MovableType

“Static” pages in MT

By following the clues at movalog I’ve managed to get a static page working with MT which means that I can write individual pages that include MT layout and data. This allows me to create pages such as About Me, Contact etc.
Note that I’m still using the static pages I’ve had for these examples but eventually I’ll get round to updating them.

Typepad commenting broken

Twice today I’ve tried to comment on a blog hosted on typepad.com and when I post the comment I get an error message back saying

An error occurred…

Invalid URL ‘https://absoblogginlutely.net’

Please correct the error in the form below, then press Post to post your comment.”

The annoying thing is that the url is correct and works everywhere else. You also have to log in to typepads site to post a problem report (which is daft as I’m not the actual user of typepad)
Update Looks like I’m not about the only one with 74 other hits on google
Update Got an email back from typepad to say that they have now fixed it (and I can now comment again – woohoo)

Caching finds include

I found mt-rebuild which allows you to schedule a rebuild of an entry/page/index which is just what I needed to force a rebuild of my main index page on absocachinlutely to include my latest finds in the side bar of the page. I had to rename my Main Index to MainIndex and then include the blog id, set the mode to index and provide the template name in a cronjob as follows:-

/full-pathname-to/mt-rebuild.pl -blog_id=9 -template=MainIndex -mode=index

Reasons to be Comment spam 3 2 1 zero

Google announced yesterday that they will not consider links in a webpage if surrounded by a nofollow tag. The upshot of this is that comments can be surrounded by the nofollow tag and google will not consider these links in pageranking. When I first read this it sounded a great solution to the commentspam problem. If everyone follows this solution, then there will be little point in doing the spam and hopefully it will stop – but therein lies the problem – everyone needs to follow it. Scoble reports that already MSN and yahoo have announced they will also use this tag. Also interesting that they’ve done this in a couple of days/hours as opposed to having to use a committee to do it.
It will be something that I’ll be looking at putting in my MT implementation soon (details from their news page on how to do this) – when I get some time!

Learning MT and RSS

I’m trying to work out how to include a RSS feed into an index page of one of my blogs and came across Learning Movable Type: Simple RSS Customizations. Although it has not yet provided me with an answer, it has provided me with some more reading to do on other rss matters.
rssparsers might be handy for doing work outside of MT but the best source I found so far was mt-rssfeed plugin but I have not got that working yet. But it’s late and I need to go to bed so I will try again another night.