Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with blogging and movabletype

Movable Type text replacement script?

mark7570 — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 09:36:44 -0800

Any Movable Type experts out there know of a script, or add-on, to make a simple, blog-wide text replacement? When I originally set up my Movable Type blog, all the files were in the root directory of my Web server. Now that I've moved everything into a blog/ directory, the blog mostly works fine (clicking around the categories, making new posts, etc.), but there's a problem with the text inside the posts.

Specifically, for all the old posts that embedded an image, the HTML references the image in its old location, in the root directory. I need to go through Movable Type to change all those references to refer to the images in the new place - just adding a "blog/" to the URL in the right place. Not making this fix will result in many broken images when we remove the old files from the root (non-blog/) dir.

This would be an easy search-and-replace for a python script, but it's not text files I need to traverse here - it's the movable type database itself, where all the posts are stored. So - any MT experts out there know of a way to do it, with an MT script or some MT plugin?

Thanks!

Is it possible to export all drafts in MovableType?

2oh1 — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:27:12 -0800

MovableTypeFilter: Is there a way to export all unpublished entries (drafts)? It would be a million times easier for me to go through them all offline rather than one at a time with MT's cumbersome interface. I'm running MT 4.21. Even challenging solutions are helpful. Over the years, my MovableType database has become littered with tons of unpublished drafts. So many, in fact, that they've become a lost cause. Many of these are crap ideas to be tossed, but there are a few unfinished gems scattered among them. What I'm hoping to do is export all drafts, and then delete them all. Then, offline, I'd scan through them to find the 5% that's worth salvaging. The offline part is easy... but exporting those drafts seems to be impossible.

I'm open to creative solutions here. Any ideas? How do you deal with all of your unpublished drafts?

What's the best way to geotag blog posts?

ascullion — Fri, 16 May 2008 06:06:10 -0800

What's the easiest way to geotag a blog post in MT4? Are there any decicated plugins, or any map-based technologies, that could make it easier for people who want to do it?

Immovable Type?

Asparagirl — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 15:39:08 -0800

Movable Type question involving the counting and sequential numbering of entries within one specific blog on a multi-blog system. Let's say I have six Movable Type blogs on the same system/install, each containing 100 entries.* I create a new seventh blog, with only 5 entries in that one. Within the individual entry archive template for the seventh blog, how do I structure my tags to output "this is entry #N of 5 in this blog" on the resulting pages? (N would be replaced by the actual sequential order of that entry in the blog, such as "3 of 5", "4 of 5", etc., as determined by either the entry's published date or just the sequence in which the entry was added to the blog, it doesn't matter.)

It sounds simple (and maybe I'm missing something here), but the only likely tag I've found for this, MTEntryID, exports the system ID of the entry in question (which could be #703 or something, or 000703 if you use leading zeroes). That is, it's being counted sequentially relative to the overall install/system, and not to the one blog in which I'm interested.

I can get a total count of entries within just the seventh blog -- the "...of 5..." part -- using MTBlogEntryCount, so that's no problem. But isn't there something similarly blog-specific with regards to entry numbering?

*In actuality, the largest MT install I manage has 95 blogs on it and over 400,000 comments.

Minimum hosting features, maximum blogging features?

betafilter — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 12:58:58 -0800

Very limited webhost features, very fond of content management. Help a student update things easily? My university offers about 50MB of free webspace to students and not much else. No cgi scripts, no databases, no htaccess password-protected pages. I’d love to generate some easily updatable content using Wordpress or MT, but both seem to require more features than I can access.

My webdesign/coding skillset plateaued in about 2002.

I’m comfortable with HTML and CSS but would rather not re-upload my files with every update. What are some solutions?

Help moving broken Movable Type database to WordPress?

jdroth — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 08:25:05 -0800

I have a personal blog running under Movable Type. I want to move to WordPress. I've exported the existing entries to a text file, so that's good. However, a couple years ago my previous MT install tanked (similar to this). I cannot access it. I have several years worth of posts that are stuck in a database that I can't get to. I've been gradually moving these by hand to my existing MT install, but that's a pain in the ass. Is there some automated way to crawl/scrape the existing HTML files in order to retrieve these "lost" entries? Some way to break back into a corrupt MT database? Some way to repair it? (The install is BerkelyDB-based.) Important note: I have FTP access to all the "lost" entries, too. If I were ambitious, I'd figure out how to write a script that would parse all this information for me. I'm not ambitious, and am hoping that somebody has already done such a thing...

Next on the agenda: converting an existing custom MT template to WP!

For the record: current MT install and previous MT install

blogging / pinging / rss / publishing

reflexed — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:36:03 -0800

Can I use a desktop blogging client to upload posts but keep them 'Unpublished' in Movable Type? What exactly happens when Movable Type publishes? I'm looking for a desktop / browser blogging client to use with Movable Type 3.34 that will give me WYSIWYG editing, and I've got a couple questions about how Movable Type works.

