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If so, you're missing out on something very, very powerful.

The "problem" is that OpenAds doesn't natively support the level of ad placement that I'm looking for. However things like that don't always stop me. This article describes the approach I've taken using OpenAds to place ads in my MovableType generated pages:

• in specific articles
• on specific pre-defined positions on a page
• any combination of those two
• in any specific category
• site wide

All while maintaining most of OpenAds other features including weighted distribution of ad content.

Now, I do have to throw out a few caveats:

• As I write this I'm running OpenAds 2.0.11. Naturally later versions might add features and functionality that make my efforts redundant.
• I'm going to assume you have at least a basic understanding of OpenAds. It's non trivial, and documenting it is well beyond the scope of this site, and for that matter, my abilities.
• My approach might be stupid. Someone more familiar with OpenAds might well say "you should do it this way" and define something much more elegant. Fair enough. My approach works, though.

With all that butt-covering out of the way, let's dive in.

http://ask-leo.com/whats_the_difference_between_windows ... vice.html

More commonly you'll recognize this situation in email programs when you try to email someone a long link:

http://ask-leo.com/whats_the_difference_between_windows_live_messenger_
windows_messenger_msn_messenger_and_windows_messenger_service.html

As you see above, email programs see the "http://" on the first line and automatically treat the rest of it as a link. But since the line is too long to fit on the screen, they break it into two, and then don't include the second half in that link. If you click on the highlighted link you get an error from the destination site, since you didn't provide the full page URL.

And yet, if you click on that partial link above for Ask Leo!, you'll get to the intended page anyway.

Ask Leo! tolerates broken URLs. Here's how I do it.

News Home : World : National : Local : Seattle : Space Needle on Fire

Each of those encompasses everything to its right, and each would be a link to a summary page for that level of topic. The last might be the actual page you're on.

If you've used Movable Type for any length of time, you might be thinking something about categories, sub categories and the like.

As was I, when a friend prodded me with "If you come up with an MT hack for that, please post it."

I hate a challenge that I can't resist if I'm already overbooked - particularly for something I want myself. :-)

My approach at Ask Leo! is to use the article title as the basis for the URL and to place it in the root. Fortunately, MovableType makes both of the steps easy.

That works, but current thinking is that search engines "like" seeing keywords in URLs. Since I wanted to do all I could to improve my search engine rankings, I decided to change my page names from being numbered and in a subdirectory to being the article title and in the root of the site.

Changing names midstream becomes a bit of a challenge. With several hundred articles on the site already, I wanted to switch to the new naming scheme while still allowing the old-style URLs, that people had perhaps bookmarked, to work.

I'm presenting these steps in the order that you need to do them to a live, running site. Review the entire set of steps before proceeding. If you follow these steps in this order, your site should never appear "down" and links will not be broken as you make this conversion.

The challenge I had was this: I want to be able to have a list of all my category archive pages on some of the other pages that are not built by MovableType.

The solution? Create an index template that contains that list - and only that list - and have it produce an include file that I can use anywhere I like.

When dealing with templates, it's easy to think that you have to do everything using MT's constructs and easier still to get stuck into the rut of using only the examples or variations of the default templates.

One complicating factor is that with over 860 articles, I wasn't about to add summaries for most. So I wanted summaries to be visible only if a summary had, indeed been written.

As we all know, there is no "Summary" field in MovableType, instead there's something called an "Excerpt". Excerpt serves my purposes well, but only after a minor configuration change.

Have a look at the article What are "LSASS", "LSASS.EXE" and "Sasser" and how do I know if I'm infected? What do I do if I am? - it's one of my most viewed articles. One of the most commented on also. As I type this there are almost 400 comments on the article. Displaying all 400 at once (the way that MovableType's default templates work) would make for a very unwieldy page.

Now my approach is this:

MT's default CSS is far from trivial, nor is it documented anywhere that I can find. It requires an investment of time to understand. My original "Tip" was to invest that time understanding the default CSS.

1. The entry body is the "tease" portion of the entry that goes on to the home page, while the extended entry is the rest of the entry that shows up only on the entry's individual archive page.
2. The entry body is what shows up in the RSS feed. The extended entry is the rest of the entry that shows up only on the entry's individual archive page.

As an example, check out any of the entries on Forwarded Funnies. There, in the upper right, you'll see not only a previous and next for "All Entries", but a separate previous and next for entries of the same rating as the current. In other words a previous and next for all the "G-Rated" entries if the current item is itself G-rated.

Needless to say, ratings within Forwarded Funnies are simply separate MT categories.

My approach uses a combination of PHP code generated from a category archive template, and a server-side include, or "SSI", in the individual entry archive template.

As weblog owners, not only do we not want to help the spammers, but we also just don't want their off-topic posts included in our weblogs.