A list of comments, particularly a long list, that doesn’t include any style differentiation can get a little hard to read.
Using two alternating comment styles will give your readers’ eyes a break and your blog a little more style. Happily, Movable Type 4 provides a relatively simple way to do this.
Originally published at majordojo under the title "How to increase advertising revenue with Movable Type."
Every once in a while a plugin is created for Movable Type that makes you wonder, “why hasn’t anyone created this until now?†And the most recent plugin that I have installed on majordojo is no exception. Andy Yako-Mink, inspired by a ProNet conference call, created a plugin named “Cat Calendar.†But before you start imagining a 365 Cat-a-Day desk calendar for your blog, let me dispel any preconception you might have about this plugin. Simply put, Cat Calendar paginates Category Archive pages by date.
But why do I think this is so significant?
First, one of the consequences of Movable Type’s archiving system is that over time as you accumulate more and more content (which for a product that has been around for 5+ years is not completely unlikely) rebuilding specific pages becomes a very expensive operation. Category archives in particular because over time they only get larger. Rebuilding a single Category Archive page for example requires Movable Type to load a large number of entries into memory to be published to a single file. This results in a large memory foot print for Movable Type during the rebuild process; and for others that host more popular blogs it becomes a point of instability.
Article cross-posted at Sekimori Design.
After a few agonizing days of attempting to set up some very custom category displays for a client, we are posting the results here in the hopes it might prevent some other poor programmer from gaining the very same forehead dents we currently sport.
(Note: the following was accomplished in a MT 3.34 environment)
The objective: List subcategories for one single category in Movable Type.
The solution:
First, install Staggernation's FilterCategories plugin.
Second, set up your categories, subcategories, etc., then use this code to call them:
<MTTopLevelCategories>
<MTFilterCategories include="Category">
<ul>
<MTSubCategories>
<li>
<a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink $>">
<$MTCategoryLabel$>
</a>
</li>
</MTSubCategories>
</ul>
</MTFilterCategories>
</MTTopLevelCategories>
Adjust the display mechanism (ie. ul, li, etc.) as you like and there you go.
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.
This tutorial is co-authored by LMT contributor Chad Everett of Everitz Consulting and Elise Bauer of elise.com.
Movable Type allows you to create categories and sub-categories for organizing your entries. The default MT3.2 Main Index template includes code to list these categories in the sidebar section. This tutorial will attempt to explain the tags used in this code and how they work together.
The only difference between a category and a sub-category is that the latter will always have a "parent" category. The sub-category is still a category, and everything else remains the same as any other category. But by having sub-categories, you can provide better organization for your site. One example might be to put sub-categories of "Movable Type" and "Typepad" under a parent category of "Tips", to better classify the information you are creating.
Any category with such a "parent" will be considered a "child". Additionally, any category (even a sub-category!) can have its own children as well. Because of this, within this tutorial, you will see the term "level" used frequently. A parent category (Tips) is on one level. The child category (Movable Type, Typepad) is another. In turn, the child category may have children itself (Plugins, Styles, Templates), creating still another level.
Technorati, a leading blog search engine and index, has made it very easy for blog authors to get their "tagged" blog entries into Technorati's tag index. What is a tag? A tag is a type of category, and the process of tagging a simplified categorization method for your entries. The concept of tags has become popular with services such as del.icio.us and Flickr. By creating tag classifications for your weblog entries, you make it easy for Technorati to index your blog entries by tags that you specify. With Technorati tagging, you get to choose how you want your weblog entries to be classified, in contrast to algorithm-driven search engines like Google that make their own classifications based on what can be derived from the keywords in your text. Thus, people searching Technorati for weblogs having to do with book reviews will find blog entries in which the weblog author has categorized her entry as having to do with book reviews.
To save space on your sidebar listing of categories or monthly archives, you might want to use a pull-down menu like so:
To do this for your category list, make sure that you have category archiving selected as an archiving option in your weblog config, and add the following code to your sidebar:
<form action="" name="pulldown1">
<select name="mypulldown1"
onchange="document.location=pulldown1.mypulldown1.options[selectedIndex].value">
<option value="">Select Category</option>
<MTArchiveList archive_type="Category">
<option value="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><$MTArchiveTitle$></option>
</MTArchiveList>
</select>
</form>
