Movable Type supports many options for configuring the way your blog works. There are four different screens in the Blog Configuration section:
file(s) will be located. When you use ``Rebuild'' to publish your site, your index templates will be generated into this directory.
An absolute path (a path starting with /) is preferred, because it is not dependent on the location of your Movable Type directory; but if you choose to use a relative path, the path should be relative to your Movable Type directory.
This is a required field.
Example: /home/melody/public_html/blog
http:// and your site's domain name) to your public weblog. This URL should not include the filename of your index file; for example, if your index file is located at http://www.your-site.com/blog/index.html, then the value for Site URL should be http://www.your-site.com/blog/.
This URL will be sent to weblogs.com when sending an XML-RPC ping (if you have enabled this option--see Notify weblogs of updates, below).
This is a required field.
Example: http://www.your-site.com/blog/
/) is preferred, because it is not dependent on the location of your Movable Type directory; but if you choose to use a relative path, the path should be relative to your Movable Type directory.
Note that, if you wish to place your archive files in the same directory as your index files, the Local Archive Path and the Local Site Path should point to the same directory.
This is a required field.
Example: /home/melody/public_html/blog/archives
http:// and your site's domain name) to the archives section of your public weblog.
This is a required field.
Example: http://www.your-site.com/blog/archives/
This is a required field.
<$MTBlogDescription$> tag.
MTEntries tag; this is merely the default, used when you do not supply MTEntries with any attributes.
For example, if you wish to display the last 15 entries that you have posted to your blog, you could use the lastn attribute to MTEntries instead of relying on the default behavior:
<MTEntries lastn="15"> ... </MTEntries>
Note that, if you choose 7 days, 7 days means the last 7 consecutive days, not necessarily the last 7 days on which you posted an entry. So if you have posted on just 3 of the last 7 days, only the posts from those 3 days will be listed on your main indexes.
Note also that a ``day'' is defined as the time from 24 hours ago to now, where ``now'' is the time at which you are rebuilding your site. It does not mean from 12 AM to now on the current day. As an example, if you are including 1 day on your index and you posted an entry one day at 6 PM, that entry will show up on your index until the next day at 5:59 PM.
This is a required field.
Convert line breaks setting.
This setting controls the default value for that setting: if checked, the Convert line breaks setting will be checked by default when creating a new entry; if unchecked, that setting will also be unchecked.
N words of your entry.
The number of words in the excerpt defaults to 20.
Editing Menu, they will be presented with a message welcoming them, and providing a link to the manual and some introductory text. You can edit this welcome message in the Welcome Message configuration field to send specific messages to your authors, post news about your blog, etc.
If you have not selected any archive types (Archive Frequency, above), you should select No Archives for your Preferred Archive Type.
If you would like Movable Type to notify weblogs.com and/or blo.gs of updates to your site automatically--whenever you post an entry on your site--check the corresponding box.
In addition to weblogs.com and blo.gs, there are other services that provide similar functionality. If you would like to ping such services automatically, and if they support the weblogs.com XML-RPC ping interface (http://www.xmlrpc.com/weblogsCom), you can add the URLs for those XML-RPC servers to the Others box. Separate the URLs with carriage returns.
Recently updated key. This key will then be sent to movabletype.org whenever you update your site, and your site will be marked as recently updated.
<MTGoogleSearch>, for example), you will need to sign up for a Google API key ( http://www.google.com/apis/ ), then paste your API key into this field. Your key will be sent to Google's servers whenever you use Google API functionality.
This takes all of the work out of using TrackBack. You only need to link to permalinks as you always have, and Movable Type can do the work for you. You will be notified of the sites that are being pinged on the Pinging... screen.
You do not have to select any archive types, if you don't want archiving on your blog; just leave all of the boxes unchecked.
Archive Type that you use, you can define an Archive File Template in the box to its right on the configuration screen.
For example, by default monthly archive files are stored directly in your Local Archive Path, and are called YYYY_MM.html (2001_12.html, for example). You might prefer your monthly archives to be stored in 2001/12/index.html. To do this, you can set the Archive File Template for your Monthly archives to
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/index.html"$>
Another example: by default individual archive files are named by the padded form of the entry ID (000002.html, for example), and are stored directly in your Local Archive Path directory. You may wish to impose a hierarchy on your archives, based on the category into which you've placed them; for example, you would place all entries in the category Books into a directory called books/. To do this, you can use the following Archive File Template for your Individual archives:
<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>/<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>.html
A final example: by default Weekly archives are named using only the start date of the week (week_2002_01_06.html, for example). If you would like to include both the start and end dates in the filename, you can use the following Archive File Template for your Weekly archives:
week_<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y_%m_%d"$>-<$MTArchiveDateEnd format="%Y_%m_%d"$>.html
Archive File Templates are defined using a subset of the standard Movable Type template tags. The following tags can be used in Archive File Templates:
<$MTArchiveDate$> (doc) and <$MTArchiveDateEnd$> (doc) for date-based archives (Monthly, Daily, Weekly)
<$MTArchiveCategory$> (doc) for Category archives
<$MTCategory$> (doc) for Category archives
<$MTEntry*$> (doc) tags for Individual archives
NOTE: when using Archive File Templates, you must append the file extension that you wish to use for your archive files (as in the examples above). The file extension that you specify in File extension for archive files will not be used.
To ban a certain IP address from commenting on entries in your blog and sending TrackBack pings to your blog, you can use the IP Banning screen (part of the Blog Configuration set of screens).
Note that IP banning is not an exact science, and that it should not be considered true security for your site, because an IP address does not necessarily ``mark'' a user as unique. IP addresses are often dynamically assigned by ISPs, for example; this means that a user's IP address may change from one session to the next. In addition, computers at public sites (a library, for example) may always have the same IP address, but the user using the system will certainly not always be the same.
In other words, you should be careful when banning IP addresses.
To add a new banned IP address, enter the IP address into the IP Address: box, and press ADD TO LIST. To remove an IP address that is currently banned, check the checkbox next to that IP address in the IP Ban List, and click the DELETE button.