Movabletype Web Design

Here's some of what Johnson has to say:

Distribution, content creation, and the ability to more easily compete with established local players online... blogging is perfect for that. I mean a blog is chronologically arranged, in columns, divided by categories and changes (in many cases) everyday. That's the broad definition of a newspaper, right? A blog is so much more than that, but the basic structure lends itself very well to developing an online competitor for newspapers.

It was three years ago that I followed Brad Choate's instructions for using Moveable Type as a whole-site content management system. What started as an experiment became a way of life for me. The MT interface lends itself so well to content management that I'm now using it for my non-techie clients: Quakersong.org and Quakeryouth.org are both put together by MT and I've been surprised that there's been almost no learning curve for the client's adoption of this software.

Given this, it seems odd that the kids at Moveable Type haven't taken MT in this direction (even more surprising since they hired Brad himself a few years ago!). I see a big market in my niche sites for this sort of functionality and three years later I'm still having to tweak templates to get this to work. Anil, what's up? If Drupal had better documentation and smoother installation it would have been the brawn behind MartinKelley.com.

It would be fun to follow Until Monday's example and create a hyperlocal site (hint hint to VW if she's reading this). Of course, locality is not just geographically-based anymore. Quakerquaker.org is a local portal of a different kind. I'm a big believer that the hyperlocality of niche and geographic sites are the cutting edge in the next-wave of the social web.

There's a lot of pioneering to be done in this regards. The net has a lot of power to take down culture monopolies by confronting old boy networks and business-as-usual thinking with innovative social networks that harness the talents of the outsiders. The smart newspapers, magazines, churches and cultural organizations will come on board and leap-frog themselves to twenty-first century relevance. Too many of the Philadelphia (and/or) Quaker institutions I know respond to change by shuffling job titles and putting blinders up against recognizing the ever-narrower demographic they serve.

An important part of the redesign was an automatic keyword generator. Posts were run through a script that automatically pulled out keywords from the text. My 2003 article, Going all the way with Movable Type generated the following tags, which appear as links after the post:

• choate
• nonviolence
• curly quotes
• personal blog
• php
• org
• moveabletype
• movable type
• hmtl
• dashes
• textile
• garbage
• blogs

Following the links takes you to similarly-tagged articles. At least that's the conceit. When you follow a tag's link you're simply doing a site search for that keyword. A little htaccess rewrite magic is making the result look like it's a static category page.

"Fine and well" you're thinking, "big deal." Well, here's what's cool. There are 225 entries on the QuakerRanter blog. Google's just gone through and indexed the site and is now claiming it contains 1300 pages. Each tag is being indexed as its own page. Every time I mention any interesting term, it becomes a page that Google indexes and delivers to its searchers.

Which brings us to today's cool piece from the access logs. In December of 2004 a rather innocent post on Quaker Ranter became the center of a mini-whirlwind on the political blogs when it mentioned that I had gotten a call from a CBS News publicist interested in Nonviolence.org. All political blogs get publicity calls from news and opinion think tanks trying to suggest (or plant) stories but no one's supposed to talk about it. I only mentioned it because it was so unusual. One of the blogs denouncing the liberal conspiracy my post revealed was the somewhat slimy Little Green Footballs. After a few weeks the denunciations died down.

But this morning, someone looked up littlegreenfootballs in Google and came to my site. Because of my automatic keyword generator, tags, and static-loooking links, I'm now the number two entry, on two three-year old posts, now relocated to a days old quakerranter.org. Cool.

This mixing and matching of content and rich manipulation of data is sometimes lumped together in the cool bu zzphrase folksonomy. Note that none of what I've done is a tricking of Google. Every tag is really going to a page with that content. These are "natural" and "organic" search results in the lingo of SEO. I'm just presenting my information in multiple formats that appeal that the widest array of audiences.

For what it's worth, I don't think I deserve #2 status for "littlegreenfootballs" and I don't think Google will keep it there for long. It's a bit odd that they have elevated that particular term so high and no others tags seem so stratospheric.

Positive Results:

As of February 2007, Google indexes 3,540 pages on QuakerRanter.org, a blog of only 239 posts. In December 2006 30% of my Google visits were to one of the "tags" page. Reconfiguring the blog in this kind of tag-intensive way has more than doubled search engines visits, again in a very natural and organic way. Adding tags has simply made what I've written more accessible to search engines. Very cool.

Negative Ramifications:

Shortly after installing this new system, my servers started periodically crashing (about once/week). The problem would be multiple MT-Search processes overloading the memory.

My guess is that a search engine spider came along and started indexing all of the tags. Each link initiated a search query in Movable Type. The built-in search for Movable Type is just not able to handle this volume of traffic.

I installed Fast Search to solve the problem (tip of the hat to Al-Muhajabah). It took awhile: Fast Search required a MySQL upgrade at my host. After that I needed to install these plugin fixes. Then it was fine-tuning the htaccess files. It was been more work than I initially expected and the tag results now forward to a funny URL that Google doesn't love as much.

Inspired by Doing Your Whole Site with MT on Brad Choate's site, I started experimenting today with putting the whole Nonviolence.org site into Movable Type. At first I thought it was just a trial experiment but I'm hooked. I especially love how much cleaner the entry for the links page now looks and I might actually be inspired to keep it up to date more now. (I've also integrated Choate's MT-Textile which makes a big difference in keeping entries clean of HMTL garbage, and the semi-related SmartyPants which makes the site more typographically elegant with easy M-dashes and curly quotes).

So here's what I'm doing: there are three Movable Type blogs interacting with one another (not including this personal blog):

• One is the more-or-less standard one that is powering the main homepage blog of Nonviolence.org.
• The second I call "NV:Static" which holds my static pages, much as Brad outlines. I put my desired URL path into the Title field (i.e., "info/index") and then put the page's real title into the Keywords field (i.e., "About Nonviolence.org") and have that give the data for the title field and the first headline of the page. It might seem backwards to use Title for URL and then use Keywords for Title, but this means that when I'm in MT looking to edit a particular file, it will be the URL paths that are listed.
• The third blog is my "NV:Design Elements." This contains the block of graphics on the top and left of every page. I know I'll have to redesign this all soon and I can do it from wherever. This blog outputs to HTML. All the other pages on the site are PHP and its a simple include to pull the top and left bars into each PHP page.

Oh yes, I'm also thinking of incorporating guest blogs in the near future and all of these elements should make that much easier.

Here's another site to check out, about how someone integrated Movable Type into their church website using some interesting techniques.