Movable Type, Easy As Twitter?

In the previous article, I explained how to set up Movable Type as a Fluid application to run on your desktop.

But Arvind suggested one better: why not install the iMT plugin and have Movable Type run as a MenuExtra? For those of you that don’t know, MenuExtras are the little icons on the right-hand side of your OS X menu. Putting Movable Type up there as a simple dropdown menu would make it almost as easy as… dare I say, Twitter?

See for yourself.

The Setup

First, make sure you’ve downloaded the iMT plugin for Movable Type and installed it on your server. This is what’s going to give us our slick iPhone-like interface perfect for a MenuExtra dropdown.

Next, follow the instructions from the previous article on setting up Movable Type as a Fluid application. After that’s done, you’ve only got just a few changes to make before you’re ready to go:

1. On your application menu, change your User Agent to Mobile Safari 1.13 — iPhone. This will trigger the display of the iMT interface for MT.

2. Set the Window Opacity (if you prefer) under Preferences » Appearance.

3. Again, on the application menu, select Convert to MenuExtra. Fluid will ask to relaunch your instance and when it does…

Suddenly, blogging is easy again!

Note: Fluid tries to use the large 256x256 pixel icon which is a mess. So I’ve created a smaller, desaturated version for those who are using Movable Type as a MenuExtra:

InterAction:

13 June 20081. Mark Paschal:

Neat!

Did you use the small icon by itself, so the Dock and Finder blow it up? When I was playing with Blog It this way, I tried giving Fluid a real .icns with the favicon for the 16×16 size and a big icon for bigger sizes, but it ended up blank in the menu bar.

13 June 20082. cawlin:

Nice one! I've been using the same setup except with. wordpress.

13 June 20083. Byrne:

Jesse -- you just rocked my world twice in one day. Stop it!!

No, don't stop actually.

Thank you sir, may I have another?

14 June 20084. Jesse Gardner:

Mark: Yeah, I gave BlogIt a try, and it's cool for quick access to all of your different blogs. Trouble is, it *really* limits what you can send to the blog. Title and only basic content was available, whereas the iMT interface, though limiting, lets you specify categories, tags, formatting options, and comment/trackback toggles.

14 June 20085. Jesse Gardner:

Mark: I forgot your second question. I too did try using an .icns for the MenuExtras bar, but got a blank spot. Wouldn't even have realized that it was running had I not by chance clicked the empty spot where it was supposed to be. (It was there, but without an icon.)

I also hate that you can go back and respecify the image or the url. Seems like a real hassle to have to delete and start over each time you want to make a change.

14 June 20086. Mark Paschal:

Jesse: Oh, Chris Ivarson points out that the menu extra icon is a whole other file in the .app (icon.tiff). You can use Fluid to make the SSB app with the small icon for the menu extra, then replace the app icon manually with the nice one:

1. Dig into the SSB by selecting it in Finder and picking Show Package Contents from its context menu.
2. Go to Contents → Resources.
3. Overwrite the appl.icns file Fluid generated with your nice .icns.

I assume you could also generate the SSB with the nice icon, and replace the menu extra icon.tiff manually, but I didn’t try that.

Looks like you can also change the name and URL by editing the Resources → Config.plist.

YourThoughts?

(Minutia)

This entry was written by Jesse on Friday, June 13, 2008 at 5:19 PM and appears in the Movable Type chapter. The previous article was entitled, "Movable Type as a Desktop App", and the next entry is called, "Clarification On Asset Conversion, From RightFields to Custom Fields". Bookmark the permalink, save it to del.icio.us or Digg it.

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