Recently in Webdev Category

When I started using the default templates coming with Movable Type 4, I missed the Recent Comments widget. Below I explain how you can add create this widget and ass it to your sidebar in true MT4 style.

In the Movable Type administrative interface, go to Design > Templates > Template Modules and open either the 'Sidebar - 2 Column Layout' or the 'Sidebar - 3 Column Layout' template module, depending on which one you are using. Scroll down until you find a line with <MTIf name="module_recent_comments"> and paste the following code just above that line (you can of course also choose another position for the recent comments widget):

<MTIf name="module_recent_comments">
<div class="widget-archives widget">
<h3 class="widget-header">Recent Comments</h3>
<div class="widget-content">
<ul class="widget-list">
<MTComments lastn="5" sort_order="descend">
<MTCommentEntry>
<li class="widget-list-item"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#comment-<$MTCommentID$>"><$MTCommentAuthor$></a> on <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></li>
</MTCommentEntry>
</MTComments>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</MTIf>

Now in any template where you want to show the recent comments (e.g. the main index template or the individual archive template) you add the following line:

<MTSetVar name="module_recent_comments" value="1">

Rebuild your weblog, and it should show you the five latest comments in the sidebar, just as you can see on this blog.

Widgets are the fastest and easiest way to configure your sidebar. Just open up the widget administrator and drag and drop widgets on the sidebar. A great feature for novice bloggers, who don't have the technical knowledge to tweak sidebar templates.

Unfortunately, the default Movable Type templates don't use widgets, which means that to enable widgets on your site you will have to tweak the sidebar template... ouch!

I know, the default sidebar template offers a far more advanced features then the widget engine can offer, with viarables and MTIf constructions. The default sidebar template is a lot cooler without widgets, but also very hard to tweak.

In my opinion, the default sidebar template should include a check on the number of widgets configured. If no widgets have been configured, it should show the fancy sidebar, but as soon as I configure widgets, it should hide the normal sidebar and show the widgets. This is also what many templates in WordPress do and gives you the both of two sides: a fancy sidebar for starters which is easily adaptable by weblog owners.

Behind the screens, various big changes are happening on my blogging environment. As you see in the sidebar, I currently maintain have four weblogs. The oldest of the four is Brain Tags, running since ages on Movable Type. Then I have a weblog called The Wizard of POS, until today running on the same MT installation as Brain Tags and available at pos.braintags.com. There is also an old blog about my web hosting adventures, which I haven't updated in ages, called Brytenet weblog and just as the rest of the Brytenet site managed with eZ Publish. And finally I have my successful Spanish productivity blog El Canasto maganed with WordPress.

Quite a mess, isn't it? Add to that the fact that I have been experimenting a lot with non-public weblogs, and you'll get an idea of what things look like.

So I decided to clean things up, and do it well. You'll notice from the links in the side bar that I have presented my blogs as The Brain Network, a name I never have been satisfied with. Anyway, I acquired a new short and flashy domain name (of course hosted by Brytenet) and made a fresh MT4 installation. This will be the home of Brain Tags, The Wizard of POS, El Canasto and a new network blog (I still have to decide whether I want to continue with the Brytenet Weblog). Until now I have re-created The Wizard of POS, imported all existing entries, comments and trackbacks, and tweaked the default template. And by the way, I gave it its own domain name, pos-wizard.com.

There is still a lot of work to be done (and I have little time), but I already feel good about the new home for my weblogs and am looking forward to being able to manage all my blogs from a single screen.

Now that Movable Type 4 has been released and leaped ahead of WordPress, the old discussion of static publishing versus dynamic publishing shows up again. Movable Type by default uses static publishing -- it generates static HTML files with are served to the visitor --  while WordPress uses dynamic publishing -- all content is served directly from the database. What method is better?

As usual, the answer is: it depends...

Static publishing requires less server resources per visit, but it takes longer before updates (entries, comments and template changes) are visible. With dynamical publishing, your changes are immediately visible to your visitors, but you'll need more power to serve those pages.

For most bloggers it won't make any difference, as they hardly tweak their templates and receive few comments and visitors. However, if you like tweaking your templates, you might want to go dynamic, and popular blogs are better off going static.

But wait, I can hear you think: there are some very popular blogs using WordPress... That's right, and without exception they use some kind of caching method to lower the server stress. On the other side, Movable Type can also run in dynamic mode (which is what I use for this blog), and you can specify for each template whether it should be served statically or dynamically, allowing you to optimize your site's performance.

Conclusion: for low-traffic sites, it doesn't matter whether you publish static or dynamic. If you have many visitors you probable want to use static or hybrid publishing.

