Upgraded to Movable Type 4

June 28th, 2008  |  Published in Uncategorized

Sweet. Wasn’t too hard. I just hope that the plugins for it (from version 3.2) are still working. Please do let me know if you find any problems on the site.

PS. WordPress 2.5 is looking good though… we’ll see.

My Findings on coComment and Movable Type 3.2 Integration

April 29th, 2006  |  Published in Uncategorized

coComment

After 12-hours or so of usage and debugging my MT templates to properly integrate with coComment, I finally got somewhere to say the least. If you need to catchup to what this is all about, you may read my previous article on what coComment can do.

Anyways, I finally got around fixing my Individual Entry Archive template. I did the following:

  • I formatted the TITLE-tag as stated in coComment’s Support section,
  • fixed my old MT2.661 JS comment-related code to use the mt-site.js provided on MT3.2,
  • and edited my CSS to reflect the change I have done with respect to the mt-site.js

Thing is, now I’ll have to fix the cookie part. It should be simple. I think I just need to change the comment form’s variable to match that of mt-site.js. Then, match those changes in my CSS.

One other issue I found through this little experiment was that coComment looks for the default markup in terms of the submit button. That is,

<input type="submit" accesskey="s" name="post" id="comment-post" value="Post" />

So keep that in mind for those of you who just cut-and-pasted your MT2.661 code during your upgrade to MT3.2. It’s just too bad that we can’t use our custom image-buttons. So @Steph, if you are reading, could you please address this as well with the team =)

Also, placement of the coComment JS code in the header is tricky and strict. I was trying to figure out why the heck it wasn’t working when I went on to try JS placement. I ended with the following:

...
<script type="text/javascript" src="<$MTBlogURL$>js/general.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<$MTBlogURL$>js/mt-site.js"></script>
<MTIfCommentsAccepted>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
window.onload = function() {
individualArchivesOnLoad(commenter_name);
}

// coComment entry-specific variables
var postURL = "<$MTEntryPermalink$>";
var postTitle = "<$MTEntryTitle smarty_pants="1"$>";
//-->
</script>
</MTIfCommentsAccepted>
</head>

Last but not least, how do we tag keywords with multiple words? I tried separating with commas, using double-quotes and plus-sign but to no avail. If you know, let me know. Help me, help you.

Other than that, coComment’s current version is rock solid of a tool for bloggers. Enjoy!

coComment Helps Us Remember What We’ve Said

April 29th, 2006  |  Published in Technology

I was actually thinking of something like this. I was going to make it my first RoR project but that might just be to ambitious. Anyways, plain and simple,

coComment is the only service that allows you to enjoy the full potential of blog comments on the web. Before coComment, the blogosphere was not a global conversation, but tons of fragmented, hard to follow, and untrackable discussions.

Using coComment, you can now keep track of what you have been commenting on, display your comments on your blog, and see what is new in the discussions you are participating in (if other users are also on coComment).

One con (at the moment), is that “users can only track comments from blog posts that they have actually commented on, and only comments left by other cocomment users are shown.”[1] But this was a day or so ago. I have to check the new version out myself as I’ve just signed up a few moments ago.

Along with their news yesterday about version 0.4c being released, the team also mentioned the fact that there is now a Firefox extension for coComments. This addition, for sure, will make things a bit easier than having to use a bookmarlet on the user’s computer.

There might be one small gripe though. As I was taking a look at coComment’s Blog Integration section which lists which browsers and blog/CMS/site-platforms it supported, I read that Movable Type blogs must have the following format,

<title>blog name : article title</title> or
<title>blog name | article title</title>

Otherwise, the comment (in coComment) will show up as “(untitled)”.

So, seeing that, there might be an issue of having everyone involved have a standard way of templating their TITLE-tags. I, for one, see this as a big thing (so it ain’t “small” after all). If this is true, and hasn’t been addressed in it’s next iteration, coComment is pretty much forcing everyone to do “this and that.” Then again, we’ll see how this plays out with Microformats. So if you are listening/reading this oh-Lords-of-coComment, please do let us know. (Then again, I just signed up and haven’t gotten to play around with coComment that completely yet.)

