Recently in Movable Type Trials Category

confusing....

Still trying to figure out this crazy MT 4 upgrade. Every day, when I come to the mt.cgi page, it thinks I haven't upgraded, and I hit the button and it runs the datanase upgrade AGAIN. Some flag is not being set.
Anyway, here's a new page to publish.

OK....I found the thing about "Refresh Templates".....(here), so let's see if I can publish this post now

uhhhhh

link to this

I have begun posting exclusively to my wordpress blog at wp.theoblogical.org. I will eventually point my default theoblogical.org to the home page of wp.theoblogical.org. As a kind of place holder, here is a javascript renditio of the feedroll listing for what I am posting right now.

• 
  the new Wordpress RSS link
  


• 
  

All you massive throngs who subscribe to or read here,

I have begun posting exclusively to my wordpress blog at wp.theoblogical.org. I will eventually point my default theoblogical.org to the home page of wp.theoblogical.org. As a kind of place holder, here is a javascript renditio of the feedroll listing for what I am posting right now.

• the new Wordpress RSS link

I have begun the process of getting all of my features over to Wordpress. The comments in MT have died....(or, the Type Key Authentication is not working. The service itself seems OK...I tried a couple of other blogs with TypeKey driven comment authentication, and they seem to work. Their links seem to be the same links , and my profile in Type Key seems to be accessible. Something is broken with MT (again). It may be time.

The Wordpress version is at this link

RSS is : feed:http://wp.theoblogical.org/?feed=rss2 (I still don't get how Wordpress 's feed: attached to the URL is any kind of standard. It doesn't work when I plug this URL into any Reader I've tried. I have to lop off the feed: prefix) anyway , here's the RSS url WITH ther feed: attached

If you wanna comment on something here, try over on the wordpress version. I'll trackback to this link from there so if you want to comment on this post, the link to the WP version will be here

The Type Key authentication for comments here at my blog seems to be having difficulty. I received a couple of emails from people saying they were unable to comment , even after creating a TypeKey account. I cannot even comment myself after clearing my cookies. Something has blown up, it seems , on either my blog's installation , or at TypeKey, or my host did something to permissions or something.

Anybody else with MT 3.2 blogs having problems, or commenting on a 3.2 system?

This is causing me to renew my thoughts about moving it all to Wordpress. MT also needs to provide a set of instructions on how to do the "dynamic template" thing , which uses some PHP files to pull archive files. My MT installation has been taking an inordinate amount of time to save a new post (since it is writing and re-writing all the sidebars, etc.)

Anyway, any hints or suggestions about this woulld be greatly appreciated. If any of you who have commented before might try it to see if you have problems, that would help too. I'm still trying to pinpoint the source of this problem.

I found that I had a couple of comments that I had not seen....they were stuck in the moderation que, and I had not seen the notification email to alert me that they were there.

This one on this post last week was encouraging. They had problems with TypeKey, so they emailed me. This one had made some comments and also this one . They

I found these Thursday night, and emailed the people involved, thanking them for their encouragement. I also had a guy comment on spell checking, and so I emailed him and we had a discussion about that. I told him that this may well be a major reason to move to Wordpress, since it has a built in spell check, and MOvable type requires a plugin, which I tried and could not get to work (required too much dependence on the host to install or tweak several things)

Anyway, this discovery of unseen comments came at a time when I had begun to also feel a bit better about my "engagement" with work and friends and life in general. I had been feeling pretty low over the past month or two, and everything seems to have picked up, and seeing that there WERE at least a few reactions in the blogosphere was additionally encouraging. Feeling better and more involved and feeling that people value my input contributes to my sense of having something worthwhile to say, which gives me the energy and the confidence to keep plugging away at making my blog more of an accurate reflection of what I am feeling, doing, and thinking, and what interest and inspire my friends in the blogosphere.

This client has been on my desktop for a while, but I keep forgetting to use it. The nice thing is spell check (since my typing sucks, that's a good thing).

OK, scratch that. Ecto bombed when I opened it for the second time. Not a hard crash, but an empty Profile Window, even though I have three profiles set up. I also can't get it to post anything now. It says "No such post" on a brand new post. Whatever. Keep looking.

