MT - Quaker Ranter

AmyOutlaw.com

Martin Kelley — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:35:41 +0000

This is a fairly standard Movable Type blog for a Friend (Quaker) based in the West-Philly neighborhood of Philadelphia, PA. The most unusual element is that the client wanted two separate blogs: one meant for daily posts and the other for more weekly posts (it’s all set up in MT via categories). This also shows the use of Slidoo for a photo banner head. The pictures are all pulled from a particular set of her Flickr account. Visit site.

Movable Type and RTL languages

Martin Kelley — Tue, 08 May 2007 02:40:52 +0000

I’m working
on an international site built in Movable Type and including statements
in multiple languages, including “Right to Left” languages like Arabic
and Hebrew.

I was pleasantly surprised when I cut-and-pasted an Arabic text from
MS Word into Movable Type and found the letters looking good both in
the MT entry box and the resultant post. I didn’t realize just how powerful UTF-8 encoding
is and how well MT supports it throughout the system. Still, the output
wasn’t correct, as it wasn’t displayed in right-to-left fashion. I
needed to figure out the CSS for this kind of output and an easy way to allow the client to set this without forcing them into coding.

Using the highly-recommended Rightfields Plugin I added a checkbox field for posts that should be displayed in RTL. Here’s a screenshot:

RightFields has an IF function that we can use to set a new DIV with our RTL style. Here’s the coding in the MT template, stuck in just after the “entry-body” div:

Note: you’ll also have to add similar code to close the div at the end of the passage.

Finally, as best as I can determine, this is the proper CSS designation for RTF display (Microsoft has a good webpage on this). It works in Firefox, IE7 and IE6.

.rtl-display p {direction:rtl;text-align:justified;text-align:justify;}

I’d be happy to get any feedback or corrections to this. I’m a typical ‘Merican
whose foreign language skills don’t go far past a dozen phrases lifted
from Sesame Street and long-ago French classes. Arabic and Hebrew
typesetting are quite unfamiliar terrain.

Tweaking the blogs for hyperlocal content

Martin Kelley — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 03:01:13 +0000

Interesting article over the Moveabletype blog. Anil Dash interviews George Johnson Jr of Hyperlocal Media, who’s using MT as a content system to build hyperlocal community sites that can compete against local newspapers (see their very-cool looking BuffaloRising site).

Here’s some of what Johnson has to say:

Distribution, content creation, and the ability to more
easily compete with established local players online… blogging is
perfect for that. I mean a blog is chronologically arranged, in
columns, divided by categories and changes (in many cases) everyday.
That’s the broad definition of a newspaper, right? A blog is so much
more than that, but the basic structure lends itself very well to
developing an online competitor for newspapers.

It was three years ago that I followed Brad Choate’s instructions for using Moveable Type as a whole-site content management system.
What started as an experiment became a way of life for me. The MT
interface lends itself so well to content management that I’m now using
it for my non-techie clients: Quakersong.org and Quakeryouth.org
are both put together by MT and I’ve been surprised that there’s been
almost no learning curve for the client’s adoption of this software.

Given this, it seems odd that the kids at Moveable Type haven’t
taken MT in this direction (even more surprising since they hired Brad
himself a few years ago!). I see a big market in my niche sites for
this sort of functionality and three years later I’m still having to
tweak templates to get this to work. Anil, what’s up? If Drupal had better documentation and smoother installation it would have been the brawn behind MartinKelley.com.

It would be fun to follow Until Monday’s example and create a
hyperlocal site (hint hint to VW if she’s reading this). Of course,
locality is not just geographically-based anymore. Quakerquaker.org is a local portal of a different kind. I’m a big believer that the hyperlocality of niche and geographic sites are the cutting edge in the next-wave of the social web.

There’s a lot of pioneering to be done in this regards. The net has
a lot of power to take down culture monopolies by confronting old boy
networks and business-as-usual thinking with innovative social networks
that harness the talents of the outsiders. The smart newspapers,
magazines, churches and cultural organizations will come on board and
leap-frog themselves to twenty-first century relevance. Too many of the
Philadelphia (and/or) Quaker institutions I know respond to change by
shuffling job titles and putting blinders up against recognizing the
ever-narrower demographic they serve.

Going all the way with MovableType

Martin Kelley — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 03:11:05 +0000

An
early description of my using the Movable Type blogging platform as a
content management system (CMS) for an entire website. I’ve used these
techniques to build websites which clients can easily manipulate and
update.

Inspired by Doing Your Whole Site with MT
on Brad Choate’s site, I started experimenting today with putting the
whole Nonviolence.org site into Movable Type. At first I thought it was
just a trial experiment but I’m hooked. I especially love how much
cleaner the entry for the links page now looks and I might actually be inspired to keep it up to date more now. (I’ve also integrated Choate’s MT-Textile which makes a big difference in keeping entries clean of HMTL garbage, and the semi-related SmartyPants which makes the site more typographically elegant with easy M‑dashes and curly quotes).

So here’s what I’m doing: there are three Movable Type blogs interacting with one another (not including this personal blog):

One is the more-or-less standard one that is powering the main homepage blog of Nonviolence.org.
The second I call “NV:Static” which holds my static pages, much as Brad outlines. I put my desired URL path
into the Title field (i.e., “info/index”) and then put the page’s real
title into the Keywords field (i.e., “About Nonviolence.org”) and have
that give the data for the title field and the first headline of the
page. It might seem backwards to use Title for URL and then use Keywords for Title, but this means that when I’m in MT looking to edit a particular file, it will be the URL paths that are listed.
The third blog is my “NV:Design Elements.” This contains the block
of graphics on the top and left of every page. I know I’ll have to
redesign this all soon and I can do it from wherever. This blog outputs
to HTML. All the other pages on the site are PHP and its a simple include to pull the top and left bars into each PHP page.

Oh yes, I’m also thinking of incorporating guest blogs in the near
future and all of these elements should make that much easier.

Here’s another site to check out, about how someone integrated Movable Type into their church website using some interesting techniques.