I'd like something that will let me upload posts to the server but keep them with an 'Unpublished' status so that I can choose when to publish them later.

So far I've tried BlogJet, BlogDesk, ScribeFire, Ecto, and Windows Live Writer.

All (but Windows Live Writer) give you the option to upload post as a draft, but then within the Movable Type interface the post appears as published (however, it doesn't actually show until the site is rebuilt). If I actually publish the post in one of the clients, it appears on the front page.

So--a couple questions about how Movable Type works:

1. Is this behavior to be expected? (Someone was recently explaining to me that when you schedule a post to go up later, there's a bug in Movable Type and it won't actually appear until the site is rebuilt--this 'post as draft' behavior would seem to go along with that.)

2. As long as I post as draft and then switch to 'Unpublished', I should be fine as far as my posts not going out, right?

3. If I forget to publish as draft, and the post goes live, but then I immediately change it back to unpublished, will it still go out in my RSS feed? What's the time delay? (Or am I fundamentally misunderstanding the way RSS works--is the post only accessible if the person loads the feed that second it's live, but if they check later it won't be there?)

4. Same with the servers I'm pinging--if something goes live and I unpublish/delete it, does the ping still go out and just point back to nothing? Or does the ping die/negate itself?

5. And finally...which desktop / browser blogging client do you prefer?

Basically I don't want to pre-publish / annoy my readers when I use something other than the standard Movable Type interface to put posts on the server. I'm relatively new to Movable Type and blogging in general, so any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks hive mind!

How to convert Blogger to Movable Type?

MythMaker — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 17:04:31 -0800

What's the best way to convert an existing Blogger blog into Movable Type? Hi! I've had my blog on Blogger for 2 1/2 years or so, and it always met my needs, more or less. But, now that they've been changing it, it's really pretty much broken for me. My RSS feed is totally screwed up (and has been for months), and otherwise, I'm just not really happy with what they're doing (I have it hosted on my own site - I understand that the blogspot hosted blogs aren't having nearly the same number of problems.)

So, I'd like to change it over to Movable Type, and keep all my old posts, including all the old comments. I'd also like to keep all the old permalinks, if that's possible.

Anything I need to do special when installing Movable Type?

Any suggestions?

Pimp My Blogroll

jeanmari — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 12:10:37 -0800

Has anyone come across a Movable Type blogroll plug-in similar to this Wordpress blogroll plug-in (in that it can expand and contract)?

Web support for dummies?

melixxa600 — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 00:19:30 -0800

Who in the world can help me manage/fix/customize my Movable Type website? I am completely clueless, too busy to learn the damn program myself, willing to pay someone likeminded to help me, chomping at the bit to really get my blog off the ground. I think I blew it. After posting on various diaries on Diaryland for 6 years, I got myself a domain and had a (supported, i.e. paid) version of MT installed on it by an online friend. She did it for free so I can't really ask her for any more help/support. I want to change things. I want to tweak things. I want to get the comments set up, fix the quotation module installed, change images, tinker with the design, add a blogroll-type thingy, font colors, etc. I have no idea how. Basically, my skills begin and end with a little self-taught HTML. I would also, in the longer run, like to set up a second or even a third weblog on there, one eventually to host a literary magazine. But back to just the tweaks for now: I have no idea how to find someone to help me do any of this who won't charge an arm and a leg and then leave me high and dry again. What to do? How to find someone?

My boss wants a blog. Help me choose the backend.

ssmith — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 15:25:41 -0800

The company I work for wants to get on the blog bandwagon and I need to get things set up. Right now our website is hosted by Verio on a co-located server running Windows. I have a little, but not much, experience setting up blogs for friends and family members through free services like blogger.com. So installing Movable Type or something on our server is a little intimidating to me. But I will have technical resources at my disposal if I do end up needing them.

We'll need to have the blog be as robust, powerful and flexible as possible. A monthly fee is not out of the question, and is even expected. At the beginning there would just be one poster, but that could change so it would need to be able to handle multiple accounts. I'm sorely tempted to simply use a Blogger account and have it publish via FTP to our site. Will I be backing myself into a corner if I do it this way?

I do realize I'm treading on similar ground as ColdChef's question from the other day, but I'm looking at this more from a professional vs. the personal side of things. And I can throw a reasonable amount of resources (cash, time, energy, etc) against this thing if I have to.

Oh, by the way, I have to get the thing live by Tuesday.

Movable Type Weirdness

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. [+] I did enable the dynamic archive template rebuild, but once I discovered the error (Unable to read database or username) I reverted back to static. Nothing else wacky enabled, no plugins. Thanks in advance!

Help me with the Moveable Type learning curve

baltimore — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 17:39:52 -0800

I'm a TypePad user, moving to Movable Type. I know that MT is much more powerful, but out of the (virtual) box, it is lacking in a lot of the cool features (book lists, photo albums, blogrolls) that TypePad has built in.

What's the best place for a n00b like me to go to start bringing MT into line with what I had in TypePad? I've been slogging through the MT Plugins site, but if there's an even easier guide out there, I'll gladly admit I'm an MT loser and just paint-by-numbers!