After fighting for about a month with the longer post times for new posts in Movable Type, and being unsuccessful in trying to implement their "Dynamic Publishing" (I may succeed yet, but I am growing weary of the battle), and seeing the time from hitting "Save" to when Movable Type quits churning (up to about 2 minutes and then some), I am looking seriously at Wordpress (a snappy 10-15 seconds). This is due to a quick database update, versus writing static files and updating archives. The server resources may be a tad higher in dynamically showing posts, but my traffic is apparently not that high. I also would consider Community Server if it would give me a way to import my posts in.

Wordpress being an all-PHP/mySQL operation might make it more easily "tweakable", as well as Community Server (dotNet C#). The Perl modules of Movable Type are far too cryptic , as well as the various difficulties with having my host be a Windows host running ActivePerl (so that the many "tweaks" offered by folks are not directly translatable to my situation -- many of them offering assumed Linux-hosted tweaks).

The only problem is the RSS switch over. Other than announcing it, I don't think there is any kind of auto-redirect that can be implemented so that the old feed would bounce over to the new.

Anyway, the WP blog is over at wp.theoblogical.org. Maybe I'll call it Movable Theoblogical, Pressin' On! (That is, if I decide to make the switch)

This has been getting steadily worse. I'm not sure what the cause is. There is a "Dynamic Publishing" feature that seems to be related to this, but MT's online documentati on is rather unclear. Any good tutorials out there, or experience among those of you with MT experience?

12:22pm I turned on the setting that says :" Selecting the publishing model on a per template basis is a multi-step process that begin with selecting the third option, "Set each template's Build Options separately." Let's see what that does. (Gulp). 1:08 pm......I am in the midst of rebuilding everything again, since the switchover resulted in a renaming of all archives files to filename.oldextension.static So I turned off that setting and am going back to the old. I did rebuild the index file so that it would rebuild those links (I think I did---- but the point is, that the MT dynamic publishing is not for the less-than-extremely-geeky.)

It might be getting close to the time to move to Wordpress. I don't want to have to do that, if I can find the solution to this massive slowdown (I have about 3000 posts). The Blog applicaiton world is getting big and intimidating. I'll resist moving from MT as long as I can.

This is wierd. I created an ifCategory MT tag statement that creates an image tage that is left aligned whenever the category is Authentic Church. IE will not show my image of the Authentic Church cover like Firefox and Netscape will. It is the image to the left of the post in all my "Authentic Church posts, which also have the light green background. But the Category archive pages do not have the background color in the post area, and yet the image does not show there either. I have tried the suggestion of adding a style attrbute of style="z-index:9;" to the image tag, and also to a div surrounding the image using a class defined in my stylesheet like thus:
.IEimageFront {
z-index:1;
}
I am out of ideas.

OK! I'm almost there on the customization of the look for certain Categories.
In this post earlier, Eric and Dave offered help. The links Dave pointed to were the easiest solution for my feeble MT mind to grasp. Worked like a charm. Eric had helped me before figure out where to put the css change for the blockquote , which I had applied at one time but since moving to StyleCatcher and its "dual" stylesheets (where styles-site.css imports two stylesheets. I guess I could add the mt IfCategory tag in the template file, just after the css call, as a condition to pull in a particular css file AFTER that so that its settings override any previously set styles? Am I on the right track?

For example, right now, styles-site.css has this:

/* This is the StyleCatcher theme addition. Do not remove this block. */
@import url(/movtyp/mt-static/themes/base-weblog.css);
@import url(/movtyp/mt-static/themes/theme-theoblogicalOld/theme-theoblogicalOld.css);
/* end StyleCatcher imports */
.AuthenticChurch {
padding: 10px 10px 10px 10px;
background-color: #effbdb;
border: solid 1px #7c9e40;
}

I added the special section for AuthenticChurch below it based on this link's suggestion

If I then do this:
Then in your Main Index template, add the div class
<div class="<$MTEntryCategory$>">
just after the MTEntries tag. Close the tag by adding a </div> before the closing MTEntries tag.

then I should see the .AuthenticChurch class get called. Let's try it.

