Don't Back Down

I've been a bit under the weather this week. Returned from the weekend trip to a lovely bout with my own personal demon, epilepsy. It had been a couple of years since I had a seizure, so I guess my body figured it was time. I had two Monday night (into Tuesday morning, actually). What a pain. I've been mostly unable to speak for the last week, though that is getting better, and I haven't done much other than lie around and try and stay out of the way while my wife and parents try to get some things done around the house.

I have managed to catch up on MT-Moderate counting, however, and it's currently batting a stellar .995 (189 for 190). Much better than I could have hoped. One particular comment spammer that was trolling the site even seems to have decided to take a break for a while. I'm sure he'll be back. If not him, someone else.

Thanks to a suggestion by (and testing from) V.J., I've updated MT-Moderate so that it will work in conjunction with TypeKey authentication. This is the only change with this version. The standard approval routines will run as before, but only if this is not a TypeKey user. In that case, they will be approved automatically (so long as the TypeKey approval goes through).

Read "MT-Moderate 0.5.0" »

Following in the footsteps of those better than I, I've added an XML stylesheet to the main RSS index. For those of you reading through an aggregator of some sort, this should not matter one bit. For those of you who happen to click on the XML icon, it means you should see a prettier screen in those browsers that support it. Surprisingly, IE (version 6.0-something) does support the stylesheet, but it does lose a bit of the layout - namely, it's not centered in the browser window.

Even in better browsers, you'll notice some variance from the standard styles of the site - mostly to do with spacing between closely placed items. I'm not going to worry about this at the moment, as the primary motivation was to make using RSS easier for those who don't have it - but I may get around to tidying that up one day. Let me know what you think.

Thanks to wibbler for pointing out a problem with one of the subscription methods of MT-Notifier. I've fixed the code so that this method of subscribing will work now.

Read "MT-Notifier 2.2.0" »

Tonya Jameson of the Charlotte Observer recently penned an article with an interesting title: "Why Don't White People Mind Being Stereotyped?". I'm not quite sure how to react. There are all sorts of thoughts going through my head. For the record: I have no idea if the film in question is funny or not - but I do think that the Wayans brothers have had some good humor in the past. They've also had some pretty bad attempts at humor.

Read "Social Stereotypes" »

I've come to a conclusion today. I'm tired of programming for Internet Explorer. It's just too much of a pain. Look at my CSS. Scroll to the bottom - those subselects are to make things look right again in Mozilla-based browsers, because I had to intentionally break the primary method so that it looked okay in IE. So, starting today, I am no longer going to cater to Internet Explorer.

Right now, I'm looking at some sample pages in Firefox and the pages look great. The font rendering especially is awesome. Looking at the same identical code in IE - and simple code at that, as I'm just playing around - looks horrible. I'll try and post some screenshots when I get home.

Read "Change of Perspective" »

Ben and Mena are at center stage now, announcing the new Movable Type 3.1 product. It's scheduled to go into beta soon, and should be released next month. Ben said last night at the developer's dinner that it would be August 31 (cute again), but that date hasn't been mentioned again.

Read "Movable Type 3.1" »

I'm currently in the general session at the BlogOn 2004 event. I'll admit that I'm probably not paying nearly as much attention as I ought to. But if the folks around me are any indication, I'm not the only one whose concentration is currently focused somewhere else. In any case...

Last night, we found out about the winners of the Plug In to Movable Type developer's contest (I won a third prize for MT-Notifier). Then a bunch of mostly developer-types - in which I include myself, even though I'm not sure that I'm completely deserving - went out to dinner.

Read "BlogOn Conference" »

I'll admit that I'm not an expert on language - even (or especially) English. I leave things dangling and jam sentences together and all sorts of things. But still, I can't help but notice when people who write for a living make mistakes. Shouldn't these people, who earn their living writing, be able to construct a simple sentence?

Read "Moron Language" »

Man, don't know if everyone's been seeing the same thing, but I've been receiving way more comment spam than I had at any point in recent memory. Today even saw a few different folks take a stab at it. I don't really think that it's MT-Moderate - the little plugin that could really doesn't do that much, and is completely useless on entries less than 7 days old.

Does that tell us anything? Maybe. Since I've been paying attention, it seems like most of my comment spam would probably be defeated even if I was only excluding entries over three months old. Only two of the last 40 or so comments I've received that contain spam are even from this calendar year! One of those just happened to be an entry that was quite old (almost exactly a year), but had a comment approved recently. Less than two days, in fact. So it was approved, too. In response, I changed the filter on MT-Moderate to only allow automatic approval if the most recently approved comment was less than 1 day old. Nothing else has come through - but to be fair, nothing else has been excluded by that filter, either.

Read "Comment Spamathon" »

In an "exclusive" to the Charlotte Observer, we find that current North Carolina governor Mike Easley has failed to nominate a Poet Laureate. The post has apparently been vacant since December of 2002.

Read "Newsworthy in NC" »