MovableType2Blogger conversion utility

MovableType2Blogger conversion utility

Convert MovableType or TypePad blogs into a format that can be imported into Blogger.

Everything TypePad: Domain Mapping Your TypePad Blog with a Go Daddy Domain Name

Everything TypePad: Domain Mapping Your TypePad Blog with a Go Daddy Domain Name

Handy for future reference.

TypePad and (Finally) OpenID

Six Apart has finally released good OpenID support for TypePad. This means that if you’d like to comment here, you can sign in using any other account you’d like rather than having to create and remember a password with TypePad. When commenting, choose “Sign in with…” and select “OpenID”. Then, just enter in most any other blog or account you have, like the address to your LiveJournal, Vox page, openid.aol.com/yourAOLscreenName, etc. They seem to have some other nice comment tracking features I haven’t played with yet, too.

Also they seem to have figured out how to pass OpenIDs through domain mapping transparently, so I can use david.ely.fm as my OpenID and it figures out for itself that it’s a TypePad-authenticated OpenID. Neat.

Everything TypePad: Introducing TypePad for iPhone and iPod touch

Everything TypePad: Introducing TypePad for iPhone and iPod touch

Everything TypePad brings you the latest TypePad news, along with advice and ideas for making your blog great.

TypePad iPhone Portal

Very nice custom iPhone portal for TypePad. Emailing in posts was easy enough, but this is great for making edits or approving comments on the fly. Update: and one for Movable Type.

Composing Your Posts Offline and Quick Formatting with Markdown

Composing Your Posts Offline and Quick Formatting with Markdown

Wow, great news. Markdown is my favorite way to write HTML. I’d love for this to hit Vox, too.

TypePad and OpenID

I don’t imagine it’s high on their priority list, but it’d be nice if Six Apart would add OpenID pointers to the default TypePad headers. Every TypePad user automatically gets (I think), a TypeKey identity at http://profile.typekey.com/username, and TypeKey profiles all include OpenID identities. If TypePad pages all had a delegation to TypeKey, they’d join LiveJournal and Vox (also Six Apart products, LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick having invented OpenID in the first place) in offering OpenIDs for all their users.

At present, if you’re already logged into TypeKey and want to comment on a TypeKey-enabled blog, all you have to do to sign in is click the sign in link. Then, if you want to enter your URL to be displayed with your name in the comment, you type that in when you type in your comment. Switching to OpenID would be exactly the same process, except that you type in your URL before clicking “sign in” instead of after.

What I’m getting at here is that, since I’d wager a large amount of TypeKey’s and TypePad’s users overlap, and since TypeKey profiles are OpenID profiles, OpenID could replace TypeKey without anyone missing anything. Anyone with a TypePad page would log in using their TypePad URL, and any other TypeKey users could just log in using their TypeKey profile as their OpenID, if they don’t have another one. My present comment form allows OpenID or TypeKey authentication, but it seems somewhat redundant. I’d like to remove the TypeKey thunk, but I don’t want to scare off all the TypePad users who are used to it (not that I get many comments).

Six Apart - Everything TypePad - Two del.icio.us Widgets

Six Apart - Everything TypePad - Two del.icio.us Widgets

Good stuff. This makes everything much easier.

Six Apart - Everything TypePad - Connect your TypePad feed to FeedBurner

Six Apart - Everything TypePad - Connect your TypePad feed to FeedBurner

Great addition. I’m happy to see them still working on TypePad.

del.icio.us and TypePad

A few years ago I wrote an entry about how to merge two TypePad weblogs onto one page so that you can have a “sideblog” with links in it. That method should still work, as does a Links TypeList, but I’m using del.icio.us to do it nowadays.

As a Sideblog

If you’d like your links to appear on the sidebar of your site, use this option.

1. First, create a free del.icio.us account and post a few links.
2. Within TypePad, select the weblog you want to use, go to the Design section, and click on “Change Content Selections” to select items in your sidebar.
3. Under “Feeds”, click “Add a new feed”.
4. In the pop-up box, enter:
   http://del.icio.us/username
   where username is whatever you chose for del.icio.us.
5. Choose how many items you want in your sidebar, and press “Save”.

As Daily Posts

You can set del.icio.us to make a daily post with all the links from the last 24 hours.

