Categories
Blog

Word Press Still Rocking

Quick status update on the migration to WordPress:

I’m still tweaking, but the site is coming back. Lots of the rendering quirks should be gone at this time. XHTML validation should work for most pages.

Kitten’s Spaminator royally kicks butt. Very good spam protection.

Seems to be quite a few useful plugins. Mobile support seems to be functioning correctly. Those with a cell phone or pda capable of viewing non-wap mobile browsing (HTML), shouldn’t have an issue here πŸ˜€

Another great thing is dynamic pages. It would sound more efficient to create static pages, but apparently it isn’t: When a spammer is attacking the comment area, they tend to post in batches of 4 (or more). MovableType then regenerates the page, causing a significant spike is CPU and RAM consumption. WordPress only has to add an entry to the DB. Then it’s done. By using Kitten’s Spaminator, it prevents even that from happening without good reason.

Unless I get slashdotted, I think this is a much better solution. What would be best is if my host would install MMCache. MMCache would also benefit Smarty based applications.

But regardless… as good as MovableType was. WordPress seems to be better.

Categories
Blog

Jay Allen takes a break and the Internet Chokes

Jay Allen takes a break, and myself, and many others are being pounded by spammers. His last update seems to have been 2004-10-30 16:18:38+01:00. Since then, it’s been a nightmare. At least 50 since I went to bed last night (at 2:00 AM). Now at 10:00 (no morning classes, so I slept in until 9:00), I’m cleaning up from a few hours sleep.

There’s got to be a real solution to comment spam.

I’m still considering switching to WordPress since I know PHP rather well, and use a nice CAPTCHA system to protect the blog.

Categories
Software

A curious note about MovableType 3.x

A curious note on Jay Allen’s Blog:

If you run a non-profit multi-author blog (or any type that requires payment) you should contact 6A to get better (read: perhaps $0) licensing terms. They’ve asked people to do that because they aren’t in the business of milking those who are doing good and interesting things but can’t pay.

[Source: MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse @ 10/26/2004 10:40 AM EST ]

I know many are upset over the new licensing. Perhaps this will convince people that SixApart isn’t the next evil empire.

Categories
Blog

MovableType 3.1

Sweet, perhaps blogging won’t suck for much longer. Looks like MovableType is working on some stuff.

Some things l think are pretty interesting:

Dynamic PHP publishing, controllable on a per-template basis: You can control whether you publish a dynamic or static page on a per-template basis, letting you balance the publishing and traffic for your weblog. For example, high-demand documents like XML syndication files can be static, for maximum speed and lower server load, and individual post archives can be dynamic, eliminating the need to rebuild pages when making a global template change.

Now being a PHP developer, this sounds pretty good. But I’m curious about performance. I personally prefer static pages whenever possible. But I wouldn’t mind having some PHP in there.

Subcategories: A new category management interface gives you fine-grained control over the organization and display of your posts. You can even easily move a subcategory from one parent category to another.

Where have you been for so long?

Then of course this plugin pack:

  • MT-Blacklist: a comprehensive spam-blocking and management system for comments and TrackBacks, with an advanced interface and remote importing of blacklist entries.

My prayers are answered.

  • XSearch/Plus: A system which allows you to plug in alternate search engines for Movable Type. This includes a working implementation of a powerful Plucene-based search engine.

Very cool, but again I question performance and server load.

  • KoalaRainbow: A visualization engine for Movable Type which uses its own query language to generate graphics based on arbitrary queries of data in your Movable Type system.

Cool. Personally I would vastly prefer out-of-the-box Gallery integration.

  • Markdown: A simple text markup language which allows you to create posts in plain text and have them display in semantically correct valid XHTML.

People who know me, know I love HTML, and find it geeky to play with. But I wouldn’t mind seeing what this is about. From looking at the webpage, it really kicks butt. So I would love to take a spin. And considering it’s GPL, I might just use that elsewhere.

On a little tangent, that would be pretty spiffy for bugzilla.

  • Notifier: An email notification system which lets your readers subscribe to be notified whenever an individual post, a category, or even an entire weblog is updated. There’s also a complete system for managing subscriptions.

Would anyone go for this if I set it up?

Categories
Blog

MT 3.0 upgrade

Upgraded to MovableType 3.0 tonight. So far, smooth.

I’ve got one question though:

Anyone know of a hack to get MT to correctly encode HTML entities? Hence making & &? I’d appreciate any help. It’s an essential little hack if you expect any page generated by MT to validate.

Other than that, seems good to go. Post any issues you might have.

BTW: It’s not required yet, but signup for TypeKey. If Spam continues, I might eventually require it. But for now, I’ll leave it off, and see how we do.

For the curious, the upgrade took about 1hr in total for all the installing, playing, config etc.

Much faster performance. Especially posting/rebuilding.

That’s all, good night.

Categories
Software

Movable Type 3.0?

Well MovableType 3.0 has been released.

Not to thrilled about the new licensing. Not even sure if I should upgrade, or look at alternatives like WordPress, which looks really interesting. So I’m curious what other bloggers intend to do?

Personally I wish SixApart went for a more developer, community friendly model. Release the source under something like MPL. And sell the support, installation, and custom features/development. Wouldn’t require as much developers since people would join in and commit code. And would let them focus on larger things like TypePad (which could adopt contributed MovableType code), as well as custom jobs for larger companies looking for CMS. Combine that with a donation model.

They would cut their costs, and increase their productivity if they were smart about it. Now they are going to need to compete more with alternative platforms like WordPress, and I’m sure the many others that will come about in the next few months.

I’m personally a little more interested in what WordPress is going to evolve into in the coming months. They may have a new convert. I’m not to far from switching.

Categories
Programming

Update Movable Type, Blog Spam,

As the blogging community knows, MovableType (software that powers this blog) has been updated.

I upgraded this morning, and applied a little patch to replace characters such as & with their HTML entities (so the validator doesn’t bark).

If anyone notices an issue with the blog, please contact me and let me know. I don’t think there are any from what I can see.

On a side note, for a few weeks, I’ve been employing Jay Allen’s MT Blacklist. With great success I might add. One slipped by the other day, and that’s because I didn’t update the blacklist for a while. Now I’m more religious about it.

Now to tend to whatever is causing Bender to crash.

Categories
Mozilla

Movabletypezilla.

Ben Goodger discussed the idea of making an XUL based Blog posting window.

I’m currently working on it. Can be seen here. Far from done, but a great way to learn XUL!

Quite impressive what one can do so easily. XUL is pretty cool.

πŸ˜€

Categories
Blog

What’s Playing revamped (part 1)

I got around to modifying the “What’s playing” (left of the page). It now makes links out of the songs that have/are playing. Hopefully later today I will break it up so that the artist name becomes the search term (that should be much more accurate). Of course buying the song makes me some $$$, so by music!