Setting Up An MT Blog

It's not a "tip" or a "trick" so much as a checklist. But there are several steps, some easily forgotten, and most are useful to "get right" from the beginning.

Setting Up MT

The default instructions for setting up MT are quite clear and really don't need much elaboration.

If you plan to set up more than one blog on more than one domain with the single installation of MT, then I do recommend setting up MT itself on a separate sub-domain, and within a cgi-bin directory on that domain. For example, if you look at Ask Leo!, Forwarded Funnies, or even this site, you'll see that all references to MT's cgi's are actually off of "http://pugetsoundsoftware.com/cgi-bin" (I neglected to set up a separate subdomain in my own case - ideally it would be something like "http://mt.pugetsoundsoftware.com/cgi-bin".)

Setting Up a Blog

Each time I set up a new blog with MT, I make the following non-standard 'tweaks' to the configuration:

Publishing Settings

(Formerly in Core Setup)

Site Root: as expected, this would point to the root of your site, or the root subdirectory that will contain your blog. If you're concerned about search engine rankings, I recommend the server directory that corresponds to the root of your domain. This entry for is "/home/httpd/vhosts/ask-leo.com/httpdocs", the location on my Plesk managed Linux/Apache server. Note that this entry does not end with a slash.

Archive Root: I elect to place all my individual archives at the root of my domain, so this entry for is also "/home/httpd/vhosts/ask-leo.com/httpdocs".

Site URL: as expected, the base URL of your blog. In my case, - Note that this entry does end with a trailing slash.

Archive URL: as you can probably guess, since I place my archives at the root of my site, the URL for the archives is the same as the site itself - .

Preferences

Initially, I recommend that all comments be turned off. After the blog has been created, you can implement a that I'll talk about later to avoid that nastiness from the very start. Once you've done so, then come back to preferences and enable the commenting as appropriate.

Archive Files

As mentioned in rather than using any of MT's naming conventions for my individual entry archives, I set the Archive File Template for the Individual archive to:

<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.html

if I don't expect duplicate titles, or to:

<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>_<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>.html

if I do.

Before the First Rebuild

Finally, if you have set up a single instance of MT to manage several blogs (like I have), you may need to deal with some permission issues, depending on your server configuration. Different approaches to managing the directories associated with different domains can, if left alone, result in build failures. MT, running as one account on your server, may not have the permissions necessary to write to the target directories.

Unfortunately there's no blanket solution. It depends highly on your operating system (Linux, Windows, etc.) and whether or not there is a management system installed (cPanel, Plesk, Ensim, etc.). In most cases you simply need to be aware that, when executed, the MT cgi scripts are running 'as' a particular user. That user, by virtue of groups, access control lists, or other security management, must have permissions to write to the directories configured for your various blogs.

Posted February 14, 2006