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A default MT4 blog comes with a list of Monthly Archives in the sidebar.  For many blog purposes (LMT an example) you don't really need to show archives by month. A category listing will suffice.

Okay, so you've created a new blog in MT4. You've followed the system prompts and have picked a style from the available defaults. Now you want to customize the style you've chosen, perhaps use a different font, or a different color for an element. You go to look at the stylesheet template in Design > Templates > Stylesheet, and instead of seeing CSS code to edit, you see this:

Now what?

This article is part of a series of posts on How to Build Blog Traffic (see Intro).

If our goal is to increase our blog traffic, the primary question we need to ask ourselves is, how do people get to our blogs in the first place? Understanding how people learn about our blogs, and make their way over to visit them, will help us better understand how to use technology to increase our visibility.

So, how do people find out about us?

This article is part of a series of posts on How to Build Blog Traffic (see Intro).

When I first started blogging in 2003, I viewed the exercise mostly as a way to express myself. I didn't know what a "blogroll" was, nor did I care that much when I learned. Over the last few years I have found that the main distinction between a blog and any other website, other than diary-like entries, is the interconnectedness with other bloggers who care about the same things I do. It's being part of a community of other similarly interested people that make blogging so compelling.

Engaging the community of people who care about the same things you do can exponentially enhance your blog's visibility. The following tips are obvious to me now, but weren't when I first started blogging:

This article is part of a series of posts on How to Build Blog Traffic (see Intro).

Everyone knows that if you want a successful blog you have to start with great content. But what does it mean to have great content? Your friends and family will read your blog because they know you and like you. To reach out beyond your social network to a much wider audience you need to provide something valuable, something a reader can't easily get elsewhere, or can't easily get all in one place. Here are some things to consider regarding what goes on the pages of your blog:

Be Useful, Entertaining, or Timely

The most successful blogs are useful, entertaining, timely, or a combination of all three. Of these three, probably the one that will have the most legs is "useful". When you present something that's useful, people will return to it over and over again. A blog like Darren Rowse' ProBlogger.net is filled with practical advice for bloggers. You can spend hours going through Darren's archives. The addictive Life Hacker blog recommends ideas and software to help us all become more productive. A new favorite is Lara Ferroni's Still LIfe with... blog about food photography. With each of these examples, the content doesn't expire the day it is written, but remains valuable to readers for months or even years.

You spend hours, days, weeks, months writing, photographing, uploading, editing your blog. At the end of the day you hope that someone (or more than a few someones) takes the time to read it. One would think that it is pretty obvious the steps one must take to build an audience, or build traffic to one's blog; you have to have great content, right? But less obvious are the roles that community and technology play in increasing your blog audience.

In preparation for a workshop I'm leading at BlogHer '06 I'll be writing up a series of posts about all the different things you can do to increase traffic to your blog - content, site traffic - what it is and how to measure, the stats you should care about, how people find your site, Google, search engines, and SEO, site design, RSS, community, and tags. The three main themes that we'll see over and over again are content, community, and technology.

Updated
Movable Type uses CSS elements defined in your weblog's stylesheet template to control font sizes as well as other style factors. The following graphic indicates which default stylesheet classes and IDs correspond to which heading and text elements in the MT3.2 default Vicksburg style.

The default settings for Movable Type include category archiving. If you assign categories to your posts, you may want to include that information in the "Posted by" section underneath each entry. This is quite easy to do.

If you are using Movable Type default templates, the titles of your entries on the main page of your MT blog are just that - titles. They look pretty but go nowhere. If you want to get from the entry on your main blog page to its individual entry page, you need to click on "Permalink" or "Continue reading".

Setting it up so that the titles of the entries themselves are hyperlinks to the individual entry page is fairly straightforward and requires edits to two templates - your Style Sheet and the Main Index template.

1. The Stylesheet The MT3.2 default stylesheet is a huge file. The last time I printed one out it took 18 pages. It is easiest to edit your stylesheet by opening the stylesheet template and copy and pasting the entire template into a text editor (e.g. BBEdit for the Mac). The stylesheet is divided in sections. The first section is called Base Weblog, and contains the sub-sections basic elements, standard helper classes, page layout, banner user photo, content, modules, position everything, and mt calendar. Do not make changes to anything in this Base Weblog section. Keep going until you find your theme section. In the case of the template that comes with a new MT weblog, the beginning of the theme section is this:

/* Vicksburg (theme-vicksburg.css) */

Right after the /* basic page elements / section, you'll see the / page layout */ section. Find the .entry-header class. It will look like this:

.entry-header
{
   margin-top: 0;
   border-left: 5px solid #dae0e6;
   padding: 0 0 0 10px;
   color: #666;
   font-size: 18px;
}

Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic publishing over static publishing?

Elise Bauer, editor of Learning Movable Type, and Arvind Satyanarayan, author of Movalog, discuss some of the pros and cons of dynamic publishing. Non-techie luddite-wannabe Elise shies away from anything that seems like it might not be worth the effort and so far hasn't even tried dynamic publishing. Plugin creator and MT hack-master Arvind has embraced dynamic publishing with his usual boundless enthusiasm. Let's see if he can convince Elise...