Recently in Blog Stuff Category

Between last night and tonight I have worked through rewriting my blog's templates using more MT4 friendly methods. What does this mean to you? Very little. Commenting will be easier, so if you've ever had something to say to me now is the time. A tag cloud will appear on the right side. That'll be more interesting as I use tags more. I cleaned up my blogroll a bit and put it into one single links section. If you want to be in there, give a shout. Oh yeah, and searching should work better, too.

Overall not a whole lot changes here. I will start deploying the new stuff in a few minutes. I will post again when deployment is complete.

I spent a bunch of time working on rewriting this blog's templates tonight to leverage some of MT4's latest and greatest. I have not finished yet, so the templates aren't in place. When they do go into place there won't be many noticable changes other than this: comments will become more open again. I plan to take advantage of some built-in protections as well as allowing authentication through several different methods. The result should be easier commenting for anyone who wants to.

Just incase someone who reads my blog does not actually read Slashdot, Movable Type is now Open Source.

(Via Slashdot.)

As of this evening, I am officially writing for the Boston Metroblog. I won't crosspost much, if anything, but just this one I'll link to one of my posts. Check out my first metroblogging post about our pal, Eric Gagne, here.

This is a test post not using MarsEdit because I did not like how the last one appeared formatted and want to check if it's MT's fault or MarsEdit's.

And I'm explaining this because... I don't know.

Yes yes, I know. I am quite the slacker. It's been too long since I've posted regularly, and I have resolved to work on that. As part of that resolution, I have upgraded MovableType (finally!) and downloaded a trial of MarsEdit. Sadly, MarsEdit does not support subcategories with MT, which I believe is an MT limitation, and does not yet have support for tags, which is a MarsEdit limitation but high on their list.

We'll see what happens!

For a long while now I've been missing entries from my livejournal friends in my newsreader (NetNewsWire Lite) and wondering why. Today, on a hunch, I disabled syncing with NewsGator - the only syncing service provided for NNW, and lo and behold things worked! Good to know.

I've had it up to here with comment spam. It's just plain getting old. I am thinking about implementing Open ID comments. I know it's not really a nice thing to be required to login to something if you want to comment on my blog, but frankly this is just getting old. If implement this plugin, commenters can use TypeKey, Open ID, and LiveJournal logins, but there will be no anonymous comments anymore.

I'm also thinking about Blacklist Connector for MT 3.2 and getting mt-blacklist to work with MT 3.2. I'm not sure whether any of this is worth the bother.

Comment spam is the bane of any blogger's existence. I, personally, don't get nearly as much as others I know get but it's still very annoying. I complained about it to Skadz and he told me how to tweak the SpamLookup Keywords plugin. He did not, however, mention what to tweak it with. Unlike mt-blacklist, there's no file (that I've found) filled with keywords and URLs to block. But I did find this. It's an extension to the SpamLookup plugin, and it's got some pretty cool little additions to it like the ability to block by url, content, email address, etc. Check it out.

PoliticsVT announced today that they will be closing up shop in 2007. I'm not really into politics, but this is one of the few politically geared sites and publications that I actually read. Their reporting and discussions are top notch in my book, and it will be sad to see them go.

But I have to wonder - is this really the end? Timing is everything, and tomorrow is April Fools Day. Is this all an elaborate joke? Something tells me it's not. But it does beg the question - why not get help? Realistically these guys have a pretty strong support and reader base. Some of these people are fully qualified to be writers. Some of them write for political blogs themselves, or keep their own blogs. Some people would love to be a part of a community blog like this.

We can hope.