Results tagged “Movable Type”

This reCAPTCHA code is getting harder and harder to fill in. Found this in my comments section.

So .... does it want me to solve for x?

Trying to restore the backup database again. Looks like it might have been a mysql issue.

A little unforseen maintenance and one broken RAID controller later, we're back online. Lost a few days, though, and for some reason, the ZuckerBlog page appeared to be publishing from the MissingLinks page as well. In fact, all the blogs I manage had some kind of content bleed into other published blogs. The origin of this was that I imported the backup .sql file into the wrong version of MySQL, and although everything looked good in the Movable Type web interface, the database was moving everything around. The best way to fix this was to pull everything apart again, and reinstall the older MySQL server.

So far, everything's OK. The only thing I'm still having problems with is email posting, and I should have that fixed up in a little while.

By the way, Movable Type 5.2 looks pretty awesome. And it appears much faster than version 4, though this may actually be because I gutted the old server and replaced it with a newer one.

Found another probem with the Post Office plugin for Movable Type: you can't include any kind of punctuation characters in the subject line of your email message/entry title, otherwise it will munge the image file name that goes along with it.

Granted, the Post Office plugin isn't to blame for this, since it won't rename the image at all; this was functionality I had to add in later. So, really, it's my own fault.

Well, it's fixed now. Weird chars are replaced with underscores.

Now that I have the old-timey image thing tuned, let's try making it look like a Polaroid picture.

I miss Polaroids.

Trying to reduce the image size and geometry from 580k and 2048x1536 to under 100k and no bigger than 500x500.

More testing of sending an image through the Post Office plugin for
Movable Type. Trying to resize the picture and make it look like an old
photo.

Testing sending an image through the Post Office plugin for Movable Type.
Renaming the image to the message subject line/entry title, and adding a
.png extension.

Testing again, this time with the homegrown script.

And it has revision control! Finally.

Here are some of the new and improved features in MT5:

• A new user dashboard for both the website and blogs. This makes it easy for authors, editors, designers and other publishers to easily navigate between the two.
• A new theme mechanism that makes it easy to apply a new theme across a website and blogs with a single click that proliferates changes throughout the published site.
• Enhanced content management features that include revision history and new custom fields. There are five new object types for custom fields: website, blog, comment, template and asset.

Introducing Movable Type 5 - Movable Type

Testing out a post-via-email plugin.

I've been using the MT-Twitter plugin for a while now, so that when updating the MissingLinks page, a corresponding twitter posting is made. It used to be using bit.ly to shorten the URLs (prior to the big server crash, I was using icanhaz.com, but lost all my code when the RAID controller on the server failed). Sometime in mid-November, the bit.ly URLs just disappeared, making me thing something went wrong on twitter's API. Either that, or something went wrong on my server, which I hadn't even touched that month.

So, I looked around for some suitable Perl code to re-introduce the bit.ly API calls that mysteriously went missing. The answer was a chunk of code from openclue.org (now apparently defunct). I'm reposting it here, so it might help someone out (myself included -- I'm backing stuff up properly now).

The twitter.pl script just needs a few extra lines. I inserted this code just after the "my $intro" line in the _update_twitter function:

my $bitly = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $url_response =
    $bitly->get("http://bit.ly/api?url=" . $obj->permalink);
my $small_url;
if($url_response->is_success) {
   $small_url = $url_response->content;
} else {
   $small_url = $obj->permalink;
}

Then you have to update the part of the script which creates the twitter message. Replace the original $text string with the $small_url string:

# my $text = $intro . $entry->title . ' ' . $obj->permalink;
my $text = $intro . $entry->title . ' ' . $small_url;

Presumably, you can use any URL shortener API you want -- just insert the proper API call. Or, if you're enterprising, make your own URL shortener. That way, you own all the links.

Someone even came up with an idea to use .htaccess 301 redirects to bounce a link ending with <mt:EntryID> to the proper <$mt:EntryLink$>. Of course, this really only works if your domain name is short to begin with.

Neat way to get new content for better blogging.

Need a photo to match a post you're writing? Zemanta to the rescue. Like to be reminded to tag your post so that it's search engine optimized? Zemanta will help you out. Zemanta has indexed more than a million top media sources and quality blogs, including Wikimedia Commons, Flickr and various stock photo providers to make it easier for you to create compelling posts.

Movable Type 4.32 Now Available - with Zemanta Built In - Movable Type

Good little tip from BrainLog

In MT 4, the QuickPost bookmarklet pre-populates the entry's title with the title of the page, and sticks the URL of the page and the selected text in the message body. The URL is not a link, it's just the URL, followed by two <br /> tags, then the selected text, if any. Like this:

[Title:] Title Of Page
[Body:]
http://url-of-page/<br /><br />

Selected text, if any.

The new behavior is weird. Entry titles are all the rage with newer blogs and RSS feeds, so I'll grant that I'm behind the times for not using entry titles on short link-y entries. And perhaps usability studies showed that most people didn't want the page title to be the link text, though it doesn't seem like a hassle to make that the default. But I can't think of a reason why I'd want to use the URL without being a link.

