Incorporating data from Movable Type into your Web Pages

The first step was to go into the administrative area of Movable Type (a great weblogging tool written by sixapart that I use to run five different weblogs), and click on the “Templates” button on the left, then chose “create new index template”.

The new page asked for the name of the new template, the target filename, and then offered an input box where I could enter the necessary HTML. I named the template “Latest Entries”, the file “latest-entries.html”, and added the following to the body:

<MTEntries lastn=”2″>
<a href=”<$MTEntryPermalink$>”><$MTEntryTitle$></a>,
</MTEntries>

That’s all that was necessary to create a new file that is now automatically updated and recreated each time a new weblog entry is submitted. Not too hard, eh?

On the index page itself – index.shtml – I added the following few lines of HTML:

Don’t forget to keep current on my weblog, where my latest
entries talk about
<!–#include virtual=”blog/latest-entries.html”–>
and much more. Just visit
<a href=”http://www.intuitive.com/blog/”>The Intuitive
Life</a> and please feel free to add your own comments too.

If you check out the index page you’ll see that the titles of the weblog entries just magically appear as if they were part of the regular typed-in material rather than automatically generated by Movable Type.

This is almost exactly the same technique I used on the Debtfree-Today Web site – a sister site to the real-life-debt site I mentioned earlier – to create an actual boxed element that has the latest five entries neatly listed in clickable form. If you can get this basic last-two-entries working, I’m sure you’ll be able to get the more complex solution to rock too.