Ten Reasons Why

Hrm. Well, since I woke up and shook the dust off good ol’ Ten Reasons Why, I decided I needed to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Movable Type — specifically, version 3.2. All went well with the upgrade (nice new icons on the admin interface, Six Apart buds), but somewhere along the way I got the bright idea that it would be smart to “refresh” the templates, since the documentation indicates that the new refresh feature would back up the old templates and replace them with the default templates.
Eh. Not so much.
I presume that probably is true if you are your modified templates use the default template names, but since I’d mucked about with my template naming conventions, I’ve managed to hork the site design. Oh well. It was long past overdue a redesign, especially since I never totally completed the previous redesign (c. January 2004) — the comments and trackback pages were never right and the archives were kinda hinky. So I guess I get to stretch the HTML & CSS muscles as well.
I do wish I’d remembered to take a screenshot of things before I commenced with the horking.
Note: hork isn’t really a word, but fun to use anyway.

Movable Type

Didn’t think you were ever gonna see another post here, didja?
I’ve been on self-imposed hiatus for about a year and a half, but this site is still live, still gets hit from some random search queries, and (at least for a while) still got hammered by link spammers. (More on that later.)
The real news is I’m back blogging, but not here at good ol’ Ten Reasons Why. I’m part of the blogging team for Blackboard’s new blog, Educate/Innovate. Blackboard is my employer, of course, so I get to blog about educational technology and get paid for it.
Well…really, I mostly get paid for the boatload of other stuff that I do for Blackboard as Associate Director of Research & Development, but we can pretend that some micro-fraction of my salary covers the blogging that I’ll be doing on Educate/Innovate. And, hey, guilt-free blogging at work is never a bad thing. No more hiding the blog entry window when the boss walks in my office. ;-)
Anyway, after D’Arcy mentioned that he still had 10RW’s feed in his subscriptions, I figured that it might be worth shaking the dust off 10RW to see if anybody else was waiting for me to wake up.
Anybody out there?
Oh yeah…the spam story.
Sometime last year, I was searching the 10RW archives for an idea I’d written down…oh, somewhere between 2000 and 2004, I guess, and was a bit mortified to find that I’d been the victim of link spammers. I started manually deleting all the spammy trackbacks, but quickly realized that wasn’t going to work.
A few minutes mucking around in MySQL (thank god for the four SQL statements I know) determined that there were roughly TWENTY-SEVEN THOUSAND trackback spams on my blog. Sigh. There followed some minor MySQL kung fu to get rid of all the entries, an upgrade to Movable Type 3.17, an upgrade of the wonderful MT-Blacklist plug-in, some altering of script names, some closing of past comments and trackbacks, yadda yadda yadda. Apparently, good ol’ Ten Reasons Why is relatively spam free now . . . assuming you’re not counting my own writing in that category. ;-)
Hugs and kisses. Come visit at the new digs.

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