Essential Blogging

Using Movable Type

Now that you have installed Movable Type, you are ready to start using the system. The first steps are to log in and change your username and password, because the system by default always uses the same username and password. The next step is to configure your first blog.

Logging In

Open your web browser and point it at the URL for mt.cgi on your site. mt.cgi is the main Movable Type application. For example, if your site is http://www.your-site.com, and you installed the application into the /mt directory, type http://www.your-site.com/mt/mt.cgi to access Movable Type.

You should see the login prompt as shown in Figure 5-11. If you get an Internal Server error, check the permissions on mt.cgi and check that you uploaded the CGI scripts using ASCII mode. If you see a login prompt but the images do not appear, you may need to either move your images, docs, and styles.css out of your cgi-bin, or if you have already done that, adjust the Static Web Path setting in mt.cfg. See Section 5.2.5 earlier in this chapter.

Figure 5-11. Login screen

Log in with the author name “Melody” and the password “Nelson.” Case is important. The author name “melody” does not work.

After a successful login, you see the screen in Figure 5-12. This is the Main Menu. On the left of the screen is a list of the blogs to which you have access; on the right is a list of system-wide options.

Figure 5-12. Main ...