This isn't a trivial fix, and it will require taking all of our blogs offline for up to a week.

I apologize for this and wouldn't do it if it weren't necessary.

If you'd like to post a blog entry letting your readers know your blog is going offline for maintenance, please do so soon. Thanks!

-mgmt

You may notice that some things look and work different. Let me know if you have any questions or problems. I will also be gradually putting the look and feel back the way it was.

More to come.

Unfortunately, Windows (and Microsoft Word) have a unique way of generating these characters that looks fine when first posted but ends up screwing up when an article is reposted or copied from or reblogged elsewhere.

Every now and then I run a search and replace on the blog database to fix the funky characters. This is why you may occasionally see what are called HTML entities in your posts (they start with an ampersand and end with a semicolon and usually have a string of numbers in between).

If you want to avoid these character problems, I can recommend three different approaches. Perhaps one will fit your posting style best. These approaches are

1. Saving Word documents as plain text before posting.
2. Using the “Markdown with Smartypants” filter
3. Entering the character entities directly yourself.

I’ll explain each approach.

Save as plain text

If you like to compose your entries in Word before posting them to your blog, then when you are ready to post, save the entry (if you’ve saved it already, choose “Save As”) and then in the Save dialog box, choose the Text or ASCII Text or Plain Text format. Line breaks or no, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is, once you’ve done this, close the document and then reopen it in Word. Otherwise, the special characters won’t be cleaned up.

Once you’ve reopened the text version of your post, you can copy and paste it into a new blog post.

This will override Word’s tendency to make quotation marks curly and turn hyphens into dashes.

But what if you do want those more sophisticated looking typographical elements? That’s were the second approach comes in.

Use the Smartypants filter

Smartypants is text filter built into our installation of Movable Type that converts straight quotes to curly quotes, single hyphens to en-dashes and double hyphens to em-dashes. If you use this filter your posts willl look typographically slick but you won’t have any funky characters in your posts. (The filter generates the correct HTML entities). Speaking of HTML entities, entering them directly is the third approach.

Use HTML entities

This last approach is probably overkill for most of you, but for completeness, I am going to include a short table of the key HTML entities, what they’re called, and what they look like. If you type any of these as-is into your entries you’ll get the corresponding typographical character:

For each of these entities there are actually two ways to enter them, a numerical reference and an abbreviation of the name (in each case they start with an ampersand and end with a semicolon).

All of your entries are stored in a database, and Movable Type offers a simple way to create a single text file containing all the posts along with all their metadata (titles, dates) and related content, such as comments and trackback pings.

Every now and then I back up the entire database but you should think about making a backup of your own blog from time to time. How do you decide how often to do it? Well, anything not backed up, in case of disaster, would have to be recreated by patching together information from Google cache and the Wayback machine.

Anyway, here’s how to back up your blog:

1. Go to your blog on the Mediajunkie server
2. Choose Import / Export in the side navigation (under Utilities)
3. Choose the Export “tab”
4. Right-click (on Windows) or Ctrl-click (on the Mac) on the link labeled with your blog’s name, and
5. On the menu that pops up, choose “Download Linked File” or “Save Link As” or whatever your browser calls the command for downloading a linked resource.
6. You’ll be prompted by a Save dialog box. Give the file a name ending in .txt and save it somewhere where’ll expect to find it later.
7. Just wait for the file to download.

In the future, if you need to restore your blog, you can use the Import service to upload this same file and repopulate your post-apocalyptic blog. But let’s hope it never comes to that.

The first thing is to make sure your blog is “pinging” Technorati when you make a new post. To check, go to the Settings area for your blog (in the “Configure” block of the left-hand navigation choices of the administrative interface). Then choose “New Entry Defaults.” Scroll down and make sure “blo.gs,” “weblogs.com” and “technorati.com” are all selected.

Next, go to the Technorati website and sign up for an account there. Once your account is set up and you’ve logged in, go through the process of “claiming” your blog. There is a quick way to do this where you give Technorati your login information for the Mediajunkie Movable Type interface, and that’s a perfectly fine way to claim the blog, but to make sure that Technorati continues to recognize your ownership of the blog, do the more involved process that ends up offering you a snippet of code to place on your blog.

You can insert this snippet into a new post on your blog, but this can mess up the flow of your entries and it will eventually scroll off the main page. The better way to go is to add the snippet to your main index template.

To do this, go to “Templates” in the Configure block, select the Main Index template, scroll through the text box to near the end, and insert the snippet before or after the statement about your blog being a Telegraph blog, managed by Mediajunkie and/or hosted by Open Publishing.

If this is all too confusing for you, just drop me a line and I’ll be happy to help you out.

So, I’ll reinstall the old templates and in so doing the logo and color scheme will revert to the Movable Type default. Then I’ll selectively add back in my customizations to see if I can avoid breaking whatever I broke last time while editing the templates.

We still need to close the loophole that is letting our hacker in, but this is potentially a good sign that we may not have to put up with the slowness much longer.

To take full advantage of this filter, it helps to know the Markdown syntax.

Use of the Smartypants option helps prevent the ugly Microsoft-entity decoding errors that mar pages that quote from your blog, including our local compendium, Telegraph.

If you want to make any of the new text filters (as opposed to the simple Convert Line Breaks filter) into your default for new entries, go the Settings area on your blog, go to the section for New Entries, change the default text filter, and save the change.

Markdown is documented here: Daring Fireball: Markdown Syntax Documentation

SmartyPants is documented here: SmartyPants

To that end, I am going to replace the “Movable Type News” block in the main MT interface with items from this blog. Stay tuned.