Here's what it looks like on my site - Simply Recipes: Food Blog Updates:

Which is driven off of this Blogspot page: http://foodbloglinks.blogspot.com/.

It's very easy to set up. Here are the steps in detail:

2. Add blogs to your Blog List. Click on "Add a Page Element" in the right sidebar layout section. Then look for the Blog List element, and click "Add to Blog". Delete whatever is written in the title field of the popup. Click on "Add to List" and start adding the blogs whose feeds you want on your list, one by one. Select if you want to see the blogs' icons, the titles of the most recent items, snippets of most recent items, and the date of the last update. If you want you can rename the feed titles (sometimes they're a little long). Then click on "SAVE".

3. Strip the Blogger blog layout of everything that isn't necessary. Return to the Layout edit. Delete all of the sidebar elements except for "Blog List". To do that, click on "edit" for each page element, and click on "Remove" in the popup.

Click on "Edit HTML". Scroll down to #main-wrapper and change the width to 0. Change the #sidebar-wrapper width to however wide you want the feed text to be. In my case, I changed it to 600. Change the widths of the #outer-wrapper, #header-wrapper, and #footer to whatever your sidebar width is.

Remove the Blogger nav bar by adding the following code to the CSS (in the footer section):

#navbar {

   display: none;

   }

Click "SAVE TEMPLATE". Now click on "Page Elements". It should look like this:

If you click on "View Blog" you should see something like this:

You will probably want to change the header text into something that better suits your blog's style. To get rid of the borders, click on "Edit HTML" and scroll down to #header-wrapper and #header. Change the border from 1px to 0px. Add header font color, size and type information to #header. Click SAVE TEMPLATE and view the blog.

For example,

#header h1 {
  margin:0px 0px 0;
  padding:15px 0px .25em;
  line-height:1.2em;
  text-align: left;
  color: #333;
  font: 20px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
  padding: 15px 0 0 0;
  padding-bottom: 1px;
  clear:both;
}

You can also change the default text colors and styles in the variable name section at the top of the Edit HTML template.

Review your published blog and take note of the URL.

4. Use an iframe tag to pull the Blogger blog into your regular blog. Open up your Movable Type (or other platform) blog edit. In Movable Type, create a new index template or page. If using an index template, copy over whatever header, footer, and sidebar code you will need to construct your page. In the main body of the template place the following iframe code:

<iframe src="http://yourfeedblog.blogspot.com/" width="630" height="2000" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Replace "http://yourfeedblog.blogspot.com" with the URL of your feed blog. Change the width and height to be appropriate for the space into which the feed is going.

Save and publish.

That's it! As you add more blogs to your Blog List, you may need to increase the height of the iframe.

The three main steps that still hold for safely upgrading to MT4 (from MT3) are:

1. Make a back up of your database.
2. Make sure all the plugins you use for your site have upgrades that are compatible with the new version.
3. Install MT into a new directory in your cgi-bin. Do NOT overwrite your existing MT directory.

The Movable Type ProNet community has done a stellar job in outlining everything you need to know to do a successful upgrade to MT4. These instructions can be found at the MT Community Wiki in the Community Generated Upgrade Guide.

Please see the instructions at the Community Wiki for the specific details on how to safely upgrade your MT blog to MT version 4.

The problem with most "Email me" contact forms is that they aren't very secure. I've been using one of these forms for a few years and recently started getting a lot more spam messages coming through to my email inbox. MT developer Jay Allen suggested using his Comment Challenge plugin and the commenting capability of MT to create a more secure contact form. I've implemented this approach on elise.com and it seems to work great. Here are the steps. You will need to create a new blog for this purpose if you have enabled comments on your existing blog (the comment system templates will conflict otherwise).

2. In the blog Settings > Feedback, select "Accept comments from Anyone" and "Immediately publish comments from No one". Select "Require E-mail Address". Select E-mail Notification as "On".

3. In the blog Settings > Publishing, under "Archive Mapping", change the "Archive File Path" of the Contact Form to "Custom". Fill in %f in the field. Save changes.

4. In the Individual Archive Template, strip out the code related to the entry and pings. Strip out the MTIfCommentsActive section (you do not want to publish everyone's emails to you on the contact form.) Basically, strip from the template everything that you do not want to appear on the page. Hold on to the MTEntryIfCommentsOpen section.

5. Change the label for Comments to "Message" and Post to "Send". Strip out any other code in the comments section that is unnecessary, such as anything that refers to Typekey, Remember personal info, MTIfCommentsModerated, or HTML tags for style. Here is some example code for a very simple contact form template (you will need to add appropriate div tags for style):

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html>

<head>

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=<$MTPublishCharset$>">

   <title><$MTBlogName encode_html="1"$>: Contact Form</title>

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<$MTBlogURL$>styles-site.css" type="text/css" />

</head>

<body>

<MTIfCommentsActive>

<MTEntryIfCommentsOpen> 

<h2>Please use this form to send an email</h2>

<p><form method="post" action="<$MTCGIPath$><$MTCommentScript$>" name="comments_form">

<input type="hidden" name="static" value="1" />

<input type="hidden" name="entry_id" value="<$MTEntryID$>" /></p>

                                      