Revising Movable Type 4's QuickPost Bookmarklet - BrainLog

This is pretty useful, especially when you're hacking your way around a new 4.2 installation, after having completely customized your old 3.x Movable Type.

How To Change the Default Image Upload Location in Movable Type 4.0

Since there isn't an option within the Movable Type user interface to make the file upload utility remember that I want my images to always go into the images subdirectory I decided to go straight to the source and make it happen. Please remember that if these steps break your copy of Movable Type I'm not the least bit responsible.

Configuring the upload utility to upload to the same subdirectory by default is actually quite simple. It only requires editing a single line of a single .tmpl file. However, if monkeying with an application's source code makes you really nervous I've heard there is a great plugin for improving Movable Type's file upload utility that only costs $10.

The file to edit is called asset_upload.tmpl. Assuming you have your Movable Type files in your cgi-bin the path to this file looks something like cgi-bin/mt/tmpl/cms/dialog/asset_upload.tmpl.

Having the worst time with stylesheets today. I don't know what I did, but I did some adjustments while fine-tuning the new blog layout, and I made a mess of the whole thing. Well, only on Opera and Firefox; IE seems to think everything's fine.

I'm using the Movable Type wtt (wide, thin, thin) column layout, and the two right columns, the primary and secondary sidebars, are dropping to the bottom of the page, below the end of the wide column. Normally, this means that the width of the page isn't wide enough for the columns, but that's not the problem today. I've been over every line of stylesheet, and can't seem to sort it out properly. I've got two examples of the exact same page -- it's fine before I rebuild it, and it's broken after I rebuild. Should be easy to sort out, no? Well, it's going to take some time, but I want to be sure it's working before I try to rebuild the entire site.

And why is IE working, anyway? It's probably because it violates so many CSS standards, that it doesn't even notice the problem. Oh, and what's worse ... it's only with the MissingLinks page. The BlogZucker pages appear to be fine. That may help narrow down the problem, since it's the same stylesheet on both blogs. Maybe it's not a stylesheet problem, per se.

(sigh) Just be sure to use IE when viewing this site for the next little while. It should look ok.

Going to run some tests with Chrome and Safari, and see if they're also broken.

Update: Turns out there was an extra <div> tag in my comments template. One of the things about MT4.x is that you don't create a page template anymore ... you create a wrapper template, which then includes perhaps dozens of smaller module templates. I had to load the page in a browser, count the number of <div> tags, and make sure they all had matching closing tags. Then I had to go into each module and figure out where the extra tag was.

Glad that's fixed now.

After playing around with the Movable Type Motion Beta (I've got a copy of it running somewhere), I spent the better part of an afternoon trying to figure out if the problems with updating external app streams (such as Twitter updates) were related to some kind of configuration problem or related to the beta-state of Motion. After realizing that the run-periodic-tasks script for my permanent blog does nothing for installed betas, or other instances of Movable Type (me stupid), I realized that MT still hasn't corrected some easy errors in their modules. Nor have I. The problem is fixed now, and I'm writing down two simple fixes to two hard-to-research problems.

Problem 1: Can't locate MT/Bootstrap.pm in @INC

So, say you're getting a constant error in your daily cron logs when trying to do background publishing in Movable Type. You know, you're trying to run the run-periodic-tasks script to take care of background tasks by setting up a cron job, either daily, or six times an hour. Assuming your crontab syntax doesn't suck ass, now you're getting messages that look like this:

Can't locate MT/Bootstrap.pm in @INC (@INC contains: ...

This website has some good examples on how to fix this (hint: you don't have to modify @INC, you can simply modify your run-periodic-tasks file).

Getting background publishing to work in MT 4.1 -- GoBecky.net

The problem is that '..lib';. It's simply pointing to the wrong place in the MT file structure, which is weird, given that it's their app and all, but whatev. So what you need to do is point the script to Bootstrap.pm using the absolute filepath, and all will be well.

Problem 2: Subroutine MT::Template::Context::post_process_handler and Subroutine MT::Template::Context::add_global_filter

After upgrading your v2.x of Movable Type to v3.x or even v4, you may see these messages in your daily cron logs, if you're running the run-periodic-tasks script to enable background publishing and housekeeping:

Subroutine MT::Template::Context::post_process_handler redefined at /usr/local/www/cgi-bin/mt/extlib/bradchoate/postproc.pm line 41.

Subroutine MT::Template::Context::add_global_filter redefined at /usr/local/www/cgi-bin/mt/extlib/bradchoate/postproc.pm line 22.

Took me a while to sort this out, but only because I enabed run-periodic-tasks for two fresh installations of v4, and there were no errors in the logs. As discussed here, the problem is that the postproc.pm isn't used in v3 or v4 of Movable Type. To fix these very noisy messages in your crontab logs, go into /usr/local/www/cgi-bin/mt/plugins and edit the processtags.pl file, replacing:

use bradchoate::postproc;

with something like this:

if (MT->VERSION =~ m/^2.2/) { require bradchoate::postproc; }

or even just comment out the line altogether. You'll notice all your post processing still works, and you'll get no more error messages.