This is BrainLog, a blog by Dan Sanderson. Older entries, from October 1999 through August 2010, are preserved for posterity, but are no longer maintained. See the front page and newer entries.

Entries tagged “movabletype”

December 14, 2007

Movable Type is now open source software, released under a GPL license. Their status page has details on which pieces of their open source support infrastructure are operational, including the SVN repository, nightly builds, and bug tracking system.

MTOS is identical to Movable Type 4.0. Six Apart will continue to sell licenses with support contracts and paid benefits (some plugins and templates), but the main software and default template set—everything you need to set up a blog—are all free and released under the open source license. 6A has a slightly tricky branding problem on their hands describing the open source version of MT and their paid "versions," and they've decided to call this "MTOS" (as opposed to "MT"), even though the main software (minus paid-only extras) is and will probably always be the same across versions.

October 30, 2007

I had been updating this weblog with the Movable Type 4 betas, all the way up through the final release, MT 4.01. Even in the latest version, I was consistently getting an error message whenever I tried to update an entry that had already been published:

Error On Line 1030: Can't call method "date_based" on unblessed reference

If you're re-publishing a single entry, the entry publishes anyway. If you're re-publishing multiple entries, however, it stops after publishing one entry. So it's annoying.

It looks like this problem is related to "ExtensibleArchives," a set of plugins that were once included with Movable Type by default. Removing the mt/plugins/ExtensibleArchives directory causes the problem to go away.

The ExtensibleArchives plugins are not present in the latest MT 4.01, so I'm guessing only people that followed along with the betas have these files and are affected. I don't have time to look into it further.

September 12, 2007

Movable Type for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Also available with TypePad, Six Apart's hosted blog service. Freaking awesome.

I'm using it right now. One qualm: Once again, entries without titles get the shaft, and show up blank in the entry list. Otherwise, it's awesome.

September 6, 2007

Revising Movable Type 4's QuickPost Bookmarklet

Movable Type 4, like its predecessor Movable Type 3, includes a "QuickPost" bookmarklet—a link you can install in your browser's Bookmarks bar that you can click on when you're looking at a page you want to link to from your blog. Clicking on it opens the entry editor in another window, pre-populated with information about the page.

To set up the QuickPost bookmarklet, go to your blog's admin screen, click the Write Entry button, then scroll down below the "Save" button, and drag the "QuickPost to ..." link to your browser's Bookmarks bar.

Movable Type 4 changed the format of the pre-populated entry from MT 3. MT 3's bookmarklet created a new entry with no title, and an entry body containing HTML for the link to the page whose text was the title of the page. If you had selected text before clicking the bookmarklet, that text appeared below the link. It looked something like this:

[Title:] 
[Body:]
<a href="http://url-of-page/">Title Of Page</a>
 
Selected text, if any.

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. The <br /> tags recall a heated debate about the behavior of MT 4's new rich text editor, which uses <br /> tags between paragraphs instead of surrounding them with <p>...</p> tags. (The old default "Convert Line Breaks" does better.) The only real point of contention I can think of is the new rich text editor, and the other text formatters that come bundled. But as far as I can tell, the QuickPost bookmarklet's behavior is undesirable for all of them except the "None" formatter.

Thankfully, it's easy to edit the QuickPost bookmarklet after setting it up. The steps for editing the URL of a bookmark differ from browser to browser, but assuming you can figure that out, you can paste in new code. In Firefox, one way is to right-click on the bookmark in the bookmarks bar, select Properties, then edit the Location. You can also do it from the Bookmarks Manager: Bookmarks menu, Organize Bookmarks...

The following bookmarklet code reproduces the old behavior: no title, body contains HTML for a link to the page with the page title as the text, and selected text afterward. To use it, copy this text, paste it into your bookmark, then replace www.dansanderson.com/blog/mt/mt.cgi with the URL of your blog's mt.cgi.

javascript:d=document;w=window;t='';if(d.selection)t=d.selection.createRange().text;else{if(d.getSelection)t=d.getSelection();else{if(w.getSelection)t=w.getSelection()}}void(w.open('http://www.dansanderson.com/blog/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&blog_id=1&qp=1&title=&text='+encodeURIComponent('%3Ca%20href="'+d.location.href+'"%3E'+d.title+'%3C/a%3E\n\n'+t),'_blank','scrollbars=yes,status=yes,resizable=yes,location=yes'))

The following alternate version does the same thing, but also pre-populates the entry title with the title of the page. Again, remember to replace www.dansanderson.com/blog/mt/mt.cgi with the appropriate path for your blog:

javascript:d=document;w=window;t='';if(d.selection)t=d.selection.createRange().text;else{if(d.getSelection)t=d.getSelection();else{if(w.getSelection)t=w.getSelection()}}void(w.open('http://www.dansanderson.com/blog/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&blog_id=1&qp=1&title='+encodeURIComponent(d.title)+'&text='+encodeURIComponent('%3Ca%20href="'+d.location.href+'"%3E'+d.title+'%3C/a%3E\n\n'+t),'_blank','scrollbars=yes,status=yes,resizable=yes,location=yes'))
July 27, 2007

Movable Type 4 now at Release Candidate 1. This release fixes all of the high priority known issues with MT4, including all of my personal high priority bugs. It's still not quite the final release, but it might as well be, thanks to a lot of hard work by Six Apart. Movable Type 4 is officially awesome.

July 9, 2007

It appears iPhone's RSS reader doesn't like feeds with empty titles. Like mine. An item without a title cannot be clicked. Though I like the little "blub" animation you get when you try to double-tap on something that isn't tap-able.

I had thought Movable Type 3 was helping out by faking a title with the first few words of an entry. I'm not sure if that was ever the case, but MT 4 is definitely leaving the field blank. Other aspects of the MT4 user interface are distinctly unhelpful when entries don't have titles. Are titleless weblogs a dying breed? Do I really have to conjure up a self-important title for every little thing I want to mention on my blog?