BurningbirdThe discussion continues on comment spamming and a couple of people have taken my initial quick fix and expanded on it nicely.
Jennifer from Scripty Goddess has taken to solution into the MT tmpl files, adding the hidden field to processing.tmpl.
Brad Choate came up with a fairly complex solution that, while not keeping a determined spammer out, would force the person to work for their spam.
Joni Electric has a good re-cap of effort to date.
(Found through trackback, by the way.)
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Christine staged a Blog Debate, during which Ciscley commented about guys being reluctant to move to Moveable Type because it’s popular. She wrote:
I think (I *know* in my personal blogging circle and I’m generalizing from there) that most of the people that are uncomfortable with the popularity of MT are guys. It’s like it’s a dirty blog word to every guy I know. They use phpWeblog (though I still have to design their layouts for them cause the interface only goes so far). They use geeklog. They’ve thought about pMachine. They’re willing to try anything and everything but MT.
Is it because so many women use and love MT? Is it because MT, if you don’t actually use it and know what a huge part of it Ben does, appears to be the creation of a woman? Is it taking something away from the all male tech industry to consider that a product inspired by or significantly designed by a woman is the best option out there?
Jonathon picked up on it, writing:
There are so many things to like about Movable Type—reliability, elegant interface, customizability, MySQL support, vibrant user community—but what could be more intriguing than Ciscley’s hypothesis of gendered MT use? Has Mena’s contribution influenced the software to the extent that it attracts a disproportionately high proportion of female users?
Christine picked up on both Ciscley’s and Jonathon’s comments, so it will be interesting to see if there is any form of debate on this.
A gender bias with Movable Type just isn’t something I’ve seen. I would imagine that there is a strong gender bias with the other weblogging tools that Ciscley has mentioned, but not with MT.
Any initial reluctance to adopt MT is based on the installation, which can be a hassle for non-techies. However, this seems to effect both men and women equally, and is really dependent on how comfortable the person is with Perl and CGI. Once installed and used, though, MT users can be fanatical in support, regardless of gender. I know — I’m a fanatical MT user.
(“Hello, my name is Burningbird, and I’m addicted to Moveable Type.”)
Why do I like MT? Because it’s a lovely, lovely piece of software. Powerful enough for all my needs, hooks that allow one to tweak if we wish, and now it has the MySql backend, which for a data person such as myself, is pure heaven, with little chocolate sprinkles on top.
Hmmm. Come to think of it, if Movable Type is an example of software resulting from a paired man/woman collaboration team, then I think it’s time for the software industry to look at its development practices.
(Notice how I didn’t once use “—ism”? I’m getting better. And Christine, I have Trackback enabled. Do I get a cookie? Sorry for the double ping, but MT went crazy — it pinged you three times, blo.gs, weblogs.com, and my mother. It also scritched my kitty underneath her neck, and washed the dishes in passing.)
It’s not often that one can room with an ex-husband and manage to remain best friends. It just goes to show that though I may be firey, difficult, opinionated and hard to live with online, I’m a soft, loveable, easy going charmer offline.
Well, no, not really, but it was a nice try.
Anyway, the roomie and I visited downtown St. Louis Saturday afternoon and by impulse decided to ride the tram to the top of the Arch.
Before going further, it’s important to know that I’m slightly afraid of heights, though it’s manageable. I have no problems in tall buildings, on bridges, or on hills, but I can get uncomfortable with open stairways — I get dizzy for some reason. I’m also a bit afraid of tight, closed spaces, though it’s also manageable. I love caves, but the roof has to be at least a foot over my head; I’m not one to crawl through tight spots.
Anyway, back to the story.
We stood in line to go through security, which only took about 20 minutes. And then we stood in line to be admitted to the waiting area for the tram. Another 20 minutes. Then we stood in an inner waiting area for about 25 minutes. We were finally allowed in to the stairs for loading on to the tram. The wait there was only about 6 minutes, giving me enough time to realize that the entrance for the tram was about 4 feet tall and about half that wide.
The guide joked with the crowd, “I hope you’re not afraid of heights or are claustrophobic”. HaHaHaHaHaHa.
When the tram arrived and the door opened, these people crawled out of this little egg like thing with five seats crammed into a space that could easily fit two.
Rob and I were the last on, which means we were right next to the door. The door with a glass window. The door with a glass window overlooking a great, big, tall stairway. The door with a glass window overlooking a great, big, tall stairway, all viewed from the inside of a little itty bitty living space. For four minutes. And they didn’t provide Tic Tacs.
