Recently in Server Management Category

During normal use of Movable Type you probably never have to worry about character sets or encoding.  But when you migrate your installation to a new server or you add a Japanese, French, German... guestblogger, that is when things can get tricky and it might be worth knowing a thing or two about what is the deal with strange characters, accents, ümlauts and all the interesting ways in which they can fail to display.

As soon as a Movable Type powered site becomes somewhat popular, there is often a steep increase in server load. This despite Movable Type's static publishing model.  How can this be?  Serving static HTML pages isn't that much work, is it?  Some investigation often reveals that it is the search script (mt-search.cgi) which is causing all the load.  Now what?

Sometimes you don't want everybody to be able to read your blog, or at least certain parts of it.  Because of the standard way Movable Type uses to publish your blog (static HTML files) it is not always as easy to shield your blog from unwanted visitors.  But there is a relatively straightforward and simple way if you are on an apache webserver (like 99% of all MT installations I think).

Anybody who has used Movable Type for some time has seen it.  The dreaded error message: Can't call method "..." on an undefined value at (some file) line (some number).  So what does it mean when you get this error, and more importantly, how can you fix it?  First, let's have a look at the cause of the error.  In order to understand what is going on you first need to know a bit about how Movable Type works.

Sometimes when you are writing a plugin for Movable Type (or just a little utility script) it can be tempting to quickly add, remove or edit some piece of data directly in the database.  In many cases, this is a very bad idea, and I will tell you why.