Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with MT

grid good?

allterrainbrain — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:16:40 -0800

Media Temple's Grid Service: current verdict? (or: alernatives?) Media Temple's Grid Service (the only service that would make sense for my small-budget sites) has gotten a lot of criticism for outages and slow response times. Have things now improved and stabilized with GS, in your experience?

MT's last direct statement about overall GS status seems to be the apology posted three months ago in their blog. Their system incidents page lists several GS outages during February & March, but it's not clear how many users any of those outages affected. (All? Just a few?)

And if you don't recommend Media Temple, I'd love to hear if you currently use and recommend a reliable alternative that's both
A) large enough to have its own data center, rather than being a tenant in someone else's; and
B) not Dreamhost or 1and1 (just getting those out of the way; why-not would be off topic here).

My priority is reliability/uptime (for both web hosting and pop/smtp) rather than low price -- but I'm more in the $20/mo range than, say, the $50/mo range.

Thanks!

First there is a mountain then there is no mountain, then there is

youthenrage — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:52:15 -0800

I'm going to japan from march 9 until april 6, and I want to climb Mt Fuji, from the bottom to the top. How much snow should I expect? How cold is it going to be? Do I need to bring boots and 3 layers of technical outdoor clothing or a warm jacket and sneakers? My lonely planet says its doable, but thats pretty much it. If you feel like throwing in some other "Can't Miss in Japan" places to visit, feel free.

Camping in Mt. Jefferson Wilderness area?

apipameme — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 15:05:49 -0800

*_/\_Heading to the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness area to camp, any suggestions? Planning a camping trip with a big group of friends (10). We'll be leaving from Portland and would like to head into the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness area. I'd like to find a primitive spot to camp or make our own site as opposed to staying in a fenced off campground. It may be really hot so an area near water is preferable. Any recommendations for camp spots, swimming spots, or good hikes? Thanks!

Easy image insertion in MT

XQUZYPHYR — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:22:20 -0800

Movable Type: is there a plugin/hack that would make it easy to insert a different line of code depending on a selection from a pull-down menu? What I'd like to do is replicate an old format on my blog posts seen in earlier posts here.

For all those posts, I was simply inserting the IMG tags in the actual title line of the post. That's obviously both cumbersome and bad coding.

What I'd like to do is have some kind of option in my edit window where I can select an item from a dropdown menu, or write in a keyword or something, and then the corresponding icon graphic appears in the post. As the page I linked to shows, I'd prefer it to be able to have "no icon" as an option, as well as possibly different sizes. (The former is a much bigger deal though)

The closest I came was CustomFields, but it didn't seem to be doable as it's not complex enough to correspond image tags to a selection field.

I guess the best comparison would be those weird "current mood" things on LiveJournal, etc. Except instead of selecting the mood and having it display the mood I'm in, a corresponding picture would be there.

I have this nagging suspicious this is a simple thing to do and the answer is right under my nose but I've tried unsuccessfully for a month now to come up with an idea.

New to MT

about_time — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 04:44:24 -0800

I want a private, metafilter-like blog for a group of friends. So I installed MT. Works great, but the default install isn't the best for people who are not great with computers. All I want is for "post" to be at the top of the displayed blog and it should only allow authorized users to post. How can I do this? I already have access control set up through ssl. I'm also willing to switch blog software if there is a better package somewhere for this. It seems like MT is meant for those with many readers and few authors. I need something where all readers are authors. Thanks for your help.

How to redirect RSS feeds to a new location?

jdroth — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 17:51:50 -0800

I have a Moveable Type weblog. I would like to redirect the feeds. This probably involves using .htaccess and mod_rewrite. My mind has grown weary after two hours of trying to get this to work. Can anyone offer advice? This weblog has feeds located at:

http://www.sitename.com/index.xml

http://www.sitename.com/atom.xml

http://www.sitename.com/index.rdf

http://www.sitename.com/feed/

http://www.sitename.com/subdir/index.xml

http://www.sitename.com/subdir/atom.xml

http://www.sitename.com/subdir/index.rdf

I would like all of these feeds to be redirected to:

http://www.feedburner.com/sitename

I am not well-versed in regular expressions. I've looked at the Apache docs, and have looked at an .htaccess file that does similar things for WordPress, but I'm stumped.