1. Log into del.icio.us, and go to:
   http://del.icio.us/settings/username/daily
   where username is your del.icio.us account name.
2. Click “add a new thingy”.
3. Enter the following:
   • jobname: any name you’d like. I used “typepad”.
   • outname: the name of your weblog, as it appears in TypePad.
   • outpass: your TypePad password.
   • outurl: http://www.typepad.com/t/api
   • outtime: the hour of day you’d like the links posted, in GMT. 0=midnight GMT, 23=11 PM GMT.
   • outblogid: Your TypePad blog ID. If you go into TypePad and select your weblog, the URL will look like this:
     https://www.typepad.com/t/app/
     weblog/manage?blogid=somenumber
     Enter in the number at the end.
   • outcatid: The ID of the category you’d like to publish into. I haven’t gotten this to work, but it works fine without it.
4. Press “Submit Query”.

You’ll have to wait until your out_time to see if it worked, but once it does it’ll post an entry every 24 hours containing all the new links you’ve entered into del.icio.us.

Pros and Cons

Both approachs have their virtues. Using a sideblog keeps links out of the main flow of your posts, which is nice if you want to seperate what you write from what you link to. It also keeps links out of your XML feed. Readers who want to read your links can subscribe to your del.icio.us feed, but people reading your TypePad feed will continue to just get “real posts” you’ve written.

Using digest posts is good if you’d prefer to keep everything in one column. The daily post method will put the links into your feed, so anyone reading your feed will get everything on your site. If you don’t post entries that often, but you post links every day, this’ll keep content flowing on your site, which might be a good thing. On the other hand, it may also mean that your page will be filled mostly with links to things instead of full posts, and some people don’t like to be reminded about how prolific they’re not.

TypeKey is Live for TypePad Users

Via Dive Into Mark, I hopped over to Idly’s MT 3.0b1 First Thoughts. Since MovableType 3.0 is in beta, it makes sense that they’re doing some major testing on TypeKey, their new comment registration system. Noticing that Idly has a TypeKey notice on his comment form, I clicked the link to see if I could sign up. I filled out the form and got an error message informing me that someone was already using my login name. This upset me, being that I’m the ruling daveXtreme in cyberspace.

Turns out that all TypePad users’ login names have been reserved for use in TypeKey, and I was able to log in using my TypePad password.

This was probably a good call by Six Apart, as TypePad is aimed at beginner users who would be confused and upset if they had to maintain different sets of identities for using their own site and commenting on others’. Yay for integration.

I guess privacy-skiddish people might be upset by being automatically thrown into the system, but since Six Apart already has all their contact information from their TypePad bill, they’ll just need to get over it.

Setting Up a Sideblog in TypePad

I’ve added a new feature to daveXtreme.com, called eXtremities. During my web surfing I come across lots of interesting sites that seem worth a link, but don’t need an entire post devoted to them. The main page will always show the five most-recent links, and every link will be available in a separate archive page. An RSS feed of the links is also available. (Note: if you came here via a direct link to this article, go to the front page to see them.) LiveJournal users can add LJ User davelinks to their Friends’ pages (though due to LJ’s poor content aggregator, they won’t get the links in HTML, and the first time they add davelinks to their page they’ll get 15 entries at once).

Setting up a Sideblog in TypePad

At first I wanted to use a links TypeList to handle it all, but there’s not yet a way to create an archive of TypeList items, and I didn’t want to have to create a new RSS feed that I’d have to manually rebuild each time I posted a link. Advanced users can use the following method to include a similar “sideblog” on their pages:

1. Create a new weblog. For example purposes, we’ll call it “sideblog.” In the configure tab of the new weblog, enable syndication in the “Publicity & Syndication” mini-tab. I recommend syndicating the entire post, as they’ll usually be short and you don’t want the HTML to be stripped.
2. Design the weblog to look however you’d like. While you’ll be including the posts into the sidebar of your main page, you’ll still want a pretty template for the sideblog archives.
3. In the “Edit Template Sets” mini-tab of the “Design” tab, find the design you just made and check “Convert.” Click “Convert” to clone your template into an advanced template.
4. Click “Edit” next to the name of your new advanced template. This will take you to the advanced template editing screen. Click “Create new index template,” give it a name, and put “sideblog.inc” in the “Output File” field. This template will be the HTML that your main weblog will display in its sidebar.

5. Here is a simple example template you can use. It will display a title, the five most-recent sideblog entries, and links to the sideblog archives and RSS feed.