<p> <label for="comment-author">Your Name:</label>

<input id="comment-author" name="author" size="30" /></p>

<p> <label for="comment-email">Your Email Address:</label>

<input id="comment-email" name="email" size="30" /></p>

<p><label for="comment-text">Message: </label><br />

<textarea id="comment-text" name="text" rows="14" cols="60"></textarea></p>

<p><input type="submit" accesskey="v" name="send" id="comment-post" value="Send" /></p>

<p>All fields required.</p>

                                 

</form>  

</MTEntryIfCommentsOpen>

</MTIfCommentsActive>

</body>

</html>

6. Save and rebuild the template. Create an entry, with the title "Contact" and nothing in the entry body or extended entry. Publish the entry. (Note that based on your archive mapping preferences, this will create a page with the URL - http://www.yoursite.com/contact.html). Click on "View Entry" to see the Contact Form page. Test the form by sending yourself a test message.

7. Edit the Comment Pending Template. Strip out all unnecessary code and put in the message, "Thank you for your message."

If your Contact Form is going to be a pop-up, you can add a little Javascript button to the page to close the popup window. In the header section of the template, put the following code:

     <script language=javascript>
     function closeWin()
     {
      window.close();
     }
     </script>

After the Thank You message on the template, place the following code to create a button that will close the popup:

<input type="button" onClick="javascript: window.close();" value="Close" />

8. Install Jay Allen's Comment Challenge plugin. Follow Jay's install guide carefully, and place the <$MTCommentChallenge$> code right after the comment form text area in the Comment Form template. Save and rebuild the template. Test the form again by sending yourself a test message.

9. Edit the Comment Error Template. Strip out all unnecessary code.

10. If you are planning to let people preview their emails to you before they get sent, edit the Comment Preview Template, and make sure to include a Preview button on the Contact Form.

11. Test all forms extensively to make sure they are working properly.

12. Provide a link to your contact form from your website. If you want your contact form to be a pop-up, you can use this code to create a link (swap out http://www.yoursite.com/contact.html for the URL of your contact form):

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/contact.html" onclick="window.open('http://www.yoursite.com/contact.html','popup','width=550,height=650,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=50,top=0'); return false" rel="nofollow">Contact</a>

Introducing a new way to search for Movable Type information throughout the MT community, MT Community Search (http://www.mtcommunitysearch.com).

Using Google's custom search capability, I've put together a custom search engine of the most popular and content-rich Movable Type sites, including the MT forums. You'll find this search bar in the sidebar of LMT. You can try it out here:

<!-- Google CSE Search Box Begins -->
  <form id="searchbox_003084314295129404805:7bvp7badf0w" action="http://www.google.com/search">
    <input type="hidden" name="cx" value="003084314295129404805:7bvp7badf0w" />
    <input type="hidden" name="cof" value="FORID:1" />
    <input name="q" type="text" size="40" />
    <input type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" />
  </form>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=searchbox_003084314295129404805%3A7bvp7badf0w"></script>
<!-- Google CSE Search Box Ends -->
      

If you would like to have this search bar on your site, with the results opening up into your own website, use the following code snippets.

Here is the search bar code. Replace http://www.learningmovabletype.com/communitysearch.php which occurs on the first line of the following form with the URL of the page on which you would like the results to occur.

<!-- Google CSE Search Box Begins -->
  <form id="searchbox_003084314295129404805:7bvp7badf0w" action="http://www.learningmovabletype.com/communitysearch.php">
    <input type="hidden" name="cx" value="003084314295129404805:7bvp7badf0w" />
    <input type="hidden" name="cof" value="FORID:11" />
    <input name="q" type="text" size="40" />
    <input type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" />
  </form>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=searchbox_003084314295129404805%3A7bvp7badf0w"></script>
<!-- Google CSE Search Box Ends -->

Then, on the results page, place the following code where you would like the results to appear:

<!-- Google Search Result Snippet Begins -->
<div id="results_003084314295129404805:7bvp7badf0w"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
  var googleSearchIframeName = "results_003084314295129404805:7bvp7badf0w";
  var googleSearchFormName = "searchbox_003084314295129404805:7bvp7badf0w";
  var googleSearchFrameWidth = 600;
  var googleSearchFrameborder = 0;
  var googleSearchDomain = "www.google.com";
  var googleSearchPath = "/cse";
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/afsonline/show_afs_search.js"></script>
<!-- Google Search Result Snippet Ends -->

<input type="hidden" name="cof" value="GALT:#0066A1;GL:1;DIV:#FFFFFF;VLC:654006;AH:center;BGC:FFFFFF;LBGC:FFFFFF;ALC:654006;LC:654006;T:2B1205;GFNT:2B1205;GIMP:2B1205;FORID:11"></input>

You can play around and experiment with the color values.

If you think a site should be included in this search engine, search for it first. If it isn't there, and you would like it to be, drop me a note in the comments.

Enjoy!

Replacing the date with <?php echo date('Y'); ?> will do the trick. For example, the copyright code for LMT is:

There's probably a way to do this just with using MT tags. Anyone know how? If so, please let us know in the comments and I'll add it to this post.