Movable Type

Ben Hammersley: "The combination of comment spammers, and the database calls made by mt-comments.cgi and MT-Blacklist, is putting so much load on servers that the admins are having to pull sites down to save the others." I haven't used MT-Blacklist for my Movable Type sites, because I am loathe to trust third parties to provide up-to-date and correct blacklists. I'm having good results so far by simply closing old entries to comments and trackback. ... (read more)

You May Already Be a Winner

I received around 25 entries in the Movable Type Bible Desktop Edition book giveaway. Chosen at random from received comments and trackback, the five winners are Elise Bauer, Richard MacManus, Harrison Brace, Christian Crumlish, and Judi Sohn. I'm also sending one to Hanna for the shameless heart-wrenching tale of hard luck in her contest entry: I could mention that I'm ridiculously poor, being disabled and a ward of the state. But that would be demeaning, wouldn't it? I'll be fighting the ... (read more)Before you install MT-Workbench to close old Movable Type entries to feedback, take a look at Conversation Killer, the plug-in I wish I knew about before I did all of that coding. ... (read more)

New Movable Type Tool: MT-Workbench

I have released beta version 0.1 of MT-Workbench, a PHP class library that can close all weblog entries to comments and trackback after they become one week old. The open source library was written for a Movable Type weblog that uses a MySQL database. The library's closefeedback.php script can be run daily as a cronjob, closing old discussions so they can't be abused by comment spammers trying to boost their Google PageRank. So far, the results have been heartening on the Drudge Retort, which ... (read more)

Rebuilding Movable Type Entries by Cronjob

Thanks to a tip from Richard Eriksson, I've completed the Movable Type utility to close comments and trackback on all weblog entries after they become a week old. I will be releasing it tomorrow under the GPL, assuming it runs properly as a cronjob and closes these seven-day-old entries to new feedback. I couldn't get the script to work until I used Timothy Appnel's mt-rebuild utility to republish individual entries after they have been closed. I tried to use Ed Dumbill's excellent XML-RPC for ... (read more)

New: Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition

Hot off the presses: Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition, my new 410-page book on the current edition of the weblog publishing software. I wrote the book to encourage Movable Type webloggers to get into the advanced publishing capabilities of the software, such as template design, plug-in programming, and XML syndication with Atom and RSS. For the book, I spent six months combing over the Movable Type documentation, support forums, source code, and database. I stalked several coders who use ... (read more)

Closing Movable Type Comments

I'm winning the war on comment spam on Wordzilla, my homebrew weblog software, thanks to PHP code that rejects link-heavy comments and submissions from banned IP addresses. I'm losing on Movable Type and Manila. Both programs are being flooded with spam that has to be hand-deleted, a chore that's miserably time consuming in each. Six Apart enhanced Movable Type's comment-management features in version 3.1, but it can take up to five minutes to delete a group of spam comments on the Drudge ... (read more)

Handling 18.5 Janets of Web Traffic

The Drudge Retort was hammered yesterday, serving 10 gigabytes of traffic as thousands of people looked for exit polls and early election returns. The unit of measurement for traffic here is Janet Jackson's right breast, the exposure of which maxed out the shared SDSL connection on my old server. For seventeen straight hours, it served 144 kilobytes per second of traffic (1 Janet) to people on a fruitless search for celebrity mammary. Since that time, I have moved to dedicated server hosting ... (read more)

Turning Off the Radio

Because I wrote the book on Radio UserLand, my decision to stop using the software on Workbench has raised a few eyebrows.By tradition, the first thing a weblogger must do with new software is publish a vicious excoriation of the old software, warning others to keep away, like a courageous relief worker marking a land mine.Textbook example: When Mark Pilgrim concluded that a Movable Type licensing change would have cost him $535, he declared the software a dead end, switched to WordPress, and ... (read more)

Encoding XML in Movable Type Templates

Last week, I helped Jessamyn West fix a problem with the XML encoding of the RSS 2.0 feed on the Movable Type weblog she ran during the Democratic National Convention. West's feed couldn't be read successfully by the Convention Bloggers aggregator because of the following line: [more] This line produced output of this form: some entry text]]> [more] The block that begins with and ends with ]]> is character data in XML. The encode_xml attribute causes this encoding to take place, which ensures ... (read more)