June 2008 Archives

This is a screen shot of the home page of Cambridge Products Group LLC, a company in Whippany, NJ. I designed this site using the Movable Type Publishing System version 4.1 and a customized version of the Hemingway theme applied to the Classic Blog Template Set.

From a technical perspective, the coolest feature of Cambridge Products Group's website so far is their Contact Us page. This is a web form that can be used to contact representatives of the company. The form uses reCaptcha form validation for spam control.

This is a screen shot of the home page of Sustainable Rooftop Solutions, a company in Whippany, NJ. I designed this site using the Movable Type Publishing System version 4.1 and a customized version of the Hemingway theme applied to the Classic Blog Template Set.

This is a screen shot of the home page of DaveAiello.com, my personal website. I'm trying to use it to tie together all of the things I do on the Internet so people can get an idea of what I think is worth doing.

I designed this site using the Movable Type Publishing System version 4.1 and a customized version of the Hemingway theme applied to the Classic Blog Template Set.

This is a screen shot of one of the most popular articles ever published on Operation Gadget, my weblog about electronic gadgets and the technology used in sports. Operation Gadget has been published continuously since November 2003.

As a result of the operational and financial success of Operation Gadget, publishing companies and freelance journalists began asking me for help. That's why I started my micropublishing consulting business called Weblog Improvement.

This is a screen shot of the home page of The Travel Plan Idea Blog, a website that constantly comes up with new ideas for memorable trips. I manage the server where this site is hosted and make most of the changes to the publishing system.

Travel-Plan-Idea.com currently operates on Movable Type Publishing System version 3.36, but should be upgraded to MT4 soon.

This is a screen shot of the splash page of Spot-On.com, one of Weblog Improvement's former clients. I built this website and maintained it from October 2005 to November 2007. The designer for this site is Paul Farnell of Salted Services Ltd. in the UK.

The Spot-On Splash Page is a custom, object-oriented PHP script that uses the Smarty template languages caching features to improve performance and scalability. It pulls together the most recent blog posts from 20 different blogs published on the Spot-On website by directly querying the Movable Type / MySQL database.

This is a screen shot of the home page of Ohno Zone, one of the top Apolo Anton Ohno fan websites. CTDATA hosts this website and Weblog Improvement has been handling the publishing system behind this site for several years.

The Ohno Zone currently operates on Movable Type Publishing System version 3.36, but should be upgraded to MT4 soon.

This the home page for the Atlantic Amateur Hockey Association Officiating Program, a website affiliated with USA Hockey. This website has consisted of a weblog and an a membership management application since the year 2000.

The AAHArefs website moved to Movable Type in the Fall of 2005.

This the home page of the Rensselaer Club of New Jersey, a regional chapter of the alumni association of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. This website was launched in 1997, converted to a blog on a modified version of the Slashcode platform in 2000, then to Movable Type in the Fall of 2005.

The RCNJ Web Site is the only significant website operated by a regional alumni chapter of the RAA. The site has won two national awards from the alumni association for promoting alumni communications.

This weblog is currently on hiatus.

This the home page for Chatham Township Data Corporation, the parent company of WeblogImprovement.com. CTDATA is a company that I started in 1989.

The site launched sometime in 1996, converted to a blog on a modified version of the Slash Open Source Project publishing platform in 2000, then to Movable Type in the Fall of 2005.

The most technically complex aspect of migrating this site to Movable Type was preserving the URLs in the blog portion of the site. There are over 1200 articles on the CTDATA blog, some with significant PageRank. In order to preserve the URLs, we had to write a custom exporter for the Slash publishing platform as well as make changes to the Movable Type 3 import mechanism.

The Movable Type publishing system has undergone a lot of changes in the past year. The transition from Movable Type Version 3 to Version 4 has brought significant new features to the platform. However, the most important changes relate to the speed and efficiency with which Movable Type 4.1 and 4.2 operate.

Getting the most out of Movable Type 4 requires more than just installing the new software package. You need to review the templates that represent your blog's design, and make sure that they are coded in the most efficient way. That's where Weblog Improvement can help you.

We've performed several Movable Type 3 to Movable Type 4 migrations, and we've worked particularly hard on changing template structures to take advantage of new performance enhancements in MT4.

Let us help you to make your site better and faster with Movable Type 4.