30 minutes after updating this site to Movable Type 4.0 RC2, I read this. Back to work...

For quite some time, my old domain jeroensangers.com had been in monkey mode. That is to say, there was nothing interesting at all, except for a photo of me in my younger days. For a long time I wanted to put up something more useful, but never started.

And you know how it goes: the moment you start, you can't finish anymore, and within a small period of time my new site was finished. I installed Joomla!, chose one of the default themes, removed a whole bunch of clutter and wrote a few simple texts. And there it is, my new personal hub, where you can read all about me:

Every once in a while when I log into Movable Type, I am happily greeted by the following message:

If I press the 'Begin update' button, Firefox will crash. So I open good ol' Internet Explorer, and update the database. After that I switch back to Firefox and go to phpMyAdmin to fix the mt_permissions table.

I love beta software!

Last week Six Apart released the beta for Movable Type version 4. Until last weekend I didn't have the time to have a look at it, but Sunday I downloaded the files and copied them to my server.

Of course things went wrong, as was to be expected with a beta release. I know that you never should install beta releases on a production environment, but I took the risk anyway as this weblog is partly a playing ground. I am a long-time Movable Type user, and suspect that my database is full of legacy data of old settings and plugins.

After copying the files, I went to the new MT Dashboard, and found out that all images had been scrambled. I suspected that my FTP application accidentally had uploaded them in ASCII mode, so copied them again in binary mode, without result. I checked the files I had downloaded from Six Apart, and yes, they were scrambled as well. So I downloaded the tar.gz file instead of the zip, uploaded the images again, and the images came up correctly.

The second problem I encountered was more serious. The dashboard showed up OK, but whenever I tried to access one of the blogs, I got an error message:

invalid permissions for author 1 at lib/MT/Author.pm line 337

This one took a little bit more to solve, but at the end I found out that newly created users don't have this problem. After comparing all settings in the database between my old users and the new user, I found the culprit: In the table mt_permission I found duplicate record for my user ID with permision_blog_id = 0. After removing the duplicate records, the error did not appear any more.

Now I am able to get into my blogs, and as you see, write new items. However, as soon as I publish a new entry I get another error message: Fallback Is Required At Lib/mt/util.pm Line 1331. I haven't solved this error yet, but found out that I can simply rebuild my site to make the entry appear.

As you can see, I also changed the design of the site. I was getting fed up with the previous design, and at the same time wanted to see what new template features came with MT4, so I reset the templates to the new minimalist theme. The coming days I will be studying and tweaking this design to my own tastes, so things might change a little bit. One thing I noticed already is that the default templates do not use the widget manager, basically because the new sidebar template module offers filtering by template type, giving the possibility to show a different sidebar on different types of pages. Other things they copied from WordPress are Pages and a file manager -- with tagging!!! --

There are still some other things to be fixed, such as activating trackbacks -- in the blog's configuration I see that this has been deactivated on a system level, which is not the case. So far I like MT4 a lot. It is fast, pleasant looking and I am happy with new features such as the file manager, entry auto-save and interactive template errors.

During the last hour instead of the usual non-interesting stuff I write you saw:

tr = preg_replace("/\\[_$i\\]/", $params[$i-1], $str); } } return $str; } ?> return $this->error("Tag does not exist."); } function load_modifier($name) { $params = array('plugins' => array(array('modifier', $name, null, null, false))); smarty_core_load_plugins($params, $this); return true; } } ?> } ?> Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/jeroens/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/mt.php:682) in /home/jeroens/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/mt.php on line 554

While some people might find this more interesting than the usual text, I was not happy with it. I just updated Movable Type to the latest version, and now my sites are dead. As usual, when you think you can quickly update software, it usually takes way more time...

After several tries, I finally found the culprit: my new FTP software tries to be 'smart', and figures out whether a file should be overwritten or not. After dumbing down the FTP software, all is fine again.

My latest weblog El Canasto is a big success, with more and more readers every day. Every week a few other weblogs link to articles from El Canasto and therefore I expected my PageRank to increase, but to my big surprise Google decided to lower the PageRank for El Canasto last week. It went from 5 down to four, and I have no idea why.

Normally I wouldn't care about it, but in this case El Canasto was about to enter in the Top 500 of Spanish weblogs --and I expected an increase of visitors when arriving to that point-- but the PageRank is one of the factors used to calculate popularity. The decrease in PageRank set me back to position 650. I can only wait until I steadily grow again, or until Google makes another readjustment of the PageRank.

We depend too much on Google...