I can't access my blog's MT control panel

languagehat — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 17:45:51 -0800

This week my blog (languagehat.com) had an unprecedented flood of weird spam; as I was in the midst of deleting another chunk of it, I found myself locked out of my MT control panel (when I try accessing mt.cgi, I get "Invalid login"). Songdog, who helps me with stuff like this, posted a report at the Movable Type Community Forum, where you can find the horrid details; unfortunately, since I'm still using MT 2.63, there's not much in the way of support, and nobody's responded at the forum. If anybody here has suggestions, I'm all ears and deeply grateful.

Help me with MT filename trimming.

Marquis — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 11:47:21 -0800

Individual entries on my MT 2.6x installation are archived using their trimmed entry-names (i.e. blog.com/trimmed_entry_na.php). I'd like to make the filenames longer from now on (trimming to 30, probably), but I think that if I change the parameter in my Archiving prefs and rebuild, it's gonna go and change the filenames of all my preceding entries too. This I don't want. Is there a way to change the trimming for filenames, but only "from now on"?

External RSS to HTML?

o2b — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 12:49:52 -0800

What are various methods of displaying external RSS feeds on my site? I have a Movable Type-based site, on which I would like to feature content from another MT-based site of mine.

I figured the simplest way to do that would be to call the RSS feed, but due to various security-related issues having to with PHP interacting with external domains I'm having a hard time finding a solution that works.

I've tried to install Appnel's Feeds.App plugin, but for some reason I can't get it to work.

I don't need an MT-plugin, I just need something that works. It's been suggested that a client-side JS parser would bypass the security issue -- does this sound like it might be practical? I'm skeptical.

How have you done it?

Why does MySQL keep restarting?

paul_smatatoes — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 14:40:34 -0800

MySQL Hell: I've spent most of my vacation trying to figure out why MySQL has gone nuts. It's part of a Movable Type install with tons of posts, comments, and log entries, and it's always run smoothly before. The problem is that it'll bomb on random queries, seemingly every minute or two, since status queries always show uptime in tens of seconds. Repairing the larger tables and restarting the server has done nothing, and no major changes have been made. What's wrong? Is this a *nix issue, a MySQL issue, or an MT issue? And how do I go about telling the difference, or fixing any of them? The hosting company's tech support, while generally useless ("not our job", they say) at least reassured me that we're running within MySQL's capabilities. Still, when I try to truncate MT's log table (via SSH), it loses the connection after two or three minutes.

85% of my web work has been on SQL Server and in ASP, but I know my way around a command line and have a good grasp of database theory. Yet I absolutely can not figure this out. Please help!

How do I do a global wordcount in MT?

Marquis — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 09:22:12 -0800

How do I get a global wordcount for every post made on my MT 2.66 blog? MT Wordcount only seems to have tags for obtaining the number of words in each entry. I want to know the big number that is the total sum for all (558) entries on the blog.

Apparently MTWordStats used to do this, but the plugin's no longer available.

Thanks!

Help me debug this simple CSS problem before I put my head through the monitor!!

anastasiav — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 08:54:07 -0800

IHateCSSFilter: Help me figure out how to fix my website so that the left margin isn't smashed up against the left margin anymore.... I did not write the original CSS for the site, because I've never been able to master CSS, and this is a perfect example of why. I'm sorry if I can't explain this well, but trying to work in CSS always makes my eyes bleed and me want to tear my hair out, despite years of trying to learn how it works.

After having redesigned the site (back in July), I have a bug in it that I can't fix and its driving me crazy - so crazy that I can't look at the site, so I never update it.

I know that changing the pix number in the body margin attribute should fix this, but it doesn't seem to, and I can't figure out why. I know that my main page calls its CSS from a file called "styles-site.css" but changing the margin pix attribute in the styles-site.css file doesn't seem to change anything in the formatting of the site -- or, rather, it does, until I rebuild the site in MT, and then it goes back to 0px for the left margin, and I cannot figure out what it is about rebuilding that is overrding the styles-site.css file.

Can you help me? I'm losing my mind over this.

and please give me answers like I'm your grandmother. I'm apparently too stupid to be any good at anything other than simple html, even after years and years of trying.

CGI query strings in MT?

o2b — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 17:32:47 -0800

I'm doing some Movable Type development. I'd like to add a custom query string to the normal mt-search strings. I was hoping to use PHP to do something with the string, but unfortunately I can't run PHP in the CGI files. Any options? I'm not a CGI writer, so I may be missing something obvious.

