Don't Back Down

Movable Type version 3.2, released in April of 2007, included a plugin known as SpamLookup. This plugin was able to submit comments to a lookup service (hence the name of the plugin) to one of a number of blacklist services, which in turn would determine if the IP address used for the comment submission is suspicious, allowing you to better judge if you had encountered a spam comment.

However, way back in May of 2007, Six Apart released a guide on updating your spam filters for the plugin. Without the change, your comment-posting process will be horribly slow, because the process has to timeout before it will continue. Also, the default for the other service probably isn't the best (though that isn't mentioned). Want to know more? Read on!

Read "Update Your Movable Type Spam Filters (Please)" »

From time to time, I am asked how to display related entries on a Movable Type-powered site (and I frequently have to look it up myself), so I figured that I'd document it here.

While there are plugins that do the work, they typically depend on another value (usually categories, keywords or tags - sometimes a combination of those), and the problem with those is that they depend on humans to first enter that value. If you forget to do so, then it means the related entries won't work until you go back and enter it. If you enter the wrong value, you get the wrong results. There has to be a better way. Luckily, there is.

Read "Displaying Related Entries on your Movable Type Site" »

If you've been reading the blog for the last little while, you know that I've been hanging out on Plurk recently. Naturally, that means that I have been playing with Plurk as well, and trying to integrate it into my daily routine. When I used Twitter, it meant that I used Twitterfeed to create Tweets from the entries that I posted here. The problem is that Plurk has no such interface, as it doesn't have an API, so no such solution exists.

Luckily, Plurk power-user Ryan Lim came to the rescue. Not long ago, he released RLPlurkAPI, a PHP-based API into Plurk. It's not an official API, but it's good enough to allow outside services to access Plurk from the outside. It isn't Twitterfeed either, but what it did was allow people such as myself to see that it's possible to access the system from the outside. Unfortunately, I still couldn't do it, and I needed some more help.

Read "Integrating Your Movable Type Site with Plurk" »

If you read the post where Andy talks about releasing the Automattic stats plugin for self-hosted WordPress, he mentions a few things that make it interesting - notably that the system "only supports WordPress". Then he also mentions that anyone with a thorough understanding of WordPress and XMLRPC could clone the plugin to make it work with other platforms.

I don't claim to have such knowledge (of either WordPress or XMLRPC), but I think I've managed to do just that. Make it work with another platform, I mean. Some time ago, I managed to get the blog registration piece working, which really wasn't that hard - you simply pass some data to the system along with your API key and in return you get your blog registered. Not too bad. Then I ran into a speed bump of rather monumental proportions. Actually it wasn't that the bump was particularly large, it's that I hit it and then had about a million other things to do. So I put everything on the back burner.

Read "Automattic Stats for Movable Type" »

Back in December, I put together a script for converting RightFields data to CustomFields. This was mostly for me, but I had a few people request this sort of thing, and I had grown tired of doing it by hand, since I'm inherently lazy. There were two problems with this script. The first was that it didn't do data stored in custom SQL datasources. Unfortunately it was just too hard to figure out. That's not to say that I couldn't make it work, but I wasn't able to do it in an automated fashion.

The second problem was that it left out a few people who had some data that they might want: Namely those with data stored in file fields (usually a file name, such as that you might use for an image). These fields can be somewhat complex, but if it's just a name, then it's not typically a problem in converting the data. So it may be okay to convert it. Still, you should probably be aware that a one-to-one conversion of this sort does have some potential pitfalls. The most common was that CustomFields doesn't have an upload option, but you also can't do things like extra file path information. So if you decide you want to convert the filename, you should be aware of these potential downfalls. It's better than nothing, however.

Read "Converting RightFields to CustomFields, Now with SQL Goodness!" »

When Six Apart released Movable Type 4.1, with it they released an entirely new commenting architecture. And technically, the foundation was laid with MT4 - but let's face it, until 4.1 came out, MT4 was a bit lacking. So I'm sticking with 4.1 for this example. Sorry.

In any case, if you install Movable Type 4.1 for the first time, you'll probably be set - because you'll be starting from scratch. But if you take an existing installation and try to upgrade your site - specifically your comment process - so that it will work in 4.1, you might have some issues. Luckily, it's a really easy fix. It's just not particularly apparent how you should make the fix, which leads to a very frustrating process to get them working again, and that in turn leads to a whole mess of time wasted. Hopefully this entry will help you get things on the right track again.