Movable Type

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?

Comment spam in MT blogs

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?

How can I schedule posts in Moveable Type 2.63 to be posted automatically?

Marquis — Mon, 16 Aug 2004 09:05:09 -0800

Queuing posts on Movable Type 2.63. I'm going away for a week; what can I do to queue posts on my blog, scheduling one to automatically be published each day? I tried installing this svelte script, but after adding the code, the blog refused to publish ANY new posts, let alone advance-posted ones (they simply didn't appear on the blog). Although pre-posting is anticipated with the upcoming version of MT 3.x, I can't wait till the 31st, and can't upgrade (I don't think) without violating the User Agreement by having too many posters.

I would have thought this was a very common requirement by MT bloggers, and I'm surprised there isn't a clear standard for this functionality.

(I have access to scripting etc., but can't get a command-line.)

Thank-you!

Are there any webhosts that offer hosting with Moveable Type pre-installed?

darainwa — Sat, 03 Jul 2004 01:32:51 -0800

I have a friend who wants to set up a movable type based weblog on a new (yet to be registered/determined) domain. Are there any webhosts that offer some sort of movable type webhosting plan, that is one with movable type already installed? Alternately, any recommendations for movable type freindly webhosts would be appreciated.

Dealing with Archives

Jairus — Thu, 05 Feb 2004 23:56:44 -0800

I'm considering buying a domain, and setting up a personal site. This wouldn't be a problem, really, except that I've got over five years of content on my current personal site in various formats, and I don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past. [Very long, very geeky details inside. Not for the faint of heart.] I started my personal site sometime around 1997/1998. I built all the pages in notepad, manually inserting links, content, next/previous links, archives, etc. After a while, I got tired of the work, and then put together a perl script to take care of putting together the static pages for me. Shortly after that, my host went under, and I purchased my domain (Obviously a self-link, and of limited functionality at the moment due to a recent format). I had to re-work all the links by hand to reflect the new domain/directory structure, and found a nice script that did everything I wanted it to, as far as a journal CMS goes.

THEN! I decided to add a second journal to my site to keep track of the far-too-surreal dreams I was having, but the script I was using didn't have any functionality to handle that, so I set up a second version of the script, in another directory. When Blogger opened, I created an account and had a Blog on my page, also entirely separate from the dream/waking journals. I didn't mind this demarcation so much, as it allowed me to separate the more personal thoughts from the external-linking kind of writing that's prevalent on weblogs.

I eventually outgrew blogger, and after trying out at several different options, I settled on MovableType as the CMS of choice for the weblog-portion of my site. I found a blogger-to-mt script that was entirely useless, and after spending a good week playing with the code (in the process learning that my coding skills have degraded shamefully), I transferred all the content over manually. Somewhere around this time I also stopped using external hosting (due to a series of major-media links that drove my site to over 2TB/traffic a day for three days, before my host shut my account down and asked for enough money to buy a car with), and setup Apache/PHP/Perl/etc on my XP box, along with a mail server to handle my domain. I transferred everything over to my home PC, and continued.

After a critical hard drive failure, I went about restoring my content from backups, only to find that the current Perl-DB version was incompatible with the older MT archives. Unable to locate a working copy of the older version, I again worked up a hack to salvage most of my MT content, losing all the metadata in the process, forcing me to re-enter it all by hand using a static copy of my old site for reference. I quickly switched to SQL for MT's data system.

Now, I'm using a variety of mt/php/perl hacks on my site to get the functionality I want. Winamp now-playing lists, inline movie/book reviews, a BlogRoll, etc., etc... All the while, I've still got these two older CGI scripts with my waking/dream journals in them, and a fair amount of static content.

It's a big mess.

Now, I'm seriously considering selling my domain name to finance a move to Amsterdam (Haarlem, really, but...), and if I'm going to be moving all of my content to a new domain, I'd like to make sure that whatever tools I use don't cause me the same problems I've had in the past. Also, I'd like to be able to import all of my older MT/other entries into this CMS, whatever it might be. My waking/dream journals are stored in individual files named after the date of the entry (Ex: 20020321), and almost entirely plaintext, with a small amount of metadata at the end of the file (Ex: {title=there is an exit here} {template=main} {datestamp=200203211611} ).

MovableType seems like the obvious answer to my CMS needs, but there's the matter of hosting. Do I continue running a mail/web server from my home, or do I go with external hosting? Do I go with a generic host that has PHP/CGI/SQL functionality, or do I go with TypePad, and hope that they never go belly-up? And, of course, how do I get these five years of content into TypePad/MT or whatever CMS I go with?

It all seems very overwhelming to me. I'm hoping that someone here has gone through a similar experience, and can offer some advice on the situation. I don't want to continue maintaining a number of different journaling systems, and I don't want to lose all of my writing. I'd also rather not have the old content archived somewhere, still in a separate format. Integration, and all that.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?