Notebook / Archives / "Movable Type"

I am now using James Seng's Bayesian filter for MT to fight spam in comments and trackbacks on this website.
If you see an entry with n comments but you are not able to read these comments, they were actually spam. I will try to fix this small bug soon.

I was expecting it would be harder, but no: this is very easy and it worked at first sight!
Before processing to the migration, you can read good stories on elise.com: On the Job.
The first step is to find a good webhosting service; in France, price are too high, you are considered like a cow (you have to give the cash, that's all) and functionnalities are very poor: it's why I would advice you to take a look at foreign (US) hosting services, especially friendly for hosting Movable Type. DreamHost meets all the needs and goes far beyond ;-).
The next step is to make the backup. There are instructions on the precited weblog, but I am going to be more concise (this procedure is for a MySQL hosted MovableType):

1. backup your files with a FTP client (the best - and it is free - being SmartFTP);


2. backup your MT database (it will be easy to dump your database if your webhosting service provides phpMyAdmin; if not... I hope you have a shell access to use mysqldump; in the worse case, you will have to turn back to Movable Type own export function);


3. install Movable Type on your new host;


4. empty the newly created MT database from its data (keep the schema) – it will be easy to retrieve the Movable Type default templates here;


5. restore your old MT database into the new one (in fact, batch SQL INSERT new entries);


6. upload your additional files (images, files you used in entries, etc.);


7. login to Movable Type with your previous user and password;


8. change the absolute path to directories;


9. rebuilt your website.

That's all, and it works very well!
If you want more (I want more so I will install this system soon), you can explore the continuous backup system for Movable Type explained here.
If you are a DreamHost client, you could find these detailed installation informations usefull (I discoved them after my migration...).

While writing the previous post, it came to my mind I absolutely need a stylesheet which can handle big portion of code, with very long lines. The question is for example: how to automaticaly cut an URL inside an anchor tag?
If I do not find answers with a cascading stylesheet, maybe I will have to write a MT plugin... hum... it would be fun to have a plugin which indent code alone!

The plugin SmartyPants is a typographic plugin for Movable Type which can translate some plain ASCII punctuation characters into “smart” typographic punctuation HTML entities:

SmartyPants can perform the following transformations:

• Straight quotes (" and ' ) into “curly” quote HTML entities
• Backticks-style quotes (``like this'') into “curly” quote HTML entities
• Dashes (“--” and “---”) into en- and em-dash entities
• Three consecutive dots (“...”) into an ellipsis entity

This plugin can be used in combination with MT-Textile plugin (Textile is Dean Allen’s “humane web text generator”).

Maybe I will find time to port those plugins to french typography in order to use them on this weblog.