Read "Upgrading Movable Type Comments to 4.1" »

With version 3.31 of Movable Type, the product began shipping with feeds.app lite, which allowed some simple abilities for republishing the content of other feeds on your site, through the use of Movable Type template tags. This plugin was a great step forward, and expanded on earlier plugins that did similar things, but in fact, it is the less-capable sibling of the (much) more powerful feeds.app from Appnel Solutions.

The primary difference between the two is that feeds.app lite allows you to pull some basic information out of the feed, while feeds.app allows you to get anything at all - it's much, much more powerful (and it also has a price tag associated). Unfortunately, feeds.app, while insanely powerful, also has caused some signficant hair-pulling to get things working from time to time. It's a shame, because it's a good plugin. Some of the problem is a conflict between the default feeds.app lite plugin and the full-featured feeds.app plugin. Some is that there are a lot of requirements (that ship with the plugin), and it appears that many systems just don't support everything that you need to get it working. Because of that, I have recently been looking for an easier solution, and I think I've found one in Feed Digest.

Read "Using Feed Digest to Republish Feed Content on Your Site" »

One of the more challenging pieces of the Movable Type administration interface in version 4 is the syntax highlighting when you are editing your templates. That's not to say that the highlighting is entirely bad, because it can be nice, and brighten your day. Rather than having a plain old black and white text box, you get colors, and line numbers, and it does make things work a bit better. In 4.0, however, you had problems with cutting and pasting. Though improved in 4.1, there are still some problems - notably slow load times.

While you can disable the syntax highlighting (known as CodePress) by clicking on a button, the problem is that the script still loads and processes the data on-screen before disabling the editor, meaning that load times can still be slow. What's worse is that the preference is stored in a cookie, so if you're on another computer, or if another user logs in, the highlighting comes right back. Because of this, I've seen repeated requests on disabling the highlighting permanently. Unfortunately, you can't just remove the codepress directory or you'll get an error and be unable to edit your templates at all. Luckily, there is a solution.

Read "Disable Template Syntax Highlighting in Movable Type 4" »

Much of today, twitterfeed has been down. Which is okay - it just means that my blog posts don't get into my Twitter stream (just one of the reasons I don't like depending on third-party services). Last week, John Chow announced that he had set another new record, with more than $30,000 in income. Unforunately, if you haven't read the report, you may not be able to do so, because his site has been responding horribly of late (at least for me). I don't know what's happening for John - if it's a problem with his server, his software, or if he's just bogged down because of the latest numbers.

Frankly I don't care that much because I keep up with his blog through Google Reader, so I don't often have cause to visit. I only happened to notice that things were slow when I went to look something up, and realized that it had happened last week when I did it as well, so it seems to be an ongoing issue. Or it could be related to my own ongoing issues (but I don't really seem to have much of a problem with other sites). Whatever the case, it underscores the importance of keeping your site running.

Read "The Importance of Uptime and Availability" »

To build a community, you need your visitors to comment on your site. Unfortunately when you do that, you open up your site to others who you might not want to come calling - namely spammers, who will leave all sorts of garbage on your (virtual) doorstep. While we probably won't ever be able to get rid of them, managing spam feedback is a completely bearable process.

Depending on who you ask, you're likely to get a wide variety of answers on the best avenue to take when it comes to plugins to use or configuration directives to take in the fight against spam. You'll see names like Akismet or Defensio mentioned, and plugins such as MT-Approval and Tiny Turing thrown into the mix. Some will tell you that you need a CAPTCHA and some will tell you that there's just no way to win. In the end, you don't really need much more than a little creativity and some patience.

Read "How to Best Handle Spam on Your Movable Type Site" »

One way to keep visitors involved in what's happening with goings-on at your site is by involving them in what's happening, and one of the more interesting developments in this area is by providing them with the ability to rate your content. Until now, one of the more common ways of doing so for Movable Type was with the Ajax Rating plugin.

Mark Carey has done a great job of putting the plugin together, don't get me wrong. But installing the plugin and getting it to work right can sometimes be a bit more than most folks want to take on. The advantage is that you get complete control over what's happening. Sometimes, however, you just need a quick-and-dirty rating solution, and that's where Outbrain comes in.

Read "Easily Add Ratings to Your Site With Outbrain" »