After my wildly inaccurate counter passed the 10.000 visitor-mark, time has come for a tune-up of my blog to better suit my needs (that lazy me didn’t see coming when I started this blog). If you have any interest in the technicalities behind MovableType and perhaps are looking for some tips and tricks for your own blog, read on.

This entry in english to better cater for an international audience

Movable Type Categories
I am an organized person (on the computer that is), so I organized all my MTEntries into categories. But I have some special categories. I originally set up a separate blog for these kind of needs. It’s probably the best way of handling “special” categories and I may still use it for my planned static pages (Yes, sometime in the future I will have an “About me”-page), But for some reason it wouldn’t work with my Moblog, so I was forced to create a category for it too. Now the problem is that I don’t want the moblogs posted along with my normal entries as it’s just pictures and the most recent one is always displayed on my main page anyway.

The way I used to avoid this was to set up my MTEntries tag like this on the front page:

<MTEntries category="Anbefalinger OR Data og teknologi OR Hverdagsliv OR Media OR Musikk og film OR Tro og tvil OR En" lastn="15">
Well, it works. And that’s the best I can say about that. Problem was, when I were to add the category “Underholdning” I had forgot about the whole system and spent an hour wondering why my entry never showed up on the front page. D’oh! Fortunately there was a plugin that did exactly what I was looking for: NOT category. NOT category unfortunately required hacking the Context.pm file, so in fear of breaking anything now or in the future I kept looking.

ExcludeCategory came to the rescue! It did the exact same thing but without the hacking. It required me to replace the MTEntries-tag with the tag MTEntriesExCat-tag instead, a small price to pay as only the main template required it. Instead of the long inclusion of every category I wanted listed on my main page I now could do this:

<MTEntriesExCat category="Mob" lastn="15">
Much nicer, and it allows for easy inclusion of future additions to my category list.

Listing the Categories
You’ve probably noticed the fine menu to the left there. The one that lists all my categories that is. I used to generate that manually with an MT-module that looked like this:

<a href="/arkiv/cat_hverdagsliv.php">Hverdagsliv</a>
<a href="/arkiv/cat_data_og_teknologi.php">Data og teknologi</a>
<a href="/arkiv/cat_underholdning.php">Underholdning</a>
<a href="/arkiv/cat_musikk_og_film.php">Musikk og film</a>
<a href="/arkiv/cat_media.php">Media</a>
<a href="/arkiv/cat_stil_og_design.php">Stil og design</a>
<a href="/arkiv/cat_tro_og_tvil.php">Tro og tvil</a>
<a href="/arkiv/cat_anbefalinger.php">Anbefalinger</a>
<a href="/arkiv/cat_en.php">In English</a>
The reason why I chose this way instead of automatically generate it with MTCategoryList is simple: I did not want to list the previously mentioned bastard category “Mob”. And I wanted to sort it manually (I am a designer after all). Most of all, since this is primarily a norwegian blog, I wanted to put the In English at the bottom of the list.

Well, I am lazy, so I wanted to do this as simple as possible plus I wanted cool features like summaries (excerpts) listed along with the number of entries in each category. To do this you have to enclose it in a MTCategoryList. Again a plugin came to my rescue: FilterCategories. This allows you to only list some of your categories or exclude some of them. It still didn’t allow me to sort them manually but at least I could put the metainfo I wanted into the title-tag. Either way I still wanted the In English-category at the bottom, so I just excluded that as well and put it and it’s metainfo in manually like this:

<MTCategories show_empty="1">
<MTFilterCategories exclude="En|Mob">
<a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>" title="<$MTCategoryDescription$> - <$MTCategoryCount$> innlegg"><$MTCategoryLabel$></a>
</MTFilterCategories>
</MTCategories>
<a href="/arkiv/cat_en.php" title="Not a translation of the site, but rather posts (in english) for an international audience">In English</a>
Well, I still miss the post-count on that category, but I can live without that :-)

Metainfo
The kick in the butt I needed to include metainfo came from Vegard and Adriaan, author of ecto. I had already added this to my individual templates head-tags:

<meta name="description" content="<$MTEntryExcerpt$>" />
which makes most search engines (but strangely not Google) display your excerpt as the page description. I already mentioned that I’m lazy, so I made ecto force me to add an excerpt / summary to my entries before I were allowed to post them. In addition to that I added descriptions to each of my categories. You can do this by clicking Edit category attributes in the MT-Category control panel. This is both displayed in the title-attribute of the category-menu (mouse over the links to see it) and in the meta-description of each category page. Experiment to see where you can put your descriptions and summaries. I love having them in title-attributes where they are hidden away until needed. Just like a tool-tip!

Other useful and not so useful tips
Probably the most useful thing I’ve done in my tune-up is to slim down my archives considerably. By default they list the entire entry (including the extended entry!). This soon adds up to extremely long, slow and not very useful archives. So I slimmed it the MTEntries tag of the category and main archive (where it’s really needed) to “just” this:

<MTEntries>
<$MTEntryTrackbackData$>
<div class="midtinnhold">
<a name="<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>"></a>
<strong><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>" title="<$MTEntryExcerpt$>, <$MTEntryCommentCount$> kommentarer">
<$MTEntryTitle smarty_pants="1" acronym="1" $></a>
</strong><br />
<$MTEntryExcerpt smarty_pants="1" acronym="1" $><br />
<$MTEntryDate format="%A %e. %b %Y">,
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>" title="Link til denne saken (Permalink)">
<$MTEntryDate format="%H:%M"$></a><MTEntryIfAllowComments> |
<a href="<$MTEntryLink$>#<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>" title="Les kommentarer og skriv din egen">Kommenter innlegget (<$MTEntryCommentCount$>)</a></MTEntryIfAllowComments>
<MTEntryIfAllowPings> |
<a href="<$MTEntryLink$>#trackback">Linker
(<$MTEntryTrackbackCount$>)</a>
</MTEntryIfAllowPings>
</div>
</MTEntries>
Well, it may look like a lot, but it’s effect is stunning. Have a look at my main archive now. Remember this used to list the full posts with big headlines and everything. Another great use of excerpts! Apologies to the people who have clicked this link in the past! In the process I found out that I had not styled my archive at all since I started this blog. Whoops! Fixed.

Another random but useful tip, comes from Jarle. He tells us that we should link our titles and reverse our titling on individual archives to get better exposure (particularly on Google). How does this work you may ask? We all know a lot of the weighting on Google comes from how many links you get from a particular word, so adding links within your site pushes you up on the list for the words included in your title. Google also ranks based on where the words appear on your page, so putting the title before your weblog-name makes sense. Instead of “The Veland Show: Movable Type 10 000 visitors-checkup” this page is now titled “Movable Type 10 000 visitors-checkup fra The Veland Show”. A subtle but important difference if one were to search for Movable Type.

Lastly I added the fun little plugin: RandomLink. This simply just parses your entire blog for links and sends you to a random one. External as well as internals. Cool if you want mindless internet-zapping. You can find it on the bottom of my link-list (Venner) in the sidebar. Or just test it by clicking here.

I also wanted to talk about the other plugins I have installed earlier, but this will have to do for now. If you have got this far and figured out what the hell I’m on about you can surely figure these out on your own:

Acronym - Automaticly adds acronym-tags to known acronyms.
BlogTimes - Chart of times blogged during particular month.
SmartyPants - Makes your blog more beautiful by replacing plain quotes, dashes, and ellipses into more typographically friendly versions.