FOCUSer.net

I am here to announce that Movable Type 3 templates and styles are now available for FOCUSer.net users.

To instantly use MT3 templates and styles on your blogsite, please do the following. WARNING: All your previous customisations to your template and style would be lost!

1. Login to Blog Management page using your login, password and blogsite.
2. Go down to “Reset Template” section, and change the action to “Reset” to “MovableType 3.0 [FOCUSer]“. Click on “Update”.
3. You will be back at the Blog Management page again. Go down to “Style” section, and pick one of the [MT3] styles. Click on “Update” to confirm.
4. Now log back into Movable Type, and rebuild all your pages!

Currently there are 5 styles that I took from MovableType’s default styles page. But feel free to modify them inside MovableType, once it has been reset. You can also get more styles from MovableStyle.com, as I believe that Lloyd has converted some of my older styles to MovableType 3.

These MovableType 3 templates have also been modified so they are different from the default templates you found in MovableType 3 installations. They are made to work with MovableType 2.6x, plus some alterations. Here’s a summary:

• No TypeKey support. We probably will never have TypeKey support unless someone wants to sponsor FOCUSer.net USD$99 so we can buy an unlimited site license for MovableType 3.
• Use PHP include to add sidebar to your individual archive page.

As your sidebar is now wrapped inside a PHP function, I will be developing tools to automatically spill out modules onto your sidebar. Here are some thoughts.

• Turning on and off and rearranging current modules – calendar, search form, monthly archives and recent articles
• Blogroll/links management
• Tagboard
• Author profile (aka Blogger style?)
• Random photos (Tim’s style)
• Customised HTML code
• Anything else?

These are just some tools to make you personalise your blogsite, without learning all the HTML, Javascript and PHP. It would take a few nights of coding, so I’ll probably do it after the talk next Friday.

Please provide feedback on how the current Blog Management system works (or not work), and ideas of what you would like to put into the sidebar.

There are some new featurs added to FOCUSer.net to assist you to manage your blog site. You need to first of all log into FOCUSer.net (not Movable Type interface but this very website) using the Username and Password from your Movable Type login. You will then be able to select which blog you would like to “manage” with a drop down list, and then click on ‘Manage’ to go to the ‘Blog Management’ page.

Here is a list of things that you can currently do on ‘Blog Management’ page:

• Turn on/off your robots.txt so you can optionally block out unwanted visits from search engines.
• Turn on/off your listing on FOCUSer.net recent updates/comments.
• Reset your Movable Type template to installation default.
• Change your stylesheet from the styles available on MovableStyle.com.

At least the last function would be useful, as many of you are still using MT’s default Clean stylesheet.

I am also planning to port the default template from Movable Type 3 so that you can potentially “reset” the template to MT3. You can then be able to apply MT3 compatible stylesheets.

Stay tuned.

There will be a scheduled down time on Monday, 30th of August 2004, when the FOCUSer.net server receives its bandwidth upgrade. Because IP address can change, there would be a time frame for DNS propagation – hopefully would be only a few hours. During this time frame, you would not be able to access your blogs, FOCUS website, and FOCUS mailing list.

Again, if FOCUSer.net does not seem to work for you, check our off-site availability log for updated details.

Grace Guan from the Mandarin Bible Fellowship is now blogging on the FOCUSer.net, and she is now requesting for help on the template and stylesheet issues (maybe I’ll do a FAQ “sometime” as many of you are still on the default ‘Clean’ style). Anyway, here is the link:

Gracie’s Web Log

That makes a total of 4 bloggers from MBF here.

Amanda Ding of MBF is now blogging here, after discovering the world of web logs, trialing blogger.com, and now testing FOCUSer.net.

Amanda’s Cyber Mind

In a not-so-related news, Mashi is no longer blogging here. I have no idea where has she gong, but last time I checked her blogsite has vanished from the database, possibly being deliberately deleted. I’ll archive the delete the site in a week…

Meanwhile, there are FOCUS bloggers on long holidays, i.e. have not had an entry for a few months. Wake up guys! :)