In the spirit of Jon’s recent <$MTHowTo$>, I’ve decided to post some of my MT tinkerings. If you’re a TypePad user, you may have noticed the “TypeList” feature that allows you to build your own blogroll, etc. TypeLists are a particularly nice way to store data in categories and build blogrolls and FOAF descriptions.
After poking around some TypePad templates, and others’ efforts I have pieced together the following Movable Type hack to build your own TypeLists.
First off, rather than dedicating a new blog to each category list, we’ll use categories and category archives to separate lists (e.g. People, Books…). So you’ll want to create a new blog called something like “Bloglists”. Because we’ll be repurposing the entry fields, we’ll turn off “Convert Line Breaks”. You’ll also want to delete all the templates except the category archive template. We’ll replace the templates later (part 2). Finally, set the blog up to publish in your main directory. This will allow you to publish certain files into your root directory (like your FOAF) and change your archive path on the server AND web to yoursite.com/bloglists/ .
Now you can add entries and build your lists. We’ll walk through setting up the “people” list. In order to work with the templates I’m going to post in part 2, you’ll want to use your entry fields as follows: Title:Person’s Name, Entry Body:Their URL, Extended Entry:Their RSS feed. For FOAF purposes we’ll use Excerpt for the person’s FOAF URI and Keywords for their
Now, some of this stuff won’t show up until next time when we put in the OPML and FOAF templates, but for now, we’ll have it spit out a scrap of HTML that we can use as a server side include. For this we’ll steal Dylan Tweney’s template and add it as an archive template. You’ll need to change the preferred archive type to Category (in the weblog prefs) and set up the template under category (weblog prefs>archiving>add new). Add in a name and path for the archive like this:<MTArchiveCategory dirify=”1″>/include.html
Now, enter your peeps and publish. You should find an archive file at http://yoursite.com/bloglists/people/include.html. If the file didn’t show up, ten you get a “D”. If it did then you can pop the include in your main page (if you are so inclined) with this scrap of code: <?php include(”http://yoursite.com/bloglists/people/include.html”); ?>
Fun? Don’t I know it. In the next post, I’ll share some templates that will add functionality to your new bloglists. And, by the way, I don’t guarantee any of this. I’m a writer, not a programmer. So if you improve on this set up, let me know and I’ll share your success.
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February 11th, 2004 at 1:15 am
If you use the default MT bookmarklet at add a site, it fills in the html in the MTEntry field automatically:
Brian Burnham: Building Typelists in Movable Type p1
This way you don’t have to copy paste to fill in 2-3 MT fields.. its just a two click process.
Of course then you need to change the archive templates aas well…
February 11th, 2004 at 1:16 am
If you use the default MT bookmarklet at add a site, it fills in the html in the MTEntry field automatically:
Brian Burnham: Building Typelists in Movable Type p1
This way you don’t have to copy paste to fill in 2-3 MT fields.. its just a two click process.
Of course then you need to change the archive templates aas well…
February 12th, 2004 at 3:31 pm
This is when MT becomes really powerful :). Good stuff.
February 12th, 2004 at 11:09 pm
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