Site Maintenance

Remember...
Don't laugh at old age...
Pray to reach it too.
Master Chen Hai Yang

It's been a while since I last looked in the Junk Mail tab in the Comments management area. I had 360 junk comments. The main culprit seemed to be online casino sites and there were about 4 genuine comments. It looks to me like MT is good at recognising the spam. I was slightly shocked at the amount of junk mail I had so I guess it's a good idea to check the contents of junk mail regularly. Like monthly or more often.

I installed Live Preview on all my blogs. It's a plugin that gives you a styled view below the text, so no more opening another window to preview the post. One of the most useful plugins I have installed.

I added a piece of code to each blog's sidebar for recent entries using Multiblog. It provides the user with the ability to include templated content from other blogs in their MovableType installation, including rebuild control and permissions. I'm a little confused about rebuild controls and probably should read the documentation that comes with it. The site has to be rebuilt to refresh the list of entries, but this seems to be the only drawback. It's another thing to add to the site maintenance list of things to do.

After adding the security code to comments in all blogs, and the Bloglet subscription code, I needed to get the input boxes to look like the rest of the formatting so it was time to get elbow-deep in the CSS stylesheet. After much perservenence I got everything looking right, but then for some reason, on Spitting into the Wind, the sidebar ended up at the bottom of the page and so I spent another hour comparing the code on the blogs to see where the difference was and what I had done wrong. Seems it was a missing closing DIV, and I kept missing it while I was studying the templates. So much wasted time and so little a mistake but it made such a huge difference to the appearance. Then because I was doing alot of cutting and pasting from my text editor to the MT screen, and had two blogs open that I was working on, I pasted an index template into the sidebar include on this blog, rebuilt and got an error, then realised what I'd done wrong and couldn't get my original sidebar code back. A hard-copy on my hard drive was 6 months old and needed much updating, and it made me think that I hadn't backed up the blog for quite some time.

I tried to use TypeMover, another MT Plugin, to do a complete backup. My intention was to backup all the blogs but couldn't get the ftp path to work. I tried so many combinations that in the end I did an online search for any posts about problems with TypeMover and discovered it isn't compatible with version 3.2 of MT. I was devestated. It's a great tool. I've used it before to backup and restore, and it was brilliant for when I moved hosting providers. I hope the author or somebody else continues to work on the code to bring it up to 3.2 standards. It would be great if the people at SixApart updated it to use instead of their Import/Export feature.