Blog Consulting and Maintenance » Movable Type

Welcome to Open Melody

Pavel Ushakov — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 15:57:40 +0000

Movable Type at one time was at the top of the Blogging chain but has slowly been declining. There’s a new movement in the community to create a software with the original principals and ideals of Movable Type and to remove what’s been dragging it down with recent releases.

We would like introduce to you, Melody. Melody is an open-source blogging platform derived from Movable Type. It’s goal is to create more community input and support, continue to expand on features, remain compatible with MT’s themes and plugins while offering many of their own, and fix many bugs in the original software.

The Melody community’s goal is to remove features and functions that have lead to Movable Type becoming a bloated former vision of it’s self. Melody differentiates itself from Movable Type through a more supported, and excited community or users, developers and designers.

Still not convinced? Try it for yourself and tell us what you think.

Burn your RSS feeds with Google’s FeedBurner

Pavel Ushakov — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:42:19 +0000

If you’re new to FeedBurner you should check it out! All blogs come with a special file called RSS or most commonly expanded as “Really Simple Syndication”. It is a web based feed used to publish blog entries, news headlines etc in a standardized format. In other words every time you write and publish a new blog post on your blog, it updates your RSS feed with the latest blog entry. Your blog visitors can then choose to subscribe to your feed with their web browser or email application such as Gmail or even specialized RSS Reader software such as Google Reader. After that every time you publish something on your blog they’ll receive a notification that there’s something new on your blog, without having to go to your blog every now and then wondering if it was updated.

If you think about it, RSS feeds are very similar to email newsletters, but without all the fuss of collecting your visitors email addresses and manually sending them out. Now lets look at what we can do if we add Google’s FeedBurner to the mix.

By registering (also called burning) your blog RSS feed with FeedBurner, you’ll see how many subscribers you have; how may people click on your links to get to your blog posts; you can see what kind of tools your blog readers are using to read your blog updates; a geographic view of where your feed items were viewed in the most recent full day. You can even make some cash with your feeds by including Google Ads between the posts! So if you have a blog and are not using FeedBurner yet – I urge you to go ahead and sign up right now. You’re missing out!

Movable Type or WordPress?

Pavel Ushakov — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:00:04 +0000

Every other person I talk to asks the million dollar question — which blog platform do you recommend, WordPress or Movable Type? First of all it’s nearly impossible to describe and list the features of both applications in a single blog post. There are many books published on Movable Type and WordPress, and in the end it all comes down to personal preference, specific needs, the server you are on, and even budget. Before I go ahead and recommend one or the other let me briefly introduce you to both of them, and tell you what I think.

WordPress was released in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and it is being used by over 200 million websites and blogs wordwide. The company behind WordPress is Automattic. The software is open source – which means it is completely free, and you’re welcome to use it or modify however you want. If something happens to Automattic as a company, and they stop working on WordPress — the large WordPress community will take over, so you don’t have to worry about the longevity of the application and its existence 5 years from now. WordPress is easy to use, it’s lightweight, it is packed with some of the most amazing features you could find in a blog platform. There are over 7,500 free plugins that extend the functionality of WordPress, and over 1,100 themes (designs).

Movable Type was released in 2001 by the company called Six Apart. It is not an open source project like WordPress (although they do have an open source version, it’s not as feature-rich as the paid version). A couple of years ago Movable Type was the most recommended blog platform, and the platform of choice by many businesses and corporations. However, since Movable Type is not free for business-use, I’ve seen companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on licensing alone, and some go with WordPress for that reason alone. In other words licensing can be the deal breaker when choosing between Movable Type and WordPress. There are not as many plugins and themes comparing to WordPress. Software updates don’t come out as often, and many claim that it feels bloated and slow when working with or publishing your blog.

During the past 2 years I’ve seen a huge growth of WordPress (see chart below), many large corporations like TIME, Inc. switched from Movable Type to WordPress — which could either be because of the on-going licensing fees and the economy we are in, or the growing list of WordPress features. We’ve also seen the changes at Movable Type where they let go of some of their key people, then VP Anil Dash leaving the company a couple of months ago, and some other bitter things that I’m not going to discuss in this post.

Earlier in 2009 we converted our company site from Movable Type to WordPress, and helped many of our clients make the switch as well. As you might have guessed, our personal preference and recommendation is WordPress, however I will say it again — it all comes down to your specific needs, budget, and the situation you are in. If you are not sure on the platform you should be using — just shoot us an email and we’ll make a recommendation based on your scenario.

User to Blog Association in Movable Type

Pavel Ushakov — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 04:54:04 +0000

Today, while working with one of our corporate customers I was asked to provide a report that lists all their Movable Type 4 users and the blogs those users are associated with.

Unfortunately Movable Type 4 doesn’t provide any type of reporting functionality, especially in the form of CVS file that can be imported into Excel for further manipulation.

So the solution was to use phpMyAdmin that comes pre-installed with most blog hosting accounts, and create a query that would display exactly what we need. After about 30 minutes of studying Movable Type 4 tables I was able to come up with the following query that does exactly what we need. Since I wasn’t able to find anything like that on Google, I decided to make the code available to anyone with a large Movable Type installation, looking to see users to blogs association.



SELECT

`mt_author`.`author_name`,

`mt_author`.`author_nickname`,

`mt_author`.`author_email`,

`mt_blog`.`blog_name`,

`mt_blog`.`blog_site_url`

FROM

mt_author, mt_blog, mt_association

WHERE

((`mt_author`.`author_status` = 1)

 AND

(`mt_author`.`author_auth_type` = 'MT')

AND

(`mt_author`.`author_id` = `mt_association`.`association_author_id`)

AND

(`mt_blog`.`blog_id` = `mt_association`.`association_blog_id`))

ORDER BY author_name;

I hope this solves someone’s problem!