So the new version of Movable Type is out. And they've got a great promotion price for the personal editions only $39.95 (this promotion is now over)! Don't forget, they always have a free version for personal use which also has unlimited weblogs (the free version of the software is not disabled at all) but no support other than the forums.
If you have donated before, they let you apply a $20 credit from earlier versions and it makes it $19.95! It's “just” five authors (that's four more than I have), it's $30 more for unlimited authors. This is an awesome deal! Nothing like when they did the 3.x release upgrade that made everyone (not me) crazy about prices and limitations.
I'l probably be upgrading next week, once everyone else has worked out all the bugs ;)
So I've got a new very easy place to recommend to blog, it's called Easy2Blog. It's got loads of options and it's easy to configure. They'll do ad exchanges for you, an about me section, a blogroll-type thing, counter, rss, sydication badges that automatically add your blog to others myYahoo/feedburner/etc., commenting, easy to add photos to posts, search, counters and an easy way to add blocks of html for other services like blogrolling or whatever you'd like (you can easily reorder them too).
Testing a slight problem concern with posts and dynamic templates in Movable Type 3.16. They don't seem to be resetting the cache properly. Actually it's working to some extent, but it does take a while (close to an hour) for some of the pages to update; see below for more information.
Continue reading "Ignore this Movable Type dynamic cache test" »
So in the past eight days, MT-Blacklist stopped 1447 pieces of spam headed for my web site. It also prevented six duplicate posts (people hitting submit twice). That's pretty great!!
While I scroll through the logs, it's still a lot of “stuff” to sift through. My big question is: Has anyone tried to post in the last eight days and the system refused to let you post? Please e-mail me if you've recently had any problems.
I think I'm going to upgrade my site (starting tomorrow or Friday). So if there are any technical problems with comments or searching that's why. It might even cause some viewing problems but those will be temporary since I can at a minimum push the pages (or at least the main page) back on-line.
Warning! Extra-Geeky post:
I'm using MovableType 2.661 I'm missing having sub-categories and I was hoping some of the dynamic features might help speed up my rebuilds. I've also been getting really slow responses when posting comments. I do a lot of odd dynamic stuff already (the body of my messages only get built once (processed once) and they just get included everywhere else (although this isn't really helping me on rebuilds since it's probably rebuilding the pages anyways, it may actually be smarter than that). I use Mt-Blacklist and some other plug-ins. Some of my category archive rebuilds are really getting slow (I'm sure my date archives are slow two, but the categories just keep growing).
I was cleaning up one of my other web sites that I work on and I just accidently deleted all my pings/trackbacks back to this site. Fortunately there were only 23. The important this is that I noticed it just as I was about to delete all the comments for this site!!!!! That would have been hundreds of comments...
So I finally installed MT-Blacklist to help cut down on my comment (and trackback) spam. “Why?” you ask... Because after getting mildly annoyed here and there with the occasional comment spam (and the very rare trackback spam) I got hit with 470 trackback spams in one night! And another 30-40 the next day before I even had a chance to start deleting the others!
Let me tell you MT-Blacklist installed like a charm and in less time than it would have taken me to delete 100 spams it took care of all 470. That's the fastest I've ever hit a PayPal donation button!!!
Continue reading "MT-Blacklist Rules(!) for blog spam (and so does Jay Allen)" »
Mell (of Divergent Poles) was trying to understand what a trackback is, so I'm making this post as an illustration.
While creating this message there was an empty spot (just like there is a place for the title) to add trackbacks, since I'm referencing this post (i.e. I'm talking about Mell) I'm adding his trackback information to that spot. When I post this message it'll send a tiny message (called a trackback or sometimes referred to as a ping) to Mell's message and now he'll know I was talking about his post and get a better understanding of this (I hope). There is no indication on my site that I trackbacked him (other than me telling you), the main reason is to let him (and his readers) know I are talking about him and when others read his site they'll know I'm talking about Mell so they might follow the link to see what I say (in this case, if they want to know what I think a trackback is).
So it's been a year since I started this blog. I've typed hundreds of entries (I don't think I made the 500 mark yet). I've changed many parts of it:
I've tried to stay away from whining and complaining too much, but sometimes cars get broken into and sometimes people die and sometimes BK screws up my order so I need to vent a little. I'm about in the same place in life as a I was last year: single, childless and still looking to make those changes. (As much as people complain about it I'd rather be spending time this month assembling bicycles or cribs or whatever.)
Even though I created The Daily Meme I've become less of a meme-a-holic which I've been missing so I think I'll go back to those silly quizzes as a way to express things about myself...
So I've almost been posting for a year AND I'm almost to 500 posts. If I average my average number of posts per day I'll probably hit both at the same time.
I kinda jump from one end of the spectrum to the other (funerals to sappy TV shows to technology), I keep thinking that I'll break out the tech into it's own blog, but I can't decide it that's necessary. I've got an idea for a tech specific blog, and if I do that, then I'd have two tech blogs (extra geeky and semi-geeky) so I think I'll keep them together for now and if I go the other route I'll just keep the long tech reviews to the extra geeky blog.
I finally got a few comment spams. It's probably the only place I've ever mentioned the word c_sino (and I'm not going to say it again, it's that place where you go g_mbl_ng).
THis isn't any kind of an invite, but it's just weird how long it took and the fact that I make people type in that little code (like at ticketmaster) before they can post...
Nothing super significant: I'm using the columnize plug-in to save some space for my archives and categories, I'm using the more javascript to make the extended entry accessible on the main page, hmm... (I did a third thing too, something I found on Girlie's site while looking for something else...) Oh, at the bottom of the my main page, how I did the recent additional entries was an idea from Girlie. Of course this was all done with Movable Type from Six Apart.