MovableType

Movable Type

Microsoft vs. Google the Tit-for-Tat war

September 15, 2005

Two days ago I pondered whether Google would acquire Technorati or finally build their own blog search engine. Just a few hours later from this post, Google announced Google Blog Search. Actually, I planned it that way! Of course, I was not the only one or even the first to wonder why Google hadn't yet offered a blog search engine.

I believe now that Microsoft should acquire Technorati and here's why. First, let's look at the Microsoft vs.

Posted in Google, MovableType

Redesigned blog to Kubrick 3 column style

September 13, 2005

Well, I decided it was time for a blog redesign. The Kubrick two-column layout design seems to be very popular due to it's simplicity and its "easy on the eye" white/blue/grey color scheme. After some hard work editing my MovableType 2.661 templates, with many late nights frustrated with the complexities of .CSS stylesheets, it is finally complete. I really need to pick up a CSS stylesheet book since a lot of my CSS coding is a bit of trial & error editing existing CSS stylesheets as a base template.

Thanks to Kubrick for the initial inspiration, Jose Salaazar who converted the Kubrick WordPress template to MovableType, and Liew Cheon Fong over at LiewCF.com who made a three-column version of the original two-column Kubrick template!

Let me know how you like it.

Posted in MovableType

Share the Google PR Love man!

August 26, 2005

Good bloggers write regularly on specific topics because it is a passion of theirs. Bloggers also develop a strong community with fellow bloggers that share their viewpoints or write about the same topics. Part of that community involves posting comments on blogs you read, doing trackbacks to interesting blog posts, as well as adding interesting blogs to your blogroll. By adding a link to a blog to your blogroll this not only acts as an endorsement of the outside blog, but it also serves to share you Google PageRank to "friends" of your blog.

Posted in Google, MovableType

Movable Type 3.2

August 22, 2005

News worth sharing since I use Movable Type for my blog software. Six Apart, maker of award-winning Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal weblog software, publicly unveiled the forthcoming 3.2 version of Movable Type at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco today. Ok, "forthcoming"? Not yet launched?

Posted in MovableType

Stupid XML Parser! RSS Feed not working

July 27, 2005

I modified my RSS template a few weeks ago and apparently I didn't include encode_xml="1"$> as part of one of the tags. Didn't realize it was needed at the time and my RSS feed was working just fine until two days ago.

Without this code, words in the blog title with with an ampersand (&) would cause the RSS feed to invalidate. I wrote about AT&T a couple of days ago and it needed to be encoded as AT&T and not AT&T.

Thus, if you haven't been getting my latest RSS feed for the past couple days now you know why.

I guess I need to subscribe to my own RSS feed just to make sure I don't mess anything up.

To quote Apollo Creed, "I'm dangerous..." (when it comes to messing around with my blog's configuration.)

Posted in MovableType

MovableType Garbage Characters Problem

April 20, 2005

I found a solution to garbage characters showing up in my blog. The solution is to download the MTStripControlChars plugin which essentially translates the (would-be) Windows-1252 characters into the corresponding Unicode numeric entities. This fixed most of the weird garbage characters, but not all of them. Unfortunately, the plugin is not complete, so I had to customize the MTStripControlChars file to add other character mappings such as copyright symbols, registered trademarks, letter 'e' with an accent é), and other mappings.

Posted in MovableType

Upgrading MovableType Berkeley to MySQL

April 8, 2005

Upgrading to MovableType running MySQL instead of the Berkeley database was certainly a challenge, but it was worth the effort (I include the MT upgrade to MySQL steps below). I've been running the default Berkeley database for TMC's blogs, including my own. I knew that the Berkeley database was not very robust in terms of database recovery/disaster, rebuilding, or fixing corrupt table entries - at least not unless you compile the Berkeley tools written in C to run on Windows 2003 where TMC's blogs reside. There are several advantages to MySQL over Berkeley, including better user community support, better tools, better backup & disaster recovery options, ability to query or modify the blog tables directly using SQL statements, and better performance.

I had several problems upgrading to MySQL and thought I would share the solution so others don't go through the nightmares that I did.

Steps to Upgrade MovableType Berkeley Database to MySQL 1) Install MySQL for your operating system.

Posted in MovableType

Damn MTGoogleSearch!

February 7, 2005

I’ve been using MTGoogleSearch for Related Entries on my MovableType blog - and unfortunately some of the related entries have UTF-8 characters in the URL titles which changes my webpage’s default iso-8859-1 encoding to UTF-8. If at least one of the Related Entries URL titles has a UTF-8 character, this causes funky characters to display in the blog body. That is, all of my em-dashes, quotes, apostrophes, etc. in the blog body are messed up.

Posted in MovableType

Previous 1 2 3 4 5

VoIP & Gadgets Blog

MovableType