For myself, adopting movable type as my blog platform wasn’t really that hard of a task. I’ve had some difficult issues to overcome, but those have come mainly from the design I created, and from the features that I’ve been trying to work into my site. For those of you considering movable type, I give it two thumbs up so far. If you have a host with php and sql, I recommend it even more.
I’d like to do some how-to posts about the design and css in a later post. Aside from those issues though, I’ve done a lot to make movable type perform the way it does here. Most of that can be attributed to a few tutorial pages and sites out there that are must reads for potential Movable Type bloggers.
- Simplified Movable Type Installation Instructions
For setting up Movable Type for the first time on a Linux server with PHP and MySql, this is the best installation guide you will find. The instructions are short, to the point, and most importantly, they give an example of the mt.cfg file. - Learning Movable Type
Elise Bauer and co. have done an excellent job of explaining some of the most confusing aspects of MT. If you’re trying to figure out how to do something, check here first. - Hicksdesign – Live Comment Previews
There are a few sites out there that explain how to setup live comment previews using javascript in Movable Type. Jon Hicks’ is by far the best writeup I’ve read. My code ended up being quite a bit different and actually does convert line breaks in the textarea to <br /> tags, but if you want a good place to start – this is it. - Mikeindustries: sIFR 2.0
If you’re looking for the latest news in web standards innovation, one person you need to be listening to is Mike Davidson. He’s a great designer who always seems to have his hand into programming as well. One of his latest projects is sIFR (pronounced: siffer) – an improvement on Shaun Inmann’s Flash Image Replacement. If you have flash and can see the Zebrawood and Cheltenham font faces on my site, then you are experiencing the benefits of sIFR.
There’s so much more to write about and link to here as I’ve really learned a lot in the last couple of weeks. I guess that should have come as no surprise since I switched to a new webhost, used a different backend, and created a comletely new design.