I received the official word today from the "powers that be" at pair.com that they will not adjust their Reaper settings to accommodate Movable Type and publishing via XML-RPC. I understand their desire to keep their servers safe and functional. It's good business practice. The thing that is a bit annoying is that I'm asking for support for something that is very common on the web. Commercial software that thousands of people use.
movable-typeI upgraded to MT3.1 last night. I haven't really done anything with it other than check out all the different interface pages. Since I had already been using MT3 for several months, 3.1 did not seem like that radical of an update. Obviously its support for dynamic pages is pretty huge but since as far as the interface went, that was relegated to 3 radio buttons on the Templates page it didn't appear significant.
movable-typeBoth my previous post and an update I did to it went through properly to my server. The Reaper didn't kill either. I don't dare hope that either pair.com has changed things to allow XML-RPC to function properly or MT3.1 changed things enough that it's no longer a problem. More likely this is more of the same thing I've been seeing for the last several weeks. Sometimes the posting works. Sometimes it doesn't.
movable-typeThe good news: Thanks to a lot of patience from the wonderful Adriaan and some great advice from the fantastic Ben Trott, we've figured out why I can't always successfully post to my website from ecto.
movable-typeI continue to have posting problems with ecto. I started searching the Movable Type forums to see if anyone has any ideas. I'm trying something out here to see if it helps.
movable-typeI would love to hear from anybody who has a Movable Type website hosted by pair.com and is using ecto to publish. I've been attempting to beta test the new version 2, but I've been having problems simply posting. Adriaan has said it's a rare thing that he's seen twice before where certain combinations of software don't work well with ecto. So if anyone is doing this please email or post a comment below. I'd be interested to find out about the version of MT, the version of ecto, whether you're using a cgi wrapper, what settings you had to change in your mt.cfg file, and any other tips or tricks you might have.
movable-typeThank you, Jay Allen, for creating such an amazing product. MT-Blacklist 2 is the coolest plug-in I've run on Movable Type---and I'm running Markdown which is super-cool in its own right, so I know how great plug-ins can be. In the 5 days since I started running it, I've blocked 231 comment and trackback spams. Prior to this I had moderation turned on for my comments so the spam never showed up but I'd still have to delete them from the database. And there was nothing I could do about trackback spam. It would show up on my site for as long as it took me to find it and delete it. With Blacklist I don't have to do that. It just doesn't show up. It's truly great stuff. Plus with the auto-update feature I always have the latest list of ne'er-do-wells and blackguards.
movable-typeIn honor of the new Blacklist 2.0e, it's open season on comments over here at MFTI. I've turned off moderation. I'm hoping that will encourage more people to join in the discussion. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Blacklist will be able to keep out most of the spam. Of course by signing up for a TypeKey account you can post comments to this weblog and many others around the world, quickly and easily bypassing the spam protection. So it's up to you.
movable-type
movable-typeThis is brilliant. Setting up Apache with virtual hosts on a local machine that mirrors a live server is a great idea for development. I've always setup other directories on the server, not accessible unless you knew what URL to enter. But with this method you wouldn't even have to be online all the time.
movable-typeI run a lot of different pieces of software to try and figure out what's going on with my website. Pair.com gave me the choice of Webalizer or Analog. Plus I've got Sitemeter and ExtremeTracking javascripts loading at the bottom of the pages. Not to mention my Refer page. Maybe it's overkill but this site is still in the "building" stage. How do most people find my site? Who are my return visitors? What pages are the most popular? That kind of thing.
movable-typeIt turns out that the email to Gallery gateway that I set up was uglier than I thought. I would strongly recommend not using these scripts to post photos from your camera phone to a webpage. I thought it was just that my implementation of procmail was bad because I didn't really know what I was doing. Well it was bad, but the scripts aren't very good either. At least the mimesave.pl one isn't. I'm still learning Perl so I only have a bit of an idea of what's going on, but it definitely does a few bad things. I would stay away from it unless you're willing to rewrite some sections. The parsing of the mime attachments is the real culprit. It decodes the mime attachment and reads the raw data into a new file and generates a random name for it with a .gif extension instead of looking at the actual name of the attached file.
movable-typeNo, this is not another Star Trek post. Nor a reference to the choice of Dave or Sammy in the new Van Halen greatest hits album. (We're all desparately trying to forget the fact that for a brief time there was a third.)
movable-typeI have been getting hit pretty hardcore with the Trackback Spam today. It seems that every time a take a look at my email there's another 50 messages from MT saying that I have new trackbacks. And they're not real trackbacks of people writing about something I wrote---they're links to sex sites. So every couple of hours I've been going in and clearing them out. It's not terribly difficult under MT3, but it is annoying. I sure hope that Blacklist 2.0 is released soon. (Hell, I'd even go for a beta! hint hint.)
movable-typeJay Allen creator of the amazing Movable Type plug-in, Blacklist, that helps greatly reduce the amount of comment and trackback spam on your website, just won the Grand Prize in the MT Plug-In Developer's Contest.
movable-typeWhen I did some upgrades to my website a week ago, I added in support for smilies. I used Lisa's excellent tutorial to set them up on my site. I'd suggest you do the same. I can offer one extra bit to make things go a little faster.
movable-typeThis one's painfully obvious when you think about it. Unfortunately I had get the author to explain it to me.
movable-typeIn the course of the most recent redesign of my website, I setup the various link lists on my site—Your Blogs, Favorite Sites, etc.—as separate weblogs that are fed into my main weblog. Anyone who has gone in and updated the templates in Movable Type knows what a pain it can be. By using a separate weblog for link lists with one entry per link, it is very easy to make changes to those lists.
movable-typeI said it would be back, and it is. I’ve brought back my Monsters from the Id title graphic. In that previous post I said I wouldn’t bring it back until “all the bells and whistles” were in place. Well, as anyone who does their own website probably knows, all the bells and whistles will never be in place. But I did do some major upgrades.
movable-typeIt figures. I don’t know whether it was Murphy or the previously mentioned “narrative convention” but the very instant that I installed Dean Allen’s excellent Refer scripts to keep track of referrals to the various pages of my website, I was referral porn spammed by a passing bot. I have now made some changes to the scripts to reduce referral spam. Hopefully that helps.
movable-typeThose folks over at Six Apart have updated their Movable Type licensing yet again. Personally I think they’ve got it perfect now.
movable-typeI made couple of upgrades to my site which you may have noticed in my last post. I installed Daring Fireballs’ excellent Markdown and Smarty Pants plug-ins.
movable-typeIf you're a repeat visitor to this website, you might have noticed that I have a few running threads. I make use of the Categories to "file away" posts in an appropriate area but I also link back to previous posts when appropriate and I have started sending Trackback pings to those posts so that people starting from the earlier post can continue the topic. A very recent example has been my look at various RSS newsfeed aggregators. (Well, to actually focus mostly on PulpFiction.) Even though I have Movable Type set to automatically ping posts that I link to on other servers, tt would not do it on my own. I would have to manually enter each of them.
movable-type