If you downloaded the MT 2.51 upgrade before, um, far too late at night/early in the morning today (before 1 am PST October 31st, that is), you’ll need to reupgrade your {MT directory}/lib/MT.pm to this version: the original had a little bitty bug that left it taking forever and a day to rebuild archive files […]
If you are using my convert line breaks hack to stop MT from adding <p> and </p> around block-level elements like tables and lists, you will want to update your hack to the newly posted version: Ben glanced at it and pointed out that it would be far faster with a slightly more sensible regex. […]
With version 2.51, Movable Type only overwrites a file when the content has changed. What does that mean to you? If someone adds a comment or a TrackBack, the index files, including your RSS feed(s), are rebuilt, so that the comment count will be updated. But if you aren’t putting the comment count in your […]
I had several things to say, about comment spamming and RSS best practices and the like, but that’s all off for tonight. Instead, like last time, I’m going to turn off the lights, get a beer or six, and put Dreaming of Violets on repeat for twenty or thirty times. The only difference? This time […]
If it’s possible to access your comments by just incrementing a number, and possible to leave a comment by just sending an HTTP POST request (yes, Movable Type users, that’s you, among others), you should know that you are vulnerable to being flooded with comments. All it takes is a moron spammer like “Mike Johnson” […]
A perfectly valid RSS item about RSS best practices takes three aggregators and two browsers to read.
Meg’s list of things to do with your extra hour tomorrow morning includes “Try to figure out how to install Moveable [sic] Type.” I discovered blogging through seeing one of her disturbing search request posts (and neveryoumind why I was there), and one of the things that appealed to me about Blogger was that I […]
Brent asks “should RSS aggregators and newsreaders parse (expand) relative URLs in RSS items?” (Before anyone else heads down the wrong track, he doesn’t mean in <link> or <url>, just in HTML in <description> or <content:encoded>) His first inclination is to say “no”, most of the people leaving comments say “no”, but Aaron Swartz says […]
Blogger users: if you don’t just publish to Blog*Spot, it’s time once again to change your FTP password on your server. Former Blogger users: it’s time once again to think back, and try to remember whether you’ve already changed every FTP password you ever gave to Blogger.
Jonathon reminds me of something I noticed, agitated about for a while, and then dropped: Movable Type’s handling of author names could use some rethinking. The default MT template for RSS 0.91 skates around the problem by having an empty webMaster element, but the RSS 1.0 template includes <dc:creator><$MTEntryAuthor encode_xml=”1″$></dc:creator> for each item. Since MTEntryAuthor […]