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November 19, 2004
Gotten past Movabletype installation
So now I've installed my Movabletype blog. It was a bit challenging but now I'm pretty happy. I have my own blog. It feels really great to get off blogger.com.
The first step after installation was to tell movable type where I will store the various bits of the tool. These bits are:
(a)The main index page, and
(b)the archives
And its as simple as that. The actual process seems a bit more complicated because you have to give 2 pieces of information for each one:
a)the local path on your webserver, for example yoursite/public_html/blog/
b)the actualy url that a web visitor would see, for example yoursite/blog/
I copied the style used by Brad Fallon which is to put everything in the /public_html/ directory. By doing this it will ensure that my site URLs are short as possible.
I am coming at this from an SEO point of view so I want site URLs to be short if possible.
As an SEO-minded author, the next thing I did was to make sure that I would be pinging various sites with my new blog entries. I hear this is good for attracting spiders, and attracting spiders never hurts.
The biggest newbie mistake I made this week was not understanding that always when you install software on a UNIX webserver, it goes in the /public_html/ folder (and below).
That mistake cost me about 8 hours.
Next Steps
This post is getting a bit long...
What are my next steps?
From research, I've learned that the next step is to learn how to customize Movabletype templates. But guess what? It seems I need to know about CSS in order to do this, so...
1) I'll go back to my Pagetutor tutorial and finish the bit about CSS
2) Then I'll go back to my Dreamweaver tutorials -- I recently bought Dreamweaver and if I learn more about it, I will learn more about CSS and HTML
3) I will continue to post in this blog without altering the templates. That shouldn't matter much, because, as we all know, in SEO a word is worth a thousand graphics!
Posted by onelukey at November 19, 2004 01:05 PM