After some hesitation, I have upgraded this blog to Movable Type 4.0 Beta 6 today. The upgrade process itself went smoothly without errors. I had to disable to some old Movable Type plugins (e.g. Brad Choate’s SQL plugin) and remove relevant tags from my templates to successfully rebuild a couple of entries. This release is feature rich, but one key feature missing is a way to upgrade/transform old templates to the new style to take advantage of all the new features more easily. In the absence of this ability, I am going to have some time exploring the new default templates. There are still a few bugs, but overall, it is an impressive and major enhancement to Movable Type.

I just finished a major enhancement to my blog. The idea is show links
from the web related to the current entry. To see how this works, just
click on the "Similar Entries from Google" link above. This feature uses
Yahoo’s

Term Extraction service to extract keywords from my Movable Type blog
entries, and feed these keywords to Google’s
Search API to
fetch related entries. The feature is still experimental, and I need to
make a few more refinements.

The first step is to extract some keywords for each Movable Type blog
entry. I wanted this step to be automated. Yahoo has a term extraction API
available as a REST service now, and Nick
Gerakines just wrote a
MT-KeywordExtractor
plugin, which automatically generates keywords as you save an entry. I had
to make a few tweaks to this plugin for two reasons. Firstly, this plugin
uses HTTP method GET to get keywords for the given content, and the blog
entry content itself is encoded in the request URL. This does not work for
large posts due to URL length restrictions. So, I modified this plugin to
use HTTP POST to submit the entry content. The second issue is the
keywords returned from the service. In most cases I tested, this service
returned too many keywords with no apparent ranking. Since I was going to
feed these keywords into Google’s search API, I just picked the first few
tags returned. The results are mixed. The search results did not make
sense always.

The second step is to feed these keywords to
the Google search API. This turned out to be a trivial step.

Update (04/01/2006): This feature is no longer experimental. I updated the scripts to feed as many keywords as Yahoo returned to Google.

Update (06/16/2006): After using this for almost three months, I decided to disable the MT-KeywordExtractor plugin in my blog. The terms extracted by Yahoo’s term extraction service are too vague and broad.

I have been running a web site at this domain since 1999, and started blogging in 2004.
Overall, I am pleased with my blogging experience, and feel that I should
have started this sooner. Blogs make it easier to write often, and take
care of a lot of details of publishing, such as styles/formatting,
uploading files, providing links, and finally, making it easy for others
to reach my blog entries. While setting up a blog is fairly easy, making
it usable takes some effort. Here is my list of blog usability issues.

Default Blog Templates

I find that site templates that software like Movable Type provide are
suitable only if you
are running a news blog, where the date/time of the entry is more relevant
than the content itself. For example, a typical Movable Type blog entry
would look like

This format is not the best if the blog is about, let’s say, some tech
topic. In fact, the default Movable Type index page template uses h2 for the date but h3 for the title of the entry, in effect overemphasizing the date of the
entry. Most of the blogs I read are tech related, and the above format does
not fit such blogs. A better style would be

This style emphasizes the title and the content. The fact that it was
published on a given date is just one of the details of the entry.

Other stylistic issues that fall into the same category include (a)
calendar of posts, and (b) date wide archives. Both are unnecessary unless
the posts are trying to present a historic view of the entries. Default blog templates are partly to blame
for these stylistic issues, and it is just a matter of customizing the
templates to change the emphasis.

No Ability to Comment

Since not all bloggers are well-known, letting visitors post comments will help establish/increase the
credibility of the blog. Whenever I come across a post that I agree with, or disagree with, or find
thought-provoking, I would like to post a comment on the same blog. But a large number of blogs are not set up to take comments from visitors, and I avoid visiting such blogs. I just don’t find
them credible. Such bloggers should probably run a magazine instead of a blog.

Announcements

Whenever something important is advertised somewhere, I usually come across a
large of number of posts all pointing to that source. For example, recent
announcement by Google about the Reader API generated a lot of posts in my
Google Reader account. Given that most people use some kind of blog reader
software or a site like del.icio.us to keep up with blogs, I find these kind of posts quite unnecessary. IMO,
they generate a lot of useless chatter. Unless a blogger wants to say something more specific,
I don’t find any point in posting such posts. So, instead of posting about "Google announced blah blah", it would be more useful to post about, say, "My review of Google’s blah blah".

Blogrolling

I can’t believe people still maintain these. With so many blogs coming up
every day, it is pointless to maintain blog rolls. Sites like del.icio.us and blog readers like Bloglines and
Google Reader are much better for discovering interesting posts.

