March 2008 Archives

I plan on highlighting the plugins and tweaks I make to MTCS for this site. The first of which is Bookmarks, a simple plugin we have Kevin Shay to thank.

MT4 makes it easy to get to most things, there are often-used pages in the app that take two or three clicks to get to, and when time can be saved with a simple plugin install, there is no reason not to install it.

Every user on the system has their own Bookmarks too. Some might not use it, but I do and I am sure a number of my users will as well. Later I will provide a How-To for our users to use the plugin.

FeedBurner and FeedBlitz have been setup for the main RSS feeds for the site. Those in the Blogosphere know of these two tools very well but for those who do not, let me give you a visual representation (of my personal blog's feed).


Sadly my stats used to be triple that. But that is besides the point. FeedBurner gives us analytics on RSS feeds that I do not readily have available. FeedBurner can also add widgets to your feed and site, even has handy MT code to do it. In another post I will explain how evil I am (BOFH, after all) by pushing all users, human or bot, to the FeedBurner feed. With a condition and a rule it is easy to set things up so the user gets the feed I want them to get.

FeedBlitz is an RSS to Newsletter tool, and "sister" application to FeedBurner. We will be using it to send out daily newsletters. Considering that FeedBurner is now part of the Google family, you can be sure it is a service that will be up and running for a while.

See Also:

• Bastard Operator from Hell

You can always contact me here: webmaster [at] bgviews [dot] com.

You may have noticed that the BGNAS site, bgnewsalumni.com, how looks like bgnewsblogs.com. This is because it will be part of the main BG Views site now. This will help keep current and past BG News alumni "in the know" and create awareness as well.

Once I am done modifying the BG Views Community Blog I will clone it to the BGNAS site. But in the meantime there is no reason this new BGNAS site cannot be used (exporting and importing data is quite simple).

I will be in touch for what needs done and who can help.

You can always contact me here: webmaster [at] bgviews [dot] com.

The MT.org site has a lot of great info online. For general things I am going to refer you to read them. For specifics to our site, those will be posted here (at a later date).

Please see the main documentation and wiki pages. From there you can drill down to find what you need. Additionally, you may wish to check out the Six Apart Guide to Business Blogging, and most importantly, the Authoring Guide.

You can always contact me here: webmaster [at] bgviews [dot] com.

As you may or may not know, BG News uses Facebook a lot. We have a number of Groups, and of course most (if not all) the staff members have Facebook Profiles.

I am happy to announce that we now have our own Network on Facebook as well. To join the BG News network, you need an official email address. I have given these email addresses to the editors and assistant editors. I will be giving them to all the BG News writers, and of course alumni, as well.

If you would like to be on the "sooner" rather than "later" list, please shoot me an email.

You can always contact me here: webmaster [at] bgviews [dot] com.

Today I setup this developer blog. It will be used to update everyone on additions and changes to the site, and include important how-to documentation for the authors of our community site.

So what is the purpose of this blog? This is merely an informative blog for the authors who write at blogs.bgviews.com. This does not just include the staff of BG News, but all authors who have "Editor" privs on our community blogs. Community writers may find something here to interest them too, you never know.

Major thanks to Byrne Reese for updating this slick template to MT4. I figured I would use this instead of the plain  "Minimalist" theme that is default for "Classic Blog" in MT4.

Unlike the other blogs on this site, this is not a "Community Blog" so not everyone can contribute articles, but you can still comment.

And yes, I will replace that header image with something a little more Bowling Green-y ;)

You can always contact me here: webmaster [at] bgviews [dot] com.

Both User Profiles and Tags have mod_rewrite rules applied to them. This makes URLs much smaller, and much better for search engines.

Two "rules" generally apply. I know that not everyone will use these best practices but as authors and editors, we can do our best to set a good example.

Rule #1: Don't put spaces in your username or tags.
Rule #2: See Rule #1.

Lets take a look at some examples:

My profile URL looks like this:

http://bgviewsblogs.com/cgi-bin/mtcs/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&id=1

But after...

http://bgviewsblogs.com/profiles/meancode

Normally Tag search results look like this:

http://bgviewsblogs.com/cgi-bin/mtcs/mt-search.cgi?tag=bg-news

But after...

http://bgviewsblogs.com/tag/bg-news

If you use spaces in your username or tags, you get %20 (a URL encoded space) such as this:

http://bgviewsblogs.com/tag/bg%20news

How this is done:
In both cases, User Profiles and Tags, I did not want the results specific to any one Blog ID, so I took &blog_id=2 out of the rewrites. When I update the templates to use the rewritten URLs, I will omit &blog_id=2 as well. For the Tags, I will have a global tags page, so I did not want to constrain the results.

In your .htaccess file, add these lines (Note: there is no line break, it is just displayed on this page as such):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^profiles/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/mtcs/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&username=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^tag/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/mtcs/mt-search.cgi?tag=$1 [L]

You could of course constrain any one of those rules to your liking, adding &blog_id=2.

One small issue:
If you notice there is a big difference between the original URL for my profile and the rewritten one (Original, Rewritten). For the rewrite I am using username=$1 and using username= instead of id= causes the custom fields to vanish. This is a known issue and I hope it gets resolved quickly.

You can always contact me here: webmaster [at] bgviews [dot] com.

MTCS, or Movable Type Community Solution (follow this link for more on MTCS), is a commercial piece of software from Six Apart that we are using to manage our blogs for the newspaper, and our community blogs -- which we have not launched yet.

I am in the process of getting things going, but for the sake of an example, please see the my default user profile. I am not done adding fields to the profile, nor have I started to customize it in any way, but User Profiles is one thing that MTCS has. It also supports Community Blogs and Community Forums.

While MT is not exactly forum software, it is nice to have a single login for both blogs and forums. It also satisfies most of our "forum" needs.

Another nifty feature that MTCS has is user recommendations. They have been turned on to registered users, however.

You might be asking why do we need MTCS? College Publisher provides blogs and forums. College Publisher provides a single blog, no more, and they do provide forums. However, they do not provide the expandability that we want, so we are augmenting with MTCS.

I can answer more specific questions, so please post a comment. I must say that since I am quite busy I have to give priority to those who work in West Hall.

If you are still scratching your head: BG Views is a community site that has not launched yet, but will be for BGSU, our newspaper The BG News, and the Bowling Green community and surrounding area. This blog is for the content authors, not just those who work at The BG News. Though much has been finished behind the scenes, there is not much that is presentable to the public. I will be using this blog to tally updates to the site, give out some information on the development process, and, later on, use this blog as a "how-to" guide for authors.

If you are a group or organization that would like to help beta test, please contact me, Ken Edwards, here: webmaster [at] bgviews [dot] com.