   <h2>Sideblog</h2> <ul> <MTEntries lastn="5"> <li><$MTEntryBody$></li> </MTEntries> <li><a href="http://yoursite.typepad.com/ sideblog/archives.html">Link archives</ a> | <a href="http://yoursite.typepad.com/ sideblog/index.rdf">RSS</a></li> </ul>

I’ve split up linebreaks for formatting above. Here’s the template file without them that you can paste into your page. (Right click to download — your browser may try to render the HTML.) You’ll have to replace yoursite with the address of your site, and if you named the new weblog something other than “sideblog,” you’ll have to change that, too. 6. Save and publish the new template. 7. Now switch to your main weblog, and go to the design tab. In “Edit your Template Sets,” open up the sidebar template you’d like to put the sideblog in. (It will probably be called “sidebar,” sidebar1,” or “sidebar2.”) Paste the following code into the sideblog (remove the line breaks to make it one line and modify it to match the name of your page):

`<!--#include virtual="http:// yoursite.typepad.com/ yoursite/sideblog.inc"-->` 

1. Save and publish our sidebar template.

Your sideblog should show up on your page now. Of course, you’ll have to add some content to your sideblog, and to make that real easy I’d suggest setting up a QuickPost bookmarklet. With one, you can just select it whenever you find a page you want to post into your sideblog, and it’ll fill in the address of the page automatically. (Remember to enable TrackBack so that you can notify people you’re linking to their pages.)

Redirecting Your MovableType Permalinks to TypePad

I use TypePad for my weblog. I used to use MovableType for my weblog. I’ve since imported all my old entries into the new page and, thanks to good engineering by the Six Apart team, everything got from one place to another perfectly with all the data intact.

One of the big problems that one can have when moving to a new site is that all of the link locations change. If anyone’s bookmarked an old entry, they might never find its twin on the new site. And until search engines find the new version, new people might stumble across the old one without knowing any better.

Here are two tricks I’ve used to make the transition better.

First, add/change to a “noindex, follow” meta in your head. This will tell search engines to ignore the old page and direct them to the new one. Now, set up a redirect from the old page to the TypePad permalink. You’ll want to give the user a few seconds so that they don’t get confused, and provide a bit of text telling them to note the new location and to change their bookmarks. Here’s a basic template (click to enlarge):

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W#C/DTD XML 1.0 Transitional//EN "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/ DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">  <html xlmns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>redirecting to TypePad</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content=" text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content=" 2; url="http://YourTypePadSite.typepad .com/YourTypePadSite/<$MTEntryDate format= "%Y/%m"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1" trim_to= "15"$>.html" /> </head> <body> <p>Slight address change. New address is: <a href ="http://YourTypePadSite.typepad.com/Your TypePadSite/<$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"$>/ <$MTEntryTitle dirift="1" trim_to="15"$>here</a></p> <p>Redirecting...</p> </body> </html> 

You’ll have to change “YourTypePadSite” to the name of your site of course, and change typepad.com to blogs.com if that’s what you use.

The key to the redirect is in the formatting of the links. MovableType by default builds permalinks using an entry ID, while TypePad uses the year and month of an entry plus the first 15 letters of the the title. So for a September 2003 post called “My First Post,” the permalink will be: http://example.typepad.com/example/ 2003/09/myfirstpost.html The template uses MT tags to reformat that data into the proper URI.

Now, if people go to the old link on your page they’ll see a screen telling them that the entry has a new location followed two seconds later by a redirect to the new page on your TypePad site. I hope this helps!

Update 9/29/03: A clarification (via Everything TypePad!), this is for your Individual Archive Template.

TypePad TOS

I’ve been playing around with TypePad off and on all day, and so far I give it a shiny gold star. The interface for posting entries and designing pages is clean and simple and quite WYSIWYG. I love that you can preview what your page will look like before you post it. The photo album feature is wonderful as well and produces similarly beautiful pages.

Of note are the Terms of Service which are satisfyingly lenient. Basically you can post whatever you want on your page and accept responsibility for what you put up. So you can’t break the law. But it doesn’t expressly forbid pornography anywhere!

Ahem. You can check out my TypePad page if you’d like. I’ve imported my entries from this page so that there’d be something to look at, and have created a photo album of my niece. I don’t expect to keep using TypePad once the 30-day trial ends, but I will strongly recommend it to anyone looking for web space.

5 Days of TypePad

The geniuses at Six Apart who invented MovableType are starting to show off more of the features of their upcoming TypePad service, and it’s looking really cool so far. The problem with having an MT weblog is that you have to run and configure it all off of your own server. LiveJournal is currently the big centralized service, but TypePad seems like it’s going to have a lot to offer. Namely, that ability to do something that doesn’t involve merely writing text posts. They’ve built in easy tools for customizing the look of your site, building pictures albums, and posting photos from your mobile phone. Sadly, as dumb a contraction as “blogging” is, they’ve gone one step farther and officially adopted “moblogging” as a term. When I hear the word I just think that it’s a new term for gay bashing.