

  Here is a screenshot of Sidebar Manager at the time of initial launch....

• Sidebar Manager Known Issues

  Sidebar Manager is a prototype. The user interface has many known issues that may impede use of this product. Rest assured though, I am always working to improve this plugin. If you have difficulty, please submit a help ticket. Here...

• Calling for Feature Requests!

  Yes. It's true. Some has indeed picked up the development of MTAmazon. Applause. And now that the "1.0" implementation has caught up with the platform, it is time to turn out attention towards the next version. So, I am curious,...

• Help: I can't edit my system MTA32 settings!

  I have seen a hand full of comments from users stating they are unable to edit their System Level MTAmazon32 settings in order to enter their Subscriber ID. For the time being, there is no way around this. You will...

• PHP hack for cool Amazon info boxes

  Nick Punter, who helped me with the merge of MTAmazonUK and MTAmazonGlobal put together a great little PHP "hack" for creating cool Amazon info boxes on your weblog. Check it out!...