Discourse.net/Movable Type

Movable Type Goes Open Source

Movable Type is now Open Source. That’s good.

Does this mean I should upgrade from version 2.64? What is the current version anyway? And how on earth would I get there from here?

Obscure Technical Post

Just in case anyone else is trying to find the answer to this, if rebuilding a Movable Type 2.6x blog produces an error message of

Wide character in print at ... /mt/lib/MT/FileMgr/Local.pm line 88

the answer can (only?) be found at archive.org.

Just to make it easier, below I've copied the key instructions from the missing post at pkshiu.com.

]]> Navigate to your Local.pm file and open it in an editor (don't forget to back it up first!). In the file, find

if ($fmgr->is_handle($from)) {
        while (my $len = read $from, my($block), 8192) {
            print FH $block;
            $bytes += $len;
        }

    }

See what's after it, and add what you need (no deletions!) so that the lines following immediately after the above look like this:

elsif(utf8::is_utf8($from)) {
             utf8::encode($from);
             print FH $from;
             $bytes = length($from);

} else {
        print FH $from;
        $bytes = length($from);
    }
    close FH;
    umask($old);
    $bytes;

It solved my problem.

Good Plugin; Great Legal Summary

I’ll probably be installing the SimpleComments MT plugin soon. Merging Trackbacks & comments seems sensible to me, although I’m slightly concerned about whether it plays nice with the MT-Blacklist plugin.

But I have to admit that what I really love most about Simple Comments is the authors’ summary of the MIT License which goes like this:

Like our other freeware, this plugin is released under the open-source MIT License. In plain English, that means you can do whatever you want with the software, including modifying it, selling it, or eating it, but we’re not responsible for anything that goes wrong.

Two Things I Wish I Could Do In Movable Type

Thanks to Henry Farrell’s sage advice, I’ve loaded up the Textile and Smartypants plugins, which are very nice indeed. I’ve had a very quick trawl through the plugin directories, and nothing else jumps out at me as both stable and necessary or even that useful unless I want to do complex things I probably don’t have the time to do. (Suggestions welcomed.)

But there are still two features I really wish I had in Movable Type. First, a spell-checker. I am dyslexic and a terrible speller (Bad spellers of the world, untie! Dyslexia rules KO!). Second, the ability to queue up a post. Over at ICANNWatch, the Slash software lets me post stuff with a future date, and won’t actually put it onto the web page until it’s ripe. Movable Type will let me give something a future date, but will post it right away anyway.

Architecturally, that’s understandable: Movable Type doesn’t do anything in the background, which makes it much less temperamental than Slashdot, and conserves resources. But what if I was willing to run, say, a cron job looking for MT items due to post? There must be a way…

The Strange Case of the (Mostly) Invisbile Archive - A Movable Type Glitch?

I’m having an odd problem with Movable Type, the great free software that powers this blog. The template that provides the monthly archives is acting up. It works fine in Mozilla—showing me the whole month’s worth of stuff—but when I test it in IE (under Windows), it only shows the earliest post for the month. Yet, when I view the source code, the text for the month is all there. It’s just not getting shown by the browser. I’ve downloaded the archive page, and the same thing happens when I view it as a local file. (I suspect I’m having a similar problem with the daily archive but haven’t tested as much.)

Anyone out there who can shed light on this?

Update: Thanks to a very helpful reader, it’s fixed! It seems I had a bad closing-comment tag, and IE is just fussier about those.