Recently in Movable Type Category

Well, as was expected, the new MT3.31 has killed a few of my plugins - especially the ones from www.movalog.com - so it's worth popping over and getting the upgrades!

Well the new version of MT has slowly been eeked out - I've held back a touch to avoid the bugs, but have just this minute upgraded this sites engine to 3.31.

The backend has changed a touch, with a few new tweaks - and the inclusion of a widget template tag. I'll have to have a look around in the manuals and find out how to implement this without trashing my templates as they are.

Wow, I go away for a month and come back to find almost 400 spam comments tucked away in the Junk filters - so at least they're doing their job, as only 12 got through in to the pending pile. Like I would automatically allow comments to go straight through in this day and age?

Even though it's almost the middle of the year, time for a spring clean around here ;-) and to queue up a few new ideas I've had swimming around my brain.

Anyone had a comment posted from JiggaDigga? Bet you have. It goes:

Great reading, keep up the great posts. Peace, JiggaDigga

While nice and inoffensive, I think I've worked out the methodology. It's a nice message, you OK it, and depending on your MT set-up, that address jiggadigga@yahoo.com becomes a trusted commentator - which will allow future comments to be automatically added to posts, and I'll bet they won't be as nice/useful/inoffensive - or in short SPAM!

Blacklist the email or change your MT set-up to manually verify comments.

I only spotted this, due to the fact that I maintain several blogs for myself and other people, and had the same message on all of them even though they are a wide spread of blog types and are not interrelated.

Well, it's finally here - the Movable Type Style Contest. I've already downloaded most of the files needed to enter, so it's inspiration time while I think up either a Salty, Peppery or Vinegary design ;-)

Though one of my caveats will be to keep the images to a minimum and have the header easily editable by users - my main reasoning there is to make the blog as accessible as possible for mobile devices.

Luckily, I don't get too much comment spam (*touch wood) - but some bloggers can get masses of it. An interesting article over at Jay Allen's site gives some indispensable tips on how to keep it all to a bare minimum.

For those of you using Movable Type, you may have noticed quite a uptick in the last week of spam. This spammer (and yes, the signature points to just one) is wily enough to evade most of SpamLookup's default tests. He is not, however, invincible.

First, assuming you're using Movable Type 3.2 and SpamLookup, you can make your life a whole lot better if you go to Weblog » Settings » Plugins » SpamLookup - Keyword Filters and put the following into your Keywords to Junk:

After a quick test with my mobile phone, I've sucessfully created a simple xml template that posts the newest article in the blog which is readable by mobile devices.

So now I can moblog both ways - letting the world read my latest blog and blog from my phone.

Just a quick note to all those visitors who may have come to see my Photoblog tutorial and not seen any examples in my own photoblogs - sorry.

I hold my hand up, I bust my own template adding some more functionality to the site. :-)

Oooops. Remember folks, MT tags tend to be Case Sensitive!

Fixed now.

Development of the CloudNine Movable Type plugin has come on a bit after I emailed Nick at socklabs.com - we now have a much improved colour choice, which after a few experimental rebuilds should get you a nice scheme.

There's still a couple bugs and a couple of features I'd like implemented - but I want the Moon on a Stick some days.

I'll get to work on a tutorial over the weekend, so hopefully I'll have something up beginning next week. Though I have to start building the set to the current production I'm involved with at the local theatre on Sunday. Bruised thumbs here I come.

As you may or may not see - I've chucked the CSS driven list menu for something more WEB2.0 - a category tag cloud. As obtained from : socklabs

Not super-hot news - but worth repeating over here:
How to make MT even more Google friendly - like it isn't enough already!