June 2010 Archives

I have recently installed the TwitterCommenters plugin on this site, meaning you can now leave a comment using your Twitter username and password.  However, if you just install this plugin on a plain Movable Type installation you are likely to get an error message that reads "Can't call method 'permalink' on an undefined value", even if you followed the installation instructions to the letter.

This forum posting asks the question if it is possible to do something like 

User Xtencil on the Movable Type Forum asks how he can show an entry in a different way depending on the number of assets present in the entry.  For example, if there are no images vs. if there are one or more.  He already attempted to use the EntryAssetsCount tag, which failed because this tag does not exist.  But never fear...

For some time now you can sort entriesin Movable Type by the value of one of their custom fields, which is really neat and allows you to create your own arbitrary orderings.  However, the sorting always happens alphabetically, which means that '100' ends up before '11'.  How to fix this?

Many paper books have an index of keywords at the end, listing for each keyword on which pages in the book they occur.  Recently someone on the Six Apart ProNet mailing list wanted something similar for his blog: an alphabetical listing of all tags along with the entry ID's of the entries that were tagged with each tag. Skot Nelson stepped up with this bit of template code.

Zemanta is a really cool plugin that comes bundled standard with Movable Type in the most recent versions available (both for MT 4.x and 5.x).  While you are writing a blogpost, it automatically scans the contents for keywords and offers you various recommendations of related content, like links, images or tags.  With one click you can then add these to your post.  However, Zemanta's controls can take up quite a bit of screen real estate and on slower computers with a bad internet connection it can also slow you down.  This can be annoying, especially if you are not using any of its functions.

Six Apart has just announced a design contest for Movable Type, where you can win Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Premium or an iPad for submitting the winning theme.  As for myself, I'm not much of a designer due to lack of artistic talent, but if you are a design talent who just needs some help with the technical side of things, don't hesitate to drop me a line!

In case you were wondering: no, this site has not died.  I was just on holiday.  Spent two weeks in the south of France, soaking up the sun and the culture.  Which left me little time to write about Movable Type :-)

But I'm back now, so expect new articles here shortly...