Blog software that supports PostgreSQL

Plutor — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 10:47:27 -0800

I'm interested in moving away from Moveable Type for my blog. Unfortunately, the only DBMS my webhost provides is PostgreSQL. Wordpress doesn't support it. Blosxom seems promising, but I'm behind a firewall and proxy at work, so web-based management is a must. I'm very technical; enough so that I'm considering writing my own blog CMS, and only the time investment is holding me back. What are my options? What do you recommend?

Has MT been stress tested?

crickets — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 08:34:28 -0800

Movable Type: How does it fare under high-volume conditions? My boss has an idea he's sure is going to be a smash hit. Surprisingly, I think he's right. I can't go into details, but he wants to use MT to manage a dozen blogs and 1-2 million unique visitors per month.

Is this practical? Are there any stats available on how MT holds up under that kind of stress? (Obviously we'd be shelling out for a robust hosting package.)

restarting MT entry numbering

Marquis — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 14:45:01 -0800

Help me reset the entry numbering on my MT blog. I've got an MT 2.6x blog that is being restarted, for convoluted reasons, in a fairly convoluted way, and I'm having trouble with resetting the entry numbering.

There were about 400 entries on the blog, which I've deleted (from within the MT control panel, and by deleting the /archives/ directory). I will be importing 400 new entries, but I would like the entry numbering (ie, ######.php filenames) to restart at 0000001. Currently, even though I've deleted all antecedent posts, the database has a memory and starts numbering things from x+1 the highest (now-deleted) post.

How can I make it so that the posts I import are numbered starting at 000001? Thank-you!

Question number 13825

moonbird — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 07:01:57 -0800

MT weirdness: last night I upgraded from 2.64 to 3.14, apparently flawlessly. Today I've noticed that I cannot access the past two weeks of archive. [+]

Question number 13438

Argyle — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 11:14:35 -0800

Comment Spam question. Recently I've been hit with hundreds of comment spams to my weblog (MT 3.0 w/ mt-blacklist). The funny thing is the links aren't to the normal kind of sites. The domain names are randoms letters that don't resolve and the text is usually a person's name. For example the link might be 'Lucille' with the domain of xzxesfseor.com.

Why are the comment spammers doing this? Are they attempting to overwhelm the blacklist systems with nonsense? Any explanations?

Question number 10466

brownpau — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 18:29:19 -0800

A Movable Type db question: hypothetically, if I wanted to delete all my entries, categorizations, comments, and trackbacks, while leaving templates and config settings intact, leaving me with a nice, clean tabula rasa, which MySQL tables should I truncate? (I'm on Movable Type 3.01D.)

Question number 10436

solistrato — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 13:01:38 -0800

In Movable Type, how do you jigger it so the URLs of the individual entries display the title of the piece, as opposed to the entry number?

Question number 10435

jmevius — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 12:15:12 -0800

.htaccess question. I want to turn all the underscores in a url into dashes. More inside..

Question number 10023

adamkempa — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 19:54:39 -0800

As a self-imposed php refresher, I've recently been toying around with writing custom movable type submission frontends for a few less web-literate family members (Basically just simplified forms that throw the user input into the MT mysql database). I've got everything ticking along nicely, but none of the submitted entries will show up until I log in and rebuild the site from within movable type. My question: Is there some way to either force a rebuild from a custom form, or automate a rebuild? I've searched the MT forums with no success. I'm using MT 2.64 with minimal knowledge of its inner workings. Any suggestions / pointers / links are appreciated!

Question number 9772

soyjoy — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 08:12:41 -0800

Blank text in Movable Type 2.661 on IE 6 - until mouseover or scroll - then text shows up. What's going on?

Question number 9611

anastasiav — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 12:43:46 -0800

I came home from my two week vacation to find an enormous amount of comment spam on my MT weblog. I've now read this so I guess I know how to stop it from happening again (if I can figure out all the tech stuff), but deleting is turning out to be a nightmare. Is there some easier way to delete this than going into each post and individually deleting the spam comments?

Question number 9574

filmgeek — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 12:07:46 -0800

Movable Type question: What sort of MT Maintenance/additions are best - MT 2.6x? (more inside)