WrenchesI just can’t seem to leave well enough alone. Every morning, after I post my entry, I have a tendency to tweak the site here and there. There’s always a little something that needs to be added, nipped, or tucked.

A few days ago, I stumbled across a site that is a Movable Type tweakers dream. It’s called empty pages. I can’t tell who the author of the site is. The only thing I’ve found were her initials when she posts a comment, which is BMK, but she is a very knowledgeable person, both in php and MT.

So this is a great site to find some cool tips, tricks, or scripts to add stuff to your weblog. Google brought me to the site after I did a search for adding page views to MT. I had tried various PERL and PHP scripts, but never quite found the right script. When I came across BML’s “Page Views” script, it was just what the doctor ordered! It was easy to install and after including the script on the navigation sidebar, it now provides a pageview count for each page on the weblog. I went back and tallied the page views from the server stats log for the major pages and I was done.

Once down the rabbit hole, you find more and more interesting little tweaks that you can do. Thanks to a helpful nammer in the MT Support Forums, I found another handy little script. Scriptygoddess wrote a script called “Show recent comments WITH total comments from that comment author” It’s a mouthful of a title, but a very simple script. What it does is show the total number of comments made by an author whenever they make a post. It’s a little thing, but I like it. 😀

Of course some cool features are simply built in to MT, you just have to know that they are there and take advantage of them. For example, I wanted to add a “E-mail To A Friend” feature that would allow visitors to easily e-mail a link to an entry to someone. I figured I’d need a script of some sort to make that work, but lo and behold I check the [documentation][10] and it’s a built into MT!

The last thing that I found was a cool way to use Trackbacks to generate a Winamp playlist for my weblog. Matt Haughey is the person who came up with this method and it is a simple and elegant method to share with others what you’ve been listening to recently. So if you go to my Odds & Ends page, you’ll see the last six songs I’ve listened to. Pretty cool huh? Whenever I play a song in Winamp, this little plugin sends a Trackback ping to my weblog. Right now each song links to a Google search based on the artist name and song title.

There’s no end to the number of plugins, tweaks and hacks for Movable Type. If you have a weblog, take some time to look around. You never know what you may find to entertain your readers, or yourself. 8)

[10]: http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_mail.html#mail this entry