seanwillson.com

well i completed my upgrade to movabletype 3.0d. it was painful for a number of reasons, the biggest being that i am running on an iis server. i had lots of trouble getting my database to migrate over. if you have a lot of posts then be sure to use a web browser that has a long timeout period as it can take a really really long time to convert all of the database files. if it dies in the middle of the conversion, which it did a few times on me, then who knows what ya have then. my biggest suggestion to anyone upgrading is to back up your database a few times before you start this process.

my reasoning behind this upgrade is that i wanted the new administration controls over the site that 3.0d offers, but most of all i’ve been getting hammered with 20-30 spam per day and mt-blacklist wasn’t handling the job cleanly. plus the manual task of having to go clean them out was a pain in the butt. plus, if i didn’t have time the bad porn comments would be sitting on my site for a few days. i wanted to be able to control who was commenting or at least be more comfortable that they were being screened by me or typekey. no, i won’t close the comments up and i won’t be a comment nazi, i just don’t want people putting porn and other crap on my blog.

anyhow, there may still be some tweaks i need to make to my templates, but i’ll fix em as i find em. for now, you shouldn’t see any changes except in comment posting. there is a small but with iis and movabletype not setting typepad cookies right but the moderated comments should work fine. anyhow, i should be returning to regular posting now. it took a while to get the conversion done.

after the severe public backlash from movabletype weblog authors it seems that sixapart has decided to change their licencing/pricing scheme. they altered the sites and authors limitations in their various tiers to bring it more in line with their user-base. the change that effects me is that the low end personal edition now has 5 weblogs and 5 authors (up from 3 and 1) which brings it in line with my usage model. the pricing is still a bit high considering the feature set but i’m starting to think that i might give them a chance rather than jump. i’m going to look into it more and make sure that it fits my usage and make a decision from there. a few of the things i’m really looking for them to add are photo blogging, email posting support, and easier file uploading. time to think on it …

if your into blogging you likely saw news earlier this week about sixapart changing their usage policy of their movabletype blogging tool. they’re changing the terms from a free usage policy, with donations accepted, to an overpriced tool that hasn’t seen a decent feature added in a few years. they released the news on their (in)appropriately entitled blog, “it’s about time”. lets just say people were less than pleased with the changes. yes, movabletype is one of the most popular blogging tools on the market but i’d be willing to bet that’ll be changing soon.

i personally use movabletype for two blogs, my wife uses it, and i have a few private less known blogs. if i were to go forth and throw sixapart some of my cash i’d owe them around $99.95 for the same exact features that i’m currently receiving for free. i find it very troubling that they’re sticking their hands out without having innovated or added a new feature since i started using movabletype almost two years ago. it would be different if i felt like they were progressing their feature set, but that’s far from the truth. don’t take get me wrong, i’m happy to support software developers that have applications i use and enjoy. i’ve done it with net news wire, unison, omnioutliner, and many others … heck i even donated to sixapart when i first started using movabletype. i just have a certain standard that sixapart hasn’t met with this new 3.0 release or the past few releases for that matter.

thus begins my search for a movable type replacement, stay tuned for all of the fun. maybe i’ll throw a redesign in at the same time.

the final step in securing my website was to install the movabletype blacklist module that allows me to block and easily remove and rebuild my web pages when someone posts spam to my blog. i didn’t think it was going to be as easy as it was to install, but i was wrong. i installed it, added the latest master blacklist file, and filtered my entire website in under 10 minutes.

i noticed that my rebuild mod is listed as a potential incompatibility with mt blacklist. i am looking into the problem and hope to resolve it shortly, if it is in fact a problem.

update — i updated my rebuild mod to now also include the changes needed for mt blacklist integration. i have created a zip that contains all of my changes for mt v2.65 and mt blacklist v1.62. if your interested in this release you can download it here or get more information on my rebuild mod page.

i upgraded the mt rebuild type mod that i wrote a while back to work with movable type 2.65. i haven’t created the patches yet but i do have the downloadable zip file up there ready for use.

i’m in the process of upgrading movabletype to version 2.65. if the site misbehaves for a bit i do apologize. i’m upgrading so i can make some changes to stop all of the spammers from posting in my comments. they’re really starting to anger me.

i installed the demo version of netnewswire a few weeks back but was unable to get the weblog posting piece working. as you likely already know i’m running movabletype to run this blog. anyhow, i was ready to give up on netnewswire until i found a posting on the yahoo soap::lite perl forum that described my problem and provided a workaround.

in short if your running movable type and you use iis on windows (not that there is another operating system supported) and can’t seem to get xml-rpc, soap, or blogging tools working then you likely have this problem and don’t even know it. to fix it you have to open the HTTP.pm file in you extlib/SOAP/Transport/ directory. do a search on SERVER_SOFTWARE and the line before it occurs the first time place this snippit: undef $ENV{SERVER_SOFTWARE};

that’s it, the next time you try to xml-rpc, soap, or your favorite blogging tool (which all use xml-rpc) it should work. i hope this helps someone else as much as it helped me.