All in all, the service is practical and very useful for those that like to read and interact with different blogs. It’s great for coComment to have gotten around and implemented something useful to the millions that are very involved with interblog-interactivity. In it’s current state of version 0.4c, I just can’t wait to see the other features it will have when it rolls out from “beta”. Pretty much, like all the other “Web 2.0″ application-sites. =)

Read the rest of this entry »

  1. Michael Arrington, coComment visit to Silicon Valley [↩]

The Style Contest

April 11th, 2006  |  Published in Uncategorized

The Style Contest for Movable Type, Typepad and LiveJournal

Six Apart, Adobe and Style Master sponsors The Style Contest. So what is it exactly about? Well, plain and simple–because “Design matters.”

Designers are the unsung heroes of the blogosphere. Their work allows users to express a character, theme and personality with their blogs.

The Style Contest was created to enable the design community to indulge and explore the contribution their expertise makes to the quality of blogging tools and the user experience.

The contest sponsors share this sentiment, and have reflected their commitment in the prize pool valued at over $17,000.

Designers—this contest is for you. To thank you. To recognize you. To reward you.

But alas, it is mostly for MT, TypePad and LiveJournal users (or those with experience with the three I’m guessing). To get more info about the what-when-where-who-how, you can check out the contest rules over here. So get those chicken-scratch going and pencils sharpened up, the deadline has been set for 15 May, 2006, 10:00 pm PST.

For those participating in CSS Reboot on May 1st, you might as well jump in as the contest is said to have a total sum of $17,000. Not to mention, every contestant wins!

Read the rest of this entry »

Movable Type 3.2 Free from Beta

August 25th, 2005  |  Published in Uncategorized

OK. So this might sound somewhat geeky but oh-damn-well… this involves technology–a part of me. Anyways, Six Apart’s Jay Allen announced last night that Movable Type 3.2 will be released on 8/25/05 in the AM. That was cool.

I mean, for those of you that have been following our blogs (Kelly, Juan, Ryan and I), you may notice the “Powered by Movable Type…” text-link somewhere. I have been using their great software since 2002. After all these years, through all the hacking and customization, if I have to do it over again and pick a blogging software… it still would have to be Movable Type.

Yah, it might sound bias (I know) but MT has proven itself (IMHO) after numerous versions that it adapts to new and un-forecastable changes in the Blogosphere, and most importantly on the WWW. “What changes?” You might say. Well, first of all, I have to give credit to Blogger for making me curious enough to start and express my thoughts on mostly about anything, as I was “bored as hell” one day during a programming class back in UCI. I remember back in the days that I wanted to do more stuff with my first-ever blogsite. I felt constricted to what I was offered, and just need a new solution.

So after Yahoo!-ing (no Google yet in my vocab) and conferring with various people on what stand-alone blogging software, a couple of names came about. I remember James using b2, so that made it on top of my list along with other ones from hotscripts.com. But alas, after a lot of thinking, testing and researching community forums of the respective blogware… I found Movable Type’s to be the most active, innovative and solution-driven group of invidividuals. This was the deciding factor in making my leap-of-faith to switch from Blogger to a stand-alone blogware–thank god I made a good choice.

Meanwhile, I can tell you a lot more of my history with MT and how it affected and helped my career in Technology but that can go on forever. I’ve seen it evolve from a strict blogware, to a CMS, to a publishing-platform, …to who-knos-what with this new release. It has:

  • helped me share my day with friends and family (vice-versa),
  • keep my design-skills stay creative,
  • pushed me to increase my knowledge of new web-technologies (i.e. XHTML, CSS, etc.)
  • and… type faster, to say the least =)

So whats in it for you, I don’t know. Its really an open-ended question that has no right or wrong answers. But I do know this, it proves that it is a “small world.” And every nano-second, new ideas are being thought of to get people to interact with each other more. After all, we’re only six degrees apart.

PS. Thanks to 6A-fam and MT-dev community for their great hardwork in producing another product (that I feel) will have an immense effect on the internet and how people interact with each other.

PPS. Thanks to 6A-fam for providing us who beta-tested 3.2 with this badge haha =)

I beta tested Movable Type 3.2