scriptygoddess

Is your Monthly Archive list getting kinda long in your sidebar? Would you like to be able to show and hide it easily, with a few of the months still showing? Someone on the MTForums asked about this today, and I figured it out and thought I’d share it here.

The javascript for expanding/collapsing is a modification on Aaron’s original tutorial and Jenn’s version of it over here. I changed the variable names, so it shouldn’t conflict with either of those options if you already have them installed.
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If you have an RSS feed and you are using MT, then you should note that your feed may not be valid. However, you can quickly fix it using the instructions on this site! [via Q Daily News]

Sharing some favorite CSS bookmarks for you all, since I spent some time finding them again this weekend while helping someone on the forums!!

There are a wide variety of CSS/Table Free layout resources on the web, with tips for developing sites that work well in cross-browser tests. Some are just test sites for learning how browsers deal with different commands, and they really are interesting and educationaly to dig through the code.

• CSS Layout Techniques - 6 major styles of css layouts in 2, 3, and 4 column styles.

• The Layout Reservoir - 3 different browser friendly layouts. Also has 2 great centering tutorials.
• Box Lessons - Mainly an example of how to deal with cross-browser differences, but the end results could be adapted to create a variety of styles.
• CSS/Edge - Some amazing ideas and concepts from Eric Meyer.
• and finally, a huge array of links can be found over at Website Tips’s CSS section

If you are working with CSS at all, you should really check out TopStyle, my very favorite CSS editor.

Someone asked about this on the MT forums, and I really liked how the answer turned out, so I thought I’d add it over here.

Some weblogs have a specific set of categories and would like to divide up the index page in columns to help segragate the posts. One such blog is BlogCritics. Other news-format blogs could be easily enhanced this way too.
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Robyn found a great new referral script from Textism. See it working here or here.

[thanks for the heads up Robyn!]

When Movable Type came out with version 2.2, it added a feature for showing the way information on blogs linked together called Trackback. This added a whole great new set of options to the blogging software. With the new version 2.5, Trackback is enhanced by an auto-discovery tool. Auto discovery allows you to link to a permalink from a post and it automatically detects the trackback URL and sends a ping. This made pinging a bit more intuative, and allowed for much easier multiple pings.

In configuring Picture Yourself, I wanted an easy way for using pings, without needing to attach the incoming pings to just a random picture that was on the main page, with the normal MTEntryTrackbackData code. It made sense to use a Category-based Trackback ping, so I made a category set to accept pings, and put that in a popup window. Still not easy enough for the user, because they’d have to copy the URL out of the popup window and paste it in the URLs to ping box.

So I posted on the MTForums and Phil came up with a great solution (and even went beyond that and made an MTCategoryTrackbackData tag)! His solution allowed anyone to post a link to PictureYourself in their post, and that automatically would discover the ping URL for that category. I enhanced this a bit to work well on traditional blogs.
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New script for you! The idea here is that you allow your users to vote for their favorite post in your blog. The top three (or two, or one - you set this) voted for posts show up in your sidebar(?) (or wherever you chose).

The instructions are MT specific, but with some minor tweaking, I’m sure it could work with other CMSs as well.

Installation is pretty simple - follow the instructions in the readme.

Requirements: Must be able to run PHP on your page/site.

Click here to download the script

Special Thanks to my beta testers: Carla, Donna, Dave.

Update 10/16 10:00pm EST: (What’s a release without a bug-fix, ay?) Just uploaded a new version of the script…If you’ve already downloaded the script previous to this fix - just replace “writeFavPosts.php” with the new version in the download.

Update 10/22: Bugfix:
if you already have this installed - on your “forms” change this line:
<input type=”hidden” value=”<$MTEntryTitle$>” name=”favtitle”>
to:
<input type=”hidden” value=”<$MTEntryTitle encode_php=”qq”$>” name=”favtitle”>

Some royalty-free/free photo sites:
intuitivmedia
istockphoto

A lot of people using Skins on their blogs want all of the elements of their journal site to have skins on them. This made a lot of people use Individual Archives as popups so that they could be skinned, too. Unfortunately, with the advent of Trackback in MT2.2, there wasn’t a good work-around to skin that window because only the trackback listing template and index template were updated upon receiving a ping. And rebuilding every time a ping comes in is a bit tedious of an option, so a lot of people just went with the trackback popups even though it couldn’t be skinned.

For people using the MySQL backend and PHP for their files, there is an option now!
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A PDA Page is a stripped down, no graphics version of your MovableType blog (for
example, here is my pda version).
The purpose is to allow mobile web devices such as PDAs (PalmPilot, PocketPC,
Visor) and cell phones to view your Blog without having to download all of the
images, blogrolls, and link lists that may be on your front page. It also
enables programs such as "AvantGo,"
"Plucker" and "Mazingo"
to download small versions of your page for offline viewing.

By the way, images posted in your blog entries will still show up on the pda
page, but I bet we can get a ScriptyGoddess to come up with a way around that
(hint, hint).

For users of GreyMatter, I have a tutorial on how to create a PDA page in
GM located here on my site. I
hope to republish it here very soon.

This tutorial is based on code that
Christine shared with me many months ago. I modified hers a little, and you
should feel free to modify this code as well.

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