Navigating to Past Entries

Jakob Nielsen recently listed this among his Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes. Most blogs don’t allow visitors to find interesting and relevant entries. Partly, blogging
software like Movable Type and Blogger are to be blamed for this. These
tools don’t provide an easy way to point users to most popular entries, or
entries relevant to the current entry. It is not that it is impossible to
setup these on blogs, but it takes some effort. So far, my experiments with
Movable Type are somewhat successful. I managed to provide links to all entries, and also relevant entries from
every post on my blog. So, when you are reading this particular entry, you
will find links to relevant entries I posted previously on the same page. I would like to provide more features like
this, and expect blogging software to catch up.

Here is a way to display a paginated list of movable type blog entries using Ajax. Take a look at the sidebar on the home page of this site. You will notice that it includes a list of entries (most recent first). After these entries there is a link to browse older entries. I reworked my blog this morning to build a paginated view of past entries using Ajax. The link for older entries fetches older entries and updates the page. Read on for more details.

Requirements

Here is the list of things you need to download and install for adding this feature to any MovableType blog.

• PHP Support: Your blog needs to support PHP for this to work.
• Rico Ajax: Any Ajax library would probably do, but I relied on this library for Ajax support. Install Rico and any others scripts Rico requires on your site.
• MTPaginate Plugin: Download and install the MTPaginate pluin. We will use this plugin below to generated paginated listing of entries.

I verified these steps with MovableType 3.2. Your mileage may vary with older versions.

Step 1. Fix MTPaginate.pl

I noticed that some MTPaginate tags add  s in their output making the generated XML invalid. So, the first step is to fix this.

Open MTPaginate.pl, and look for the following line.

my $format = decode_html($args->{format}) || " %d ";

Remove those  s from this line. The changed line should look like the one below.

my $format = decode_html($args->{format}) || "%d";

Step 2: Add a New MovableType Template

The next step is to add a new MovableType template in your blog. This template generates the XML response for the Ajax script.

Here is the content of this template.

<?php
header('Content-type: text/xml');
?>
<ajax-response>
<response type="element" id="entryPage">
<div class="entries">
<MTPaginate>
<ul>
<MTPaginateContent max_sections="10">
<MTEntries>
<span class="entry_link"><li><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink
valid_html="1"$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></li></span>
<$MTPaginateSectionBreak$>
</MTEntries>
</MTPaginateContent>
<MTPaginateIfMultiplePages>
<li>
<div class="sbPageNav">
<MTPaginateIfPreviousPage_>
<a href="javascript:getEntryPage('<$MTPaginatePreviousPage$>')"
class="rnavLink">Newer</a></MTPaginateIfPreviousPage_>
<a href="/entries.php">All</a>
<MTPaginateIfNextPage_>
<a href="javascript:getEntryPage('<$MTPaginateNextPage$>')"
class="rnavLink">Older</a></MTPaginateIfNextPage_>
</div>
</li>
</MTPaginateIfMultiplePages>
</ul>
</MTPaginate>
</div>
</response>
</ajax-response>

For this template, enter the output file name with a .php extension, and select the check box that says “Rebuild this template automatically when rebuilding index templates”. I used sb_entries.php as the output file name. You will need to use this file name in the next step below. Then save and build the template.

To verify that this template is working correctly, hit the .php file directly from your browser. This should generate a valid XML page without any parse errors. If there are parse errors, fix them first before proceeding further.

Step 3: Update Index Template

You will need to make a number of changes for your index template to add a paginated listing of blog entries.

Import the Script

In the <head> section of your index template, add the following script imports.

<script src="prototype.js"></script>
<script src="rico.js"></script>
<script>
ajaxEngine.registerRequest( 'getEntryPage', 'sb_entries.php' );
</script>
<script>
ajaxEngine.registerAjaxElement('entryPage');
</script>
<script>
function getEntryPage(page) {
ajaxEngine.registerAjaxElement('entryPage');
ajaxEngine.sendRequest('getEntryPage', "page=" + page);
}
</script>

In this script, the second argument to the registerRequest function must be the name of the php template added in Step 2 above.

Also, update the <body> tag to display the first page of entries during its onload.

<body onload="javascript:getEntryPage('1')">

Add a Div Tag to List Entries

The last step is to add a div tag to display entry list in the sidebar of your index template.

<div style="display:inline" id="entryPage">
Downloading list of recent entries...
</div>

Step 4: Add Styles

Add whatever styles you like for the entry list.

That’s it. Happy pagination.