Ai-No

The philosophy of the Ai-No blogs is to provide useful information. If the content of the blog posts is actually useful, people will find the blog anyway and the number of visitors will grow.

To prove that this principle actullay works, I would like to share the following graph:

The increase of visitors on January 2^nd is clear. And you want to know what caused the spike? A handy calendar for 2008; a very useful tool that a lot of people want.

QED

With Things Ai-No reached the milestone of 1.000 entries. Though it took me ten years to write then, I suspect that the next 1.000 entries will be written a lot faster.

A common blog widget is the Recent Comments widget, which strangely enough has not been included in the default Movable Type templates. If you want to show the last five comments in your sidebar, follow these steps to adapt your templates:

First open your sidebar template module and find the place where you want to show the recent comments. I suggest that you place them under the recent entries widget. Insert the following code in the template:

<MTIf name="module_recent_comments">
<div class="widget-archives widget">
<h3 class="widget-header">Recent Comments</h3>
<div class="widget-content">
<ul class="widget-list">
<MTComments lastn="5" sort_order="descend">
<MTCommentEntry>
<li class="widget-list-item"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#comment-<$MTCommentID$>"><$MTCommentAuthor$></a> on <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></li>
</MTCommentEntry>
</MTComments>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</MTIf>

Save the template and open the template of the page where you want to show the comments on, for example the Main Index or the Entry Archive. Add the following line to the template:

<MTSetVar name="module_recent_comments" value="1">

A few days ago, Six Apart released version 4.01 of their Movable Type publishing platform. As with all software upgrades, you want to be careful implementing it, as existing sites might break. Today I present you the method I use for upgrading MT on the Ai-No platform, with the benefits of having a possibility to quickly roll back the update without modification of existing URI's.

• Download the files from the Six Apart site;
• Backup the database;
• Upload the *.tar.gz file and extract the files;
• Copy the following files from the old (current) directory to the directory of the new version:
  • mt-config.cgi
  • plugins/ (only the files not present in the new directory)
    
  • mt-static/support/*
  • mt-static/plugins/ (only the files not present in the new directory)
  • extlib/ (only the files not present in the new directory)
  • addons/*
• Create a symbolic link to the new directory: ln -s MT-4.01-en mt

The trick is of course the symbolic link, making that Movable Type is always available under the /mt directory. Simply by changing the symlink I can quickly change from one version to another.

[Update 2007.10.4] I added some dirs based on Su's feedback.

All weblogs on the Ai-No platform are now powered by Movable Type 4.01. This latest release solves a critical cross site scripting vulnerability and test users also reported a performance increase.

After almost ten years of blogging and currently writing on four weblogs, I can honestly say that I know a little bit about blogging. And I would like to share that knowledge with you!

My experience is very broad:I am an expert on the Wordpress and Movable Type platforms, have done several usability studies and have good language skills in Dutch, English and Spanish.

Please click on the icon below to contact me for answering your blogging questions.

Yesterday I transferred El Canasto to my centralized Movable Type installation. I kept this particular weblog for the last, as I wanted to have some experience before making the transfer. Actually, I already practised the transfer a few weeks ago on my old Movable Type installation, and noticed that it is very easy to import a WordPress weblog. I was surprised to find that the WordPress import feature works better than the import of a MT blog, as the WRX import also created assets and pages.

My oldest weblog, Brain Tags, now also makes use of Ai-No's centralized Movable Type installation. The migration went flawless, and the blog was only two minutes down when I deleted the old account from the server and added it it Ai-No.

Next on the migration list is El Canasto, which is a little bit more difficult as it currently uses WordPress.

My successful personal productivity blog El Canasto was mentioned in this month's issue of the Spanish entrepreneur magazine Emprededores. The theme of this issue is 'Make profit of your time' and includes a dossier about personal productivity. The last page of the dossier gives an overview of recommended reference material, such as the Getting Things Done book by David Allen. On that page they also mention four websites, which includes, besides that David Allen guy, El Canasto! Unfortunately they caught me just in the middle of a live redesign, resulting in the strange double banner look.

At this moment I have three English blogs and one Spanish blog. I am now preparing Movable Type to transfer the Spanish blog to this account, as I want to manage all blogs from a single interface.

I installed MT in English to create the first blogs. In order to create the Spanish blog, I simply switched the MT user interface to Spanish by clicking on Hi Jeroen in the upper right corner and created a new weblog. After configuring all preferences I published the blog and set my user interface back to Spanish.

Ready for blogging in Spanish!