Next time I get an impulse, I hope someone hits me.
In the meantime, thanks to Norm Jenson for feeding my Tim Tam habit…
…and get off your butt and vote tomorrow.
If change is good, then I’m heading into truly grand times.
Effective now, the domains yasd.com, dynamicearth.com, p2psmoke.org, and burningbird.net (and several others) have been merged into the primary domain of burningbird.net. I’ll be using Movable Type to manage the content for all, but instead of creating a ‘weblog’ for each domain, I’m creating one for each sub-directory: Articles, Distributed Bits, Interactive, Tutorials, Expressions, OpEds, and so on. Then I’ll use categories to mark each item as “YASD”, “Dynamic Earth”, “P2P Smoke”, and use the MT category tag to load related logos and style sheets.
A small application will then poll new items from each sub-directory’s RSS file, as well as this weblog, and roll them into one main Burningbird RSS file — burningbird.rdf. That’s the file I’ll ask people to subscribe to. A little PHP application embedded into the burningbird.net main page will display the contents of this file.
All the older tutorials, articles, etc. will be converted into the Movable Type content management system, and I’ll use my PostCon post-content management system to re-direct the pages to the new locations. Since I don’t have Tomcat/JSP with this move, I’ll be using the PHP-based PostCon system.
Old weblog postings archives will remain, but I’ll be removing the comment form from the pages because when I remove any entry, the comments will be effectively orphaned.
Another major change I’ll be making is moving the technology-related weblog postings into appropriate locations within the entire system (such as Distributed Bits or Tutorials). Since all the Burningbird weblogs use the same numbering system, this is as easy as modifying the blog identifiers in a couple of tables. I’ll also be moving all political postings to the OpEd sub-directory.
During all of this, I’m going to be using Movable Type and RSS, but I’m not going to be writing about either (except a post-mortem document after all the changes are implemented, complete with links to source code). I need to re-focus my technology energies back into applications that I can demonstrate to potential employers, such as my PostCon system.
I found out the hard way in the last few weeks that many employers have never heard of weblogging, and could care less about weblogging. Talking about technology in relation to weblogging won’t get me a job.
As for the weblog, I’m going to be focusing on my mix of writing combined with photography, as was demonstrated in Wrapped in the Warmth of Glory or Parable of the Languages. Marc’s Voice, who linked to the Wrapped posting calls this type of writing, Multimedia Conversations. This is type of writing I love, and this is the type of writing I want to do in this weblog.
As for writings about the neighborhood — one whole new sub-directory is called Neighborhood, and is specifically for metablogging and my virtual neighborhood.
Watch me now as I light a match to this weblog.
The nameserver change has finally propagated throughout the universe of the Internet and you should all have access to this page on the new server. Additionally, you should be seeing HTML pages rather than PHP pages for the individual entries and category archive pages.
In the next few weeks, Burningbird, and all my other web sites will be going through a mergence as well as a re-birth. I’ll be using this opportunity to introduce Movable Type as a content management system for all of my web sites, and do some drastic clean up and re-organization (not to mention seeing what I can do to make sure my pages are accessible and utilize CSS as much as possible). Fun, but a lot of work.
In the meantime, the old PHP archive pages are found in the archives sub-directory so that any links won’t break; but the new archived entries will be in the fires sub-directory.
The folks at Hosting Matters have been nothing less than phenomenal with this move. It’s not easy moving from your own server to a shared environment where you don’t have root access, and I had a lot of questions and concerns. However, the HM support people have been more than patient with me. I have also become quite attached to the Control Panel that Hosting Matters uses — it really is extraordinary.
One problem we ran into is that my old hosting company and the new weren’t exactly in synch with nameserver entries and my old host literally hijacked my domain name back to the old server this morning. I talked to them today to make sure this wouldn’t happen again and Annette from HM also reloaded the nameserver zone files to make sure that the nameserver changes are propagated correctly, once again. At this time several of my domains point to the new server, and several still to the old — including Chris’ domain and weblog, EmptyBottle. However, the doman names should resolve to the correct IP by tomorrow — knock on wood.
As we were fighting the nameserver problem this morning, it reminded me of one of my all time favorite songs, which I thought I would share (2.1M MP3, or 270k Real Audio file).
Come to think of it — this song is a perfect theme song to go with Mike Golby’s skateboarding adventures.