Update: 9:48pm It all works.

I would like to show, on my sidebar, the most recent posts in my Authentic Church category, which I have set up as a sub-category under Church of the Saviour

Perhaps also even show the first couple of lines from the post aside from the title.

I would also like to customize the Archives Template so that when one of the Authentic Church posts is being displayed, a different template is shown from the default. (This might even prove to be handy for other uses, like showing related info in the sidebars of those pages, like the Church of the Sacviour Category, or Books, or whatever.

Any ideas?

(Update from the below post......after posting the entry below, the problem went away again. I am really chasing my tail on this one. That freaked me out. I still don't know exactly what change does the fix, but I am going to leave it for now. I wish there was an easier style manager plugin somehwhere, or better yet, a Dreamweaver MT template editor that lets you manipulate the location, style, and look of the MT tags on your page in a WYSIWYG mode, like the DataView mode in DW. )

(Later still: I had been trying to find the fix for this by uploading the style sheet changes, which I was assuming would show up on the page when I refreshed it. When I finally published this post, the problem disappeared again. Something about the rebuilding of the main index template (the home page) has to happen before the changes show up, although I'm not sure why, since the style sheets are called via linked CSS files, so that SHOULD happen when the css files change, right? I'm all " corn-fused")

I am having a nightmare of a time with my styles in MT. I noticed a while ago that my right side bar in IE is intruding over into the main content area. It should line up with a margin of 5 against the right side of the window. I made some changes to the style sheets (in MT, with Style Catcher, there is a base-weblog.css and a specific style sheet named , in this case, theme-theoblogicalOld.css that sits in my mt-static/themes/theme-theoblogicalOld directory. A while ago, I tweaked a few things and it seemed to work. Of course, I didn't make a note of what I did. I just went on. On my next post, the problem reappeared. Something MT is adding into the template each time it writes the file. Now I can't find what it was that I tweaked to duplicate the fix. Can anybody that might be able to see in my CSS files what the heck I've done, or what I need to change to fix this, I would be most appreciative. It might also be in my main index template, which I suppose one could get the basics from the Show Code of my home page (the home page is where the problem is happening)

I noticed that since my home page has moved into a new month, and I have fewer posts than woudl equal the height of the right sidebar, my white background stops and obscures the remainder of the sidebar. If anybody can look at the source of this page and see what I need to do with the template to make the main content portion extend on down to the bottom so that it is not starting the blue background too early, let me know. I'm also doing this post as a test to see if that is indded the case.

(Update---yup, that's the deal alright. After I posted this the first time, I see that much more of the right sidebar. The key seems to be the light blue outside border that obscures the sidebar since the content is not tall enough to extend the white all the way down. If I knew a piece of code that would create an area that is 'remainder' tall (tableheight-contentarea = remainder), then it would force the content area down to enough to uncover the sidebar. But there may be an easier way, like adjusting the blue area or something. Of course, if I keep blabbing on long enough about this, I may reach the needed content area height ---that is, until next month rolls around, so that's not such a great way to patch things. )

When I upgraded to MT 3.2, all seemed well, but my notification emails I used to get when a new comment or trackback was received is now no longer working.

(Update: Monday night....it works now! they had a power outage at my host ---first time that's happened! Maybe that VERY HARD reboot is what did the trick, or there's also a good chance that the dudes fixed it. Whatever the case, I'm stoked!)

My mail setting is the same it has been since I first started using MT almost 2 years ago. My host provider said I should be using the IP adress instead of mail.mydomain.org in my SMTP setting in the mt-config file setting for outgoing mail , but I've had that same setting for the whole time. I switched it to use the IP (which my host suggested) instead of mail.mydomain.org, which is what I have been using for the past almost 2 years. I don't know what has happened. Any ideas out there?

