Recently in Personal Projects Category

Clean Sweep is a plugin I released in conjunction with Movable Type 4.0 to help users keep URLs and permalinks valid on their web site even after a major change to your URL structure. The plugin worked by tracking broken links on your web site and allowing you to create rewrite rules within Movable Type for those broken links. So, how did this help me?

1. It increased my site traffic! I am not SEO obsessed. I probably should be, but I am not. So over the years as I have changed my URL structure numerous times and unwittingly broke a lot of inbound links to me. As someone who does not monitor my web server access log for 404s, this went largely unnoticed. Then when I installed Clean Sweep I discovered hundreds of URLs people were attempting to access that resulted in a dead end. As soon as I fixed them people entered my site as opposed to leaving, and many of them stuck around to look for more content. Traffic went up immediately.

2. Ad revenue went up! This is naturally the result of #1 above as there is always a correlation between ad revenue and site traffic. I will add though that many of the links coming into me were simple a cut and paste error somewhere on the Interweb. These are broken links I could never anticipate. Clean Sweep allowed me to catch all possible ways someone could attempt to come into my site and correct them before they hit a 404 page.

3. I fixed broken images! Web pages were not the only thing people were trying to find but couldn't. I also found a number of images and screenshots that had managed to break over the years. As a result my content actually got better and looked as professional as the day I published it.

Today I released a new version of Clean Sweep that is smarter than ever before.

This new version (1.1) will look at the URL being requested that could not be found and attempt to auto correct it for any common causes for broken links. This new simple rule set will automatically correct the following mistakes:

• Change underscores to hyphens - many users like hyphenated URLs not only for their aesthetics but for their purported SEO benefits. Users wishing to switch to using hyphens can now do so without affecting their page rank and without losing traffic.
• Map legacy Movable Type URL formats - old, old, old versions of Movable Type created file names that used an entry id as opposed to a basename. Clean Sweep will automatically detect this and redirect a user to the proper destination.
• Look for entries with a common basename - users who have switched from a category-based permalink to a date-based permalink will now have Clean Sweep redirect users accordingly.

These changes have added one last benefit for Clean Sweep:

Clean Sweep now allows me to clean up a lot of cruft that had built up on my blog and to safely change my URL structure without worrying about how Google might penalize me or how it might impact my users.

Want to test it out? Check out these URLs and see how majordojo redirects them accordingly:

• http://www.majordojo.com/archives/000675.php
• http://www.majordojo.com/2005/07/goodbye_bookque.php
• http://www.majordojo.com/personal-projects/goodbye_bookque.php

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 of Perl code, which was one of those unstated design goals for the project because let's face it, no one should have to write a single line of code, be it Perl, PHP, Python or Ruby, to create a theme for any blog and web site. That is outside the skill set of a typical designer.

But then I got to a point in the project where I wanted to surface configuration options to the user for the theme.

Byrne, meet Wall. Wall, meet Byrne. Smack.

That is when the "unstated design goal" permuted into a new proposal and prototype for how Movable Type can be extended in the future to support 100% perl-less plugins. No kidding. The experimental plugin is called "Movable Type Configuration Assistant."

How it Works

Say you are a designer. You want to build a theme for a web site that someone can just drop in to their blog and have it work. You also want to make the theme configurable while keeping your users from having to know anything about HTML, CSS, PHP or Perl themselves. Just fill out a form and be done with it. Here's the challenge: you don't know how to do that because while you know HTML and CSS like the back of your hand, your knowledge of Perl and/or PHP is some what lacking.

Enter Configuration Assistant.

Configuration Assistant for Movable Type allows you to easily design an entire settings page for your theme or plugin complete with field sets, labels, default values, pull down menus, radio buttons, check boxes, text areas, and text input fields for all the options you wish to expose. You can do this all through a simple config file. Did I say that no perl is required?

The settings a user then saves using this form will automatically be made available to you, the designer, through a set of template tags you choose and that you can use within your templates. Here is a simple example:

Here is an excerpt from a Movable Type config.yaml file that will define two settings for your plugin:

id: MyPluginID
name: My Plugin
blog_config_template: '<mt:PluginConfigForm id="MyPluginID">'
plugin_config:
    MyPluginID:
        fieldset_1:
            feedburner_id:
                type: text
                label: "Feedburner ID"
                hint: "This is the name of your Feedburner feed."
                tag: 'MyPluginFeedburnerID'
            use_feedburner:
                type: checkbox
                label: "Use Feedburner?"
                tag: 'IfFeedburner?'

This is the settings page it creates:

And here is the template code that utilizes the tags it auto-creates for you:

<mt:IfFeedburner>
  My feedburner id is <mt:FeedburnerID>.
<mt:Else>
  Feedburner is disabled!
</mt:IfFeedburner>

Documentation

• Read the complete README.txt file found inside the plugin.
• MTOS Proposal

Status of the Plugin

This plugin is a prototype for something I believe strongly should be in the core of Movable Type. I have built this plugin to serve as a working example for a proposal made to the Movable Type Open Source community.

The plugin needs additional refinement before being fully integrated. Namely:

• this plugin should extend the existing settings registry key as opposed to defining its own plugin_config registry key.
• this plugin should support additional form elements like radio, multiple checkboxes, and more.
• simplify the semantics of the configuration options.
• this plugin needs to be used by users, have its documentation completed, and be more thoroughly tested.
• this plugin needs endorsements and approval from the community.

Download

I need help testing this concept. Please consider downloading it and playing around with iit:

• Download 0.9

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 the iTunes Music Store. This latest release adds the following features:

• a complete RSS feed that includes all of the proper iTunes meta data.
• an enhanced submission form that collects addition information about your podcast including its duration, whether it contains explicit material, a subtitle, summary, keywords and more.
• additional plugin options to capture important information about your blog so that its listing within iTunes can be finely tuned.
• support for basic authentication to access podcasts located behind a username and password.
• enhanced error messaging when linking to feeds.

This release is a necessary and important step to help make Movable Type the premiere self-hosted podcasting platform on the planet. I am excited by this release and am growing even more excited about the next one, which may include any number of the following features:

• download statistics for your podcasts
• iTunes notification pings
• auto-podcast submission to iTunes

But this plugin has been more the result of the feedback I have heard from folks like Bud Gibson, Todd Cochrane and others. So I anxiously await hearing from the Movable Type user community what they would like to see in the next version.

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!

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 on your blog that result in a lowered page rank, a poor reader experience, and poor performance overall.

In this latest release I have:

• fixed a few bugs.
• added support for Lighttpd making configuration as easy for this light weight web server as it is for Apache based web servers.

You may download the update from Clean Sweep's home page.

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 I feel much more comfortable encouraging people to download, install and actually use it. I am using it now for my personal photo gallery - for what that is worth.

• Download the latest Photo Gallery 2.0

Change Log

• The upload dialog is now completely functional
• An upgrade function has been implemented to convert your old MT3.x galleries into Photo Gallery 2.0-compliant ones. The upgrade function right now is a URL hack, but it is simple: http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi?blogid=###&_mode=PhotoGallery.upgrade

Known Issues and To Do List

• The "Stop Design Photo Gallery (HTML)" template set is not yet functional.
• Tagging as a favorites doesn't work - I need to migrate old installs to use the @favorite tag as opposed to the Favorite Category.
• The template set should auto install some albums for you if none exist.
• Add a caption field for a photo
• Favorites do not display properly on the front door
• Upgrade comment form to use MT4's new form
• Paginate category archives by month somehow