WikiSoftBlog
I have been working with web sites and doing design for years now and of course without a doubt I noticed the importance of blogs on the web. Specifically I noticed how they could be used to raise search engine rankings.
I would like to post a tutorial of how to implement a blog on your own web site.
So after looking over wordpress and several other free blogs out there I decided to settle with using movable type.
The reason why I chose movable type was their program was quick and easy to download and the documentation was fairly easy to read on how to install it.
If you would like download movable type do so now by going to.
Download Movable Type
I downloaded the developer version.
Once you download movable type you are going to want to extract the files. It is a pretty hefty zip file with over 2,000 files and components so it may take you a while depending on your pc to even extract the files to a folder.
This is where things get a little bit complicated. Movable Type is written in Perl. If you were like me you probably have never installed a script written in Perl before. Movable type sort of assumes that you know how to work with Perl and their directions are not too clear. I had to search the web to find out more about Perl and to find out if I had Perl capabilities on my server.
It turns out that I did and this is how I figured that out. I downloaded a Perl hello world script and placed it in my cgi-bin. Before I did this though I did all sorts of non-sensical things like tried to place a .htaccess file in different directories to let me run Perl scripts from places other than my cgi-bin.
Don't do this. Perl scripts for the most part - if you want to make your life easy run from the cgi-bin. This is how I see it becasue it worked pretty well.
Below is the hello world script so you can get Perl working on your server. Save this text with notepad and save it as helloworld.pl pl is the suffix for perl programs. Place this in your cgi-bin directory on your web server, which should be www.something.com/cgi-bin/hellworld.pl
Here is the example on my server:
<Hello Wold Example
If you get Perl working correctly it should look just like this in your browser with your own domain.
It should be noted that this did not work for me at first. The reason why!? Because I needed to "Set Permissions" or CHMOD the file to 755. It will not work unless it has permissions set to 755. I use dreamweaver to set my permissions and it should be noted that for some reason files within the cgi-bin on my server do not set permissions the same way. If I set the permissions then refresh it appears that the permissions go back to what they were previously. I found though that if I set the permissions and then disconnect from the remote server and then reconnect the changes I made upon reconnect are saved. This may work the same way with your ftp client and your server as well so try that out if it gives you some trouble.
I also wanted to know what version of Perl I had because I think it specified that I needed version 5 or greater.
So I have another script to find that out as well. Once again put this in your cgi-bin and set permissions to 755.
It will look like this if everything is working correctly.
Perl Version
If it is not good I am sorry because I am not a Perl expert, but I think these are some pretty good trial and error steps to get you started. Contact your site admin or host for more info and how you can get Perl set up if needed.
If everything is good from here you want to take movable type that you extracted and move the contents of the first subfolder and ftp them to your cgi-bin folder on your server. You have about 2,000 plus files to upload so most likely that will take a little while.
You are going to want to CHMOD/set permissions on everything to 755 and then run the file mt.cgi from your address bar.
http://www.something.com/cgi-bin/mt.cgi
This will get your movable type installation started. From here most of it is pretty self explanatory. I did run into a couple of hick ups when I was setting up my send mail server, but that was only because gmail kept putting my movable type messages into the spam folder and I thought I wasn't receiving any mail at all. Also I was having errors on the first part of the installation because I hadn't CHMOD all the files in the cgi-bin and folders to 755.
The only other issue I ran into was that movable type could not run many of the files in the mt-static folder because they are in the cgi-bin folder. Remember cgi-bin is mainly for cgi! Don't worry though in the installation procedures it has a check for this and recognizes this problem and offers a solution for it. What it does is it copies the folder mt-static to your www/ or public_html/ domain directory. It also updates all necessary links all across the board.
You will also be asked what you want to name your blog. This is how you willl access your files. I named mine blog not knowing that it would be where the blog resides. Thus if you look up at the address bar you will see the main folder for this blog is under www.wikisoftpeople.com/blog
You may want to put more thought into this for search engine optimization purposes.
However if you have gotten this far it means you should be able to start posting entries. Any time you want to post an entry you just log into movable type from your mt.cgi address or www.something.com/cgi-bin/mt.cgi
Any time you want to veiw your blog you go to www.something.com/blog or whatever you named your main directory.
There are some cool styles that come with movable type and you may want to play around with those. In my next blog I am going to begin writing about implementing movable type into a web site that allready has a design and the best way to go about doing this.
Thanks for reading and if you have any questions feel free to post.
I would like to post a tutorial of how to implement a blog on your own web site.
So after looking over wordpress and several other free blogs out there I decided to settle with using movable type.
The reason why I chose movable type was their program was quick and easy to download and the documentation was fairly easy to read on how to install it.
If you would like download movable type do so now by going to.
Download Movable Type
I downloaded the developer version.
