MoveableType Lists

January 29, 2005 9:52 AM

Having recently installed MoveableType (after a LiveJournal migration from hell), I'm looking to personalize my blog. I can deal with web design for the templates, but I'm curious as to how people like this guy get listening and reading lists on their index. Slaving over obscure plug-in sites isn't helping. Any suggestions?
posted by themadjuggler to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

That guy is using Typepad, which may have a built-in form option. (I've never used it.) In MT, you can do that by assigning categories to your entries and laying out your page to show categories in different areas.
posted by caitlinb at 10:00 AM on January 29, 2005

Response by poster: It's running on my own server (well, a server at my hosting place), a relatively new Windows 2003 box with a good number of perl scripts installed.

I'm OK with scripting but not programming, and I'm on Mac OS X 10.3. I'm not looking for a "what's playing right now in iTunes" plug-in, but just something that can post cover-art from albums and books I'm currently enjoying.

mtamazon seems doable but involves some finagling with Amazon.com itself. Any experience there?
posted by themadjuggler at 10:00 AM on January 29, 2005

Typepad has its own features for that, but there's a plug that can be used for the same thing.
posted by mathowie at 10:11 AM on January 29, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks mathowie--

The readme says mtamazon and the amazon developer key are necessary. I take it this will be necessary whatever path I take?
posted by themadjuggler at 10:19 AM on January 29, 2005

You can sign up for a developer key at Amazon Web Services.

The site you used an example is using Barnes and Noble, not Amazon, so he's probably using their Affiliate Network.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:12 AM on January 29, 2005

There are actually scads of plugins for MT, and for the most part, they're not that hard to deal with. There are some that hook into Allconsuming.net or Netflix.

On the Mac, there's an app called Kung-tunes (by the author of Ecto) that will upload an HTML snippet you can include in your page showing what you've been listening to; I'd imagine there's a way to get that via Audio Scrobbler too. And there are lots, lots of sites that produce RSS feeds that can be converted (via a plugin or external script) into content on your MT blog. I've got a little php doohickey that shows my recent del.icio.us links.

Also: the support forum at the MT website is quite good, and you might find more answers in its archives.
posted by adamrice at 12:53 PM on January 29, 2005

Best answer: I use a "blog within a blog" approach on an older MT version (2.64). Create a second blog with your list content, identify each page as a category on the second blog (you don't need an index page template, only individual entries). Then link to the "inside" blog category pages from the main blog wrapper - the category name URLs remain constant. If they're on the same MT account they all update together, it's relatively straightforward to keep the stylesheets compatible, and MT-blacklist checks them all for spam at the same time.
posted by sagwalla at 1:21 PM on January 29, 2005

Response by poster: Sound advice that will take me a while to digest. I think I'll try the blog-within-a-blog approach first-- I think the time spent formatting/uploading the album art would be made worth it by the instant archiving of my posts.
posted by themadjuggler at 4:44 PM on January 29, 2005

Response by poster: If anyone's still checking this out, I'll wrap up the thread by saying that the blog-within-a-blog idea worked perfectly. I found this awesome little article by scriptygoddess that leaped me add the data with a simple php include.
posted by themadjuggler at 5:31 PM on January 30, 2005