Ten Reasons Why

Yeah, so I spent a couple hours wrangling around with Movable Type last night. I don’t know why. I’d had a lousy day of wrangling with other various bits of software, projects, and people at the office, plus I skipped lunch, so i don’t know what made me think that coming home and before eating dinner deciding to entirely redesign a site I hadn’t touched in two years.
Glutton. For. Punishment.
It could have gone horrifically wrong. I could have gotten in way over my head, what with the HTML and the CSS and the templates and the MT settings and the repeated clicking of the rebuild button. I could have totally lost it and left the job halfway done, and you could be reading this in 12-point Times Roman on a gray background just like 1996. And it did look dicey there for about 30 minutes when I couldn’t figure out why every time I rebuilt the site Movable Type insisted on not rebuilding all the archives. (Answer: set some more radio button preferences and a drop-down or two plus checking the Movable Type documentation. I hate it when I have to RTFM.)
In the end, though, I pulled it off and ordered pad thai to celebrate. The site looks . . . well, it looks like about 2003 instead of 1996. Literally. Those of you who somehow still have me in your feed reader since the days back when I was posting regularly may recognize the same green color scheme and the banner image from a previous design. Stick with what I know how to do.
A couple of years ago, I attempted a much more ambitious site re-design that did go horrifically wrong, and I wound up just slapping up some goofy black-and-orange Movable Type template that I pulled off a free template site. And there it stayed for years, sorta like the stack of boxes sitting next to my desk that I put there when I moved into my condo several years ago. (There’s probably something really important and life-changing in those boxes, but it’s been so long I no longer have any clue what’s in there. It’s like a personal time capsule. One day I’ll get around to opening them up, and then it’ll be all like “Ohhhh, that’s where i left that coffee can full of diamonds!”)
There’s still some hinky stuff. One bit of hinkiness being that if you’ve subbed to my RSS feed, you probably got a full feed of old posts from me when you woke up this morning. Sorry ’bout that. And I’m not gonna be winning any design awards. I expect I’ll want to screw around with colors and line spacing and font sizes . . . or maybe just not touch it for another two years. And, oh yeah, I haven’t even looked at it in Internet Explorer yet, so it may look like ass in IE. But, really, if you’re using IE, just frickin’ switch to Firefox or Safari already. I’m so over you IE users and your quirks.
Anyway. There you have it: Ten Reasons Why slightly updated for the tail end of the decade, but still kicking it with the old school charm. :-)
Now all I have to do is write.

Movable Type, Weblogs

John Dennett was kind enough to point out that TypeKey was upchucking all over anyone who tried to comment on my blog.
Don’t know what the problem was. I went through step after step resetting up the TypeKey authentication service for commenting, but it just wouldn’t stick. Finally, I just created a new TypeKey account and that seemed to work. Guess the initial TypeKey account was corrupted somehow.
Dennett was kind enough to say in his email that the horked TypeKey connection was “probably why you’re not getting any comments on your blog.”
The other (more likely) reason is that I’ve only posted six times in the last year — and 2/3 of those in the last week. Not exactly blazing a trail for loyal followers, am I?
For some reason, I’m feeling a little bloggier these days, so maybe the more frequent postings will persist for awhile.

Movable Type, Weblogs

grit-ti-fy
v. grit-ti-fied, grit-ti-fy-ing, grit-ti-fies
v. tr.

1. To mangle or complicate an activity beyond recognition, such that it may require the intervention of another to correct. E.g., These Movable Type templates are totally frickin’ grittified.

[Slang: derived from the IRC username "gritter," itself a derivation of the proper name, "Greg Ritter."]
Synonyms: hork

Movable Type

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

New MT Wiki to serve as a knowledge base for MT-related things. (Link via CogDogBlog.)
Speaking of Alan at CogDogBlog, I finally caved in, took his lead on MT spam management and installed the MT-Blacklist plug-in. I also started using the MT-CloseComments plug-in to close older comment threads.
All this even despite the crystal-clear validity of Mark Pilgrim’s explanation of why trying to combat weblog spam this way is futile in the long haul.

Movable Type

Jay Allen has written and released a Movable Type anti-spam plug-in called MT-Blacklist. [link via cogdogblog]
So far my strategy to avoid comment cruft has worked perfectly fine, but it’s good to know there’s another solution out there if I need it.

Movable Type

I’ve been slightly annoyed recently by the minor outbreak of inane comments posted by the intellectually inept who wind their way to some years old post via a search engine. Comments of this nature tend to be more annoying than offensive, and sometimes are just pathetic in their lack of basic reading comprehension.
But more disconcerting is the recent outbreak of comment spam. In the last week, I’ve deleted at least a half dozen or more advertisements for penis enlargement pills, viagra, and other questionable products that were posted to comments on random blog entries. Seems like I’m not alone either [1, 2, 3, 4, etc.].
I’ve seen a few methods [1, 2] for stopping this that involve multiple customizations to Movable Type.
For the time being, though, I’ve finally converted the backend of my Movable Type installation to MySQL* and used this close comments script (which you actually have to get here now) to close comments on all posts older than 21 days. Not only does this decrease the annoying crufty responses, but I hope that it will also limit some of the targets for the vulgar spam.
I’m seriously considering changing my policy of having open comments on every new post. I might just open up comments for the posts that I want people’s feedback on. That seems a shame, but I spend enough time filtering spam from my email inboxes. I don’t want to have to do the same with my weblog.
* That also explains why the Last Modified date for every post on this weblog is now 5:53pm yesterday. Argh.

Movable Type, Weblogs

Anybody want to build me a Movable Type plug-in that automatically closes comments on an entry after a set time period and retroactively closes comments on old posts? There’s beer in it for ya!

Movable Type

Anybody have an idea for how to close comments on Movable Type en masse?
I found two (count em: one, two), techniques for doing it if you set up MT with a MySQL back-end. Unfortunately, I’m using the default Berkeley DB option, so neither of those tricks work for me.
Ideas? Thanks in advance.

Movable Type

Beyond the Blog is a brief tutorial from Matt Haughey, creator of Metafilter amongst other websites, on how to use Movable Type as a more complete site management system, not just a weblog authoring tool. Neat ideas that I may need to implement, including this way to use MT for static pages (from Brad Choate).

Movable Type