Yahoo's response yesterday led to Microsoft issuing a statement of their own: "It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full and fair proposal to combine our companies, " and added "as we have said previously, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo's shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal."

What does this mean? It means that Microsoft wants to take Yahoo!, and they're probably going to the shareholders to do it. On top of that news is 1,000 layoffs for Yahoo! employees. This happens mere days after Yahoo! CEO thanked his employees for sticking it out. There are rumors of a deal between internet has-been AOL and Yahoo! priced at $40 a share, but it seems like the old assimilate everything Microsoft is back.

This evening, I upgraded the Movable Type installation to 4.1, attempting to fix some bugs that I had with the previous version. In the installation of Movable Type 4.1, the Dashboard widget which once worked, was broken, and spat out the following error:

Movable Type was unable to locate your 'mt-static' directory. Please configure the 'StaticFilePath' configuration setting in your mt-config.cgi file, and create a writable 'support' directory underneath your 'mt-static' directory.

I'm still running into a problem where the "export entries" function doesn't fully export my entries -- it stops at about 1200 entries.

Movable Type 4.0 Beta 2 has quietly been released. I've just installed it, so I don't see any bugs yet, though they have fixed the dreaded comment list bug (which means I can finally clear out some spam en masse).

This morning I got an email from Amazon, inviting me to their new start-up venture: Askville. Normally I don't bother with a lot of startup social networking websites, because there's always a new one with a new angle just around the corner. What makes Askville different (and worthy of blogging about here) is that they're using a game paradigm with this venture.

On Askville, users post questions and answers and are given quest coins. When you accumulate enough coins, you can then purchase superpowers. These superpowers then allow you to accumulate more coins and with more coins comes more privileges (these privileges are more like voting rights than anything else).

Rather than a message board mentality where the questions are arranged by topic, they're just all lumped together, using tag clouds for organization. Users who answer questions are encouraged to use Askville's tools for adding more links to products on Amazon. I'd probably use their little product linker more if it allowed me to use my own Amazon Associates ID, but as it stands, the product linker doesn't have that option, and labels the product for Askville's Amazon Associate's ID number.

The upgrade process is pretty straightforward, and should get you 75% of the way to transitioning over to Movable Type 4.0.

The other 25% consists of really minor issues, such as:

• On Windows-based systems, to avoid Error 500 Internal Server Errors, remember to change all the #/usr/bin/perl -w lines on the .cgi files to c:/bin/perl -w (or wherever your perl path is)
  
• Creating the new MT4 Modules and Templates and bringing them over to your older installation.
  
• Changing the Template Types on the old templates to reflect the correct template type.
  

I've switched everything over to the default templates for MT 4.0 build. The result is a much more vox-like look, which is pretty generic faded boxes look.

The templates, in the way they've been re-organized make editing specific sections easier, which should make re-designs faster.

After seeing kwc's post on the his attempted redesign with Movable Type and Photoshop, I decided to go straight into the heart of the matter, by editing the structure.css file located within the mt-static directory.

After half an hour, a small number of changes were made, resulting in a layout that just doesn't have as much empty space everywhere. Making these changes gave me a greater sense of understanding in what SixApart was going for, but also left me frustrated, knowing that if I want these changes to be permanent, I'm going to have to modify their default structure.css whenever there is an update.

The changes made in structure.css are reflected throughout the entire site, and while the optimization was really for the editor screen, having managed to preserve vertical space helps everywhere.

Seeing how easy it was to change the structure.css got me thinking though -- custom themes for the MT Editor might not be that far away.

Download modified structure.css

Six Apart today released the Movable Type 4.0 Beta. It offers a lot of new features, including a much more Ajax-ified interface. Whereas Movable Type 3.0 simply added a much more streamlined css stylesheet to the interface, in 4.0, I actually feel like I need to relearn the interface.

Looking at the known issues is disheartening, as I'd guess at about 3 months worth of work to fix all the items.

Every revision of MT adds more bloat to the default templates, and 4 is no exception. At first glance, it seems as if the templates have gotten more effficient, more concise, but this is misleading -- the templates are now broken down in subsections such as Header, Footer, Entry, and within those sections they're further broken down into sections like Sidebar, Tags, and Entry Metadata... This makes modifying a particular section easier, but I haven't yet figured out how to add these subsections to older template files.

Also, Movable Type 4.0 seems to really dislike the MTCategories tag within older version RSS templates.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the Amazon personalized Gold Box was gone. I always loved the personalized goldbox, and sure, sometimes the items they listed came from left field (for some reason, they put in camping goods in my goldbox) but at least those deals were mine. Now they've moved the goldbox to be more woot!-like. One item listed, for all Amazon buyers. This fails to impress me (plus everytime I've seen the offer, it's been sold out), but this afternoon, they've finally given into customer demands and updated the Gold Box to be a little more like the old one, except instead of manually flipping through the ten items, they've listed out all of the 10 items that you can select from on the right hand side of the page. To me, this was a rather non-intuitive place to put them, as it didn't really register on the first glance. But they are there, located on the right side of main offer.

Good job on bringing the personalized offers back, Amazon, now put them where we're more likely to notice them -- like under the main offer.

The good folks at Six Apart have updated Movable Type to version 3.33, fixing some cross-site security problems. They haven't yet revealed the full details of what those vulnerabilities are, but they'll be disclosing them in the next few days, so it's probably a good idea to update as soon as possible. The Movable Type 3.33 patches can be found here.

One of the most useful plugins I use on this site is Byrne Reese's Media Manager which integrates Amazon with Movable Type. To install MediaManager on Win32 with ActivePerl, there seem to be a couple of additional instructions to make the plugin work.

1. All the .cgi files for Media Manager in the /plugins/MediaManager directory need to be changed to point to the proper perl executable. The first line should look something like this:

#!c:/perl/bin/perl.exe -w

2. in /plugins/MediaManager/lib/MediaManager/App.pm, a line that reads:

$tmpl->param(script_url => File::Spec-> catdir($apppath, "mmanager.cgi"));

needs to be changed to:

$tmpl->param(script_url => $apppath . "mmanager.cgi");