Once you download movable type you are going to want to extract the files. It is a pretty hefty zip file with over 2,000 files and components so it may take you a while depending on your pc to even extract the files to a folder.
This is where things get a little bit complicated. Movable Type is written in Perl. If you were like me you probably have never installed a script written in Perl before. Movable type sort of assumes that you know how to work with Perl and their directions are not too clear. I had to search the web to find out more about Perl and to find out if I had Perl capabilities on my server.
It turns out that I did and this is how I figured that out. I downloaded a Perl hello world script and placed it in my cgi-bin. Before I did this though I did all sorts of non-sensical things like tried to place a .htaccess file in different directories to let me run Perl scripts from places other than my cgi-bin.
Don't do this. Perl scripts for the most part - if you want to make your life easy run from the cgi-bin. This is how I see it becasue it worked pretty well.
Below is the hello world script so you can get Perl working on your server. Save this text with notepad and save it as helloworld.pl pl is the suffix for perl programs. Place this in your cgi-bin directory on your web server, which should be www.something.com/cgi-bin/hellworld.pl
“
”
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Tell perl to send a html header.
# So your browser gets the output
# rather then <stdout>(command line
# on the server.)
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
# print your basic html tags.
# and the content of them.
print "<html><head><title>Hello World!! </title></head>\n";
print "<body><h1>Hello world</h1></body></html>\n";
# Tell perl to send a html header.
# So your browser gets the output
# rather then <stdout>(command line
# on the server.)
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
# print your basic html tags.
# and the content of them.
print "<html><head><title>Hello World!! </title></head>\n";
print "<body><h1>Hello world</h1></body></html>\n";
<Hello Wold Example
If you get Perl working correctly it should look just like this in your browser with your own domain.
It should be noted that this did not work for me at first. The reason why!? Because I needed to "Set Permissions" or CHMOD the file to 755. It will not work unless it has permissions set to 755. I use dreamweaver to set my permissions and it should be noted that for some reason files within the cgi-bin on my server do not set permissions the same way. If I set the permissions then refresh it appears that the permissions go back to what they were previously. I found though that if I set the permissions and then disconnect from the remote server and then reconnect the changes I made upon reconnect are saved. This may work the same way with your ftp client and your server as well so try that out if it gives you some trouble.
I also wanted to know what version of Perl I had because I think it specified that I needed version 5 or greater.
So I have another script to find that out as well. Once again put this in your cgi-bin and set permissions to 755.
“
”
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$command= $];
$title = "Perl Version";
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "<html><head><title>$title</title></head><body>";
print "
<h1>$title</h1>
\n";
print "Perl version : ".$command;
$command= $];
$title = "Perl Version";
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "<html><head><title>$title</title></head><body>";
print "
<h1>$title</h1>
\n";
print "Perl version : ".$command;
It will look like this if everything is working correctly.
Perl Version
If it is not good I am sorry because I am not a Perl expert, but I think these are some pretty good trial and error steps to get you started. Contact your site admin or host for more info and how you can get Perl set up if needed.
If everything is good from here you want to take movable type that you extracted and move the contents of the first subfolder and ftp them to your cgi-bin folder on your server. You have about 2,000 plus files to upload so most likely that will take a little while.
You are going to want to CHMOD/set permissions on everything to 755 and then run the file mt.cgi from your address bar.
http://www.something.com/cgi-bin/mt.cgi
This will get your movable type installation started. From here most of it is pretty self explanatory. I did run into a couple of hick ups when I was setting up my send mail server, but that was only because gmail kept putting my movable type messages into the spam folder and I thought I wasn't receiving any mail at all. Also I was having errors on the first part of the installation because I hadn't CHMOD all the files in the cgi-bin and folders to 755.
The only other issue I ran into was that movable type could not run many of the files in the mt-static folder because they are in the cgi-bin folder. Remember cgi-bin is mainly for cgi! Don't worry though in the installation procedures it has a check for this and recognizes this problem and offers a solution for it. What it does is it copies the folder mt-static to your www/ or public_html/ domain directory. It also updates all necessary links all across the board.
You will also be asked what you want to name your blog. This is how you willl access your files. I named mine blog not knowing that it would be where the blog resides. Thus if you look up at the address bar you will see the main folder for this blog is under www.wikisoftpeople.com/blog
You may want to put more thought into this for search engine optimization purposes.
However if you have gotten this far it means you should be able to start posting entries. Any time you want to post an entry you just log into movable type from your mt.cgi address or www.something.com/cgi-bin/mt.cgi
Any time you want to veiw your blog you go to www.something.com/blog or whatever you named your main directory.
There are some cool styles that come with movable type and you may want to play around with those. In my next blog I am going to begin writing about implementing movable type into a web site that allready has a design and the best way to go about doing this.
Thanks for reading and if you have any questions feel free to post.
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