One thing about the default Movable Type setup that doesn’t work very well is the way that the index (“main”) page picks entries to display. Specifically, it shows all the entries created in the last 7 days. This is fine if you write at least a few times a week, but what if you lapse for a while? Look what’s happened to Eric! You can set MT to always show the last N entries (e.g., I had mine set to 5 for a while), but that’s no good if you are very verbose occasionally, and want entries to stick around for a few days before they drop off the main page.

I couldn’t figure out a way to solve this with the standard MovableType built-in tags, so I wrote my own. MTIndexEntries is a plugin that lets you show both the last week’s entries and the last 5 entries (only showing each entry once, of course, and in the proper order):

<MTIndexEntries days="7" lastn="5">
<!-- your entry tags -->
</MTIndexEntries>

I don’t feel like writing any documentation today, so all I’ve got is the plugin and the example above. But please feel free to give it a try.