I have been trying the Movable Type Style Generator. It's getting me closer, but I still suck at design, and suck even worse with CSS. MY style Sheet is here, if anybody has any tips on how to

1. Make the content area (left column) fill in the whole white area, like it does in my IE6, for Firefox as well (which is what I usually use) (update: I seem to have fixed that one)

2. Make the right sidebar move up to thebottom of the orange banner.(update: I seem to have fixed that one too)

(Update: Numbers 1 and 2 are no longer visible. I went back to my old style--but still under 3.2) I'm trying to figure out how I can make a "test home" index page (I did it here) so I can piddle around. Maybe I'll do that next)

3. Tip me off on a "Styles and MOvable Type Templates for the "CSS-Design impaired". (Update: Here I still need help. I still suck.)

I'm having a hack of a time trying to get StyleCatcher working. Anybody know what directory needs permissions? My StyleCatcher Plugin is under my /mt/plugins/StyleCatcher

the themes folders are under /mt/mt-static/themes

whenever I try to apply a selected theme in StyleCatcher, I get this error: "Could not create theme-april_showers folder - Check that your 'themes' folder is webserver-writable"

Update: I think I got it.

I just posted that I have switched to 3.2. Then this post disapppeared.. I'll have to check into that one. I set up a test copy of my blog and upgraded it to 3.2. When all looked well, I flipped the switch. We'll see how it goes. NO trackback spam so far. That's a plus.

(Now it's reappeared again, but has a post number of http://theoblogical.org/movtyp/archives/000000.html.....the very next post is http://theoblogical.org/movtyp/archives/004409.html .......what's that about?)

I just installed wbloggar4, but it seems to have a problem with MT 316, or at least my installation. After filling in my www.theoblogical.org and /movtyp/mt-xmlrpc.cgi and sending my name and password, I get:

w.bloggar - 1072896659

Unable to parse the XML response. Parser Reason: Invalid at the top level of the document. I am trying to connect to an MT blog (MT 3.16)

I like the interface. I like the spell check. It works well with Wordpress 1.51. What's wrong with the Movable Type connection?

I have been typing so badly lately; I need a spell checker for my blogging. I use either IE6+ or Firefox 1.0 (trying to use Firefox and Sage more and more....I like Firefox/Sage's RSS reader.) But my blog entries are getting mistyped a lot; and I am embarassed when my references to blogs that have trackback show my mispellings, so that I cannot say Whoops, and correct it. Any suggestions? MOst hits on spell checkers are for browsers; any easy to install MT plugins?

I just noticed that the font in my quotation boxes changes if the quote runs more than one paragraph. Why is this?

Here's the CSS:
blockquote {
margin: 9px;
background-color:#CCCCCC;
padding-top: 9px;
padding-right: 9px;
padding-left: 9px;
padding-bottom: 9px; }

and there's this section:
.content blockquote {
line-height: 150%;
}

There are p tags inside these blockquote sections (the gray backgrounds) where the font changes, so apparently the p tag is over-riding the font type and size for the blockquote. Is there a global way --like something I can do in my CSS file, to circumvent this p tag resetting of the blockquote font type and size?

Chris commented on my last post, and I thought that might be the best thing to do for now. I don't get very many TB's anyway, and the ones I have gotten are still able to be read...just no new ones for a while.

This is horrible. I'm getting 20-30 spam Trackbacks a day. Anybody know a good preventative tool, maybe one that also hits back and reports as many of these as possible to ISP's etc. This is disgusting.

I turned on the option: Accept Comments from Registered Visitors
added my TypeKey Token, but still get the following error:
Comment Submission Error - Your comment submission failed for the following reasons: Registration is required.
Please correct the error in the form below, then press Post to post your comment.
What is happening?
UPDATE (1pm CST) I replaced all my "upgraded" templates with MT version 3 templates (backed up all my original templates) and the comments feature now works. I'll have to work back in my original template functions (like showing a link to "other posts in categoryX"

I now can take comments again (until they figure out how to deal with redirects, which may take them a while). I did away with the usual javascript popups, and sent the request to an intermediate page that traps any requests that aren't originating from my blog.

update: They don't work.....I never tried an actual comment. I'm not getting the entry_id passed on....more work to do....ahhhhhhh!