Recently in This Weblog Category

I updated the backend of this site months ago when MT 4 was released, but never took advantage of the new templates. This site dates back to 2005 and so my templates were heavily customised. The new templates for MT4 were completely different and the job of updating was just too daunting at the time.

I've been using the new templates on a site where I talk about MT4 called Babble On, and it's been a steep learning curve with widgets and modules and things I'd never even heard of before. The MT documentation explains what modules and widgets are as follows:

Now, a year later, I felt confident enough to finally do it, but not without some trepidation. The first task was to back everything up so if I stuffed up, I had something to fall back on. I created a new blog, with new templates, and imported all the entries from here. So many things were different, even the way that MT named each entry with a hyphen instead of the underscore. I applied one of the default minimalist templates so that when I set about re-doing the CSS, there wouldn't be that many major changes.

I added a fluid style, instead of using the default 940 wide layout; added the tabbed navigation, set up my background and header image and link colours. It was a slow process, because I did each thing separately to see how it would look before moving on to the next thing.

I created widgets for all the old sidebar code and created a couple of widget sets. These make life so much easier if I decide later to add or remove items. You might also notice a few new plugins I've added: Action Streams, Joomsayer and Sociotags. They all add a little more personalisation to the whole page.

I thought about a complete change for the look of the site but in the end decided that this site is "mine" and I wanted to keep it that way. It's a style that visitors are used to and is not so different to the old style. Check out the Quotes tab to compare the two. Since I've integrated the quotes blog and my photo gallery into this site it seemed only sensible at this stage to keep as close a look to the old style as possible. So after 5 days of coding and refreshing pages and rebuilds, I think I'm finally there and can concentrate on adding something to read rather than something to look at.

Hope you like it...

Last week I was pulling my hair out because signing into both my Movable Type websites seemed to take forever. I thought the problem was MT and was thinking about using another blogging platform like Wordpress. That would have been a huge job so I persevered. I disabled a couple of plug-ins that I thought might be slowing things down, and I turned off the AVG Safe Search and Security Toolbars in Firefox. It went from taking 3 minutes to load a page down to 2 1/2, not much of an improvement but something.

Today I got an email from the Dreamhost team telling me they had to disable the guestbook script on another site of mine, Junee Magic, that was the cause of the server overload problem. Junee Magic is a site I set up in 2005 when I was considering website design as a career. It never really took off and I ended up with a "real" job that paid real money but left the site there. I think it's time to take it down now. If someone actually were to contact me to design a website for them I really wouldn't have the time to do it.

The email said "It appears as if spammers were simply hammering the script, causing instability on your server. Taking a look at the guestbook itself, it seems to have bloated to 146Mb of link spam."

Spammers again! I'd love to wring every one of their rotten necks.

Tonight when I logged in it took less then a minute to load the page so I'm grateful to the guys at Dreamhost for finding the problem. Pity the culprit was my own website.

I'm rapt, I've discovered a blogging tool that cuts the task down considerably. Instead of logging in to the blog, then navigating to a new post page, just fire up Windows Live Writer and choose the blog you want to post to, type away to your heart's content, even upload photos or files, insert symbols, all while you're looking at a live version of what your post will look like.

Windows Live Writer downloads your stylesheet so posts are styled the same as if you were logged into your site. I'd say it's cut my posting time down by 3/4 so you can expect to see me posting more often from now on.

I've spent the last few days upgrading my site to Movable Type 4.01. It wasn't as daunting as I first thought, but it did take a long time because I have 8 blogs on this site. That meant going through the templates on each blog to see what was and wasn't compatible with the new version. I had to uninstall several plugins, upgrade several others, and installed quite a few of the newer ones that have been developed just for this version.

I changed all the comment forms to take advantage of the new MT4 commenting features. I read a great article by Tami called Retrofit Your MT3.x Templates With New MT4 Comments that was the clincher for the upgrade. After reading all I could about upgrading (instead of a clean install), and was satisfied that my pages wouldn't be changed in any way, I took the plunge.

Uploading everything to the server and weeding out the obsolete files was a slow process. Movabletype.org has a section explaining the changes in MT4 and a list of the plugins to be removed in the upgrade guide. There's another great article about upgrading your MT3 templates but I preferred to keep my old look and just change a few bits and pieces.

There's a couple of formatting issues that I need to look at on Toni's Corner of the World, these templates are older than the rest of the blogs, going back to version 3.1, and with 3.2 the templates got a major overhaul and many of the div names changed. Adding the new commenting features turned out to be quite tricky because I couldn't just cut and paste, and I've lost the formatting on the comment forms. It's was 1:30 am last night and I couldn't get my head around the stylesheet so have had to leave till I can think straight.

It's been a long couple of days but I've been putting this off for a while and now it's done.

Finally, the ads on my site are finally paying off and maybe will even pay the bills this year! I'm over the moon. It was with total surprise when I opened an email tonight to discover I'd been paid $58.70 AU in ad revenue. I signed up with Auction Ads in the middle of May, and only 6 weeks later they're paying me. I've been using Google Adwords for years, and am still waiting for a cheque from them, and in just 6 weeks I'm averaging $10 a week with eBay auction ads. I won't get rich quick, but this money will certainly help with web hosting and domain fees.

Auction Ad$
Allows you to monetise your website by displaying live eBay auctions next to your related copy.

I always thought that earning money through your weblog was a wasted exercise unless you actually had something to sell. Well it seems that people will pay you for selling their stuff, so it couldn't be easier. I'll just sit back and let the $$$ roll in. The trick is to use the right keywords to match the content in your posts. This isn't always straight forward when you're talking about a different topic every time you post, so I decided on using keywords that matched what I often search for on eBay, for instance, camera (I bought one just yesterday), hard drives, ipods, CDs, DVDs, etc. If you site has a specific subject content then it's even easier: you can target your visitors with something related.

I'm excited! Yesterday I finished fine-tuning the Project Honey Pot install and today I caught an email address harvester. Now I feel like I'm really fighting back in the great spam war!

These are today's very impressive statistics from the project:

• Spam Trap Addresses Monitored: 3,121,660
• Spam Trap Monitoring Capability: 191,555,000,000
• Spam Servers Identified: 2,811,454
• IPs Monitored: 3,000,386
• Harvesters Identified: 16,709
• Dictionary Attackers: 93,914
• Comment Spammers: 4,634

Project Honey Pot has thousands of members around the world working together to track and stop email harvesters. So far I've only caught one, but it was one unknown to the project previously, so that makes me feel kinda special. To track harvesters and other malicious robots visiting your own website, sign up with Project Honey Pot today. It's fast, free, easy, and one of the ways you can help make the Internet a better, safer place.

Tonight I decided to tackle the new Gallery 2 install and figure out how to integrate it into my Gallery tab, as I had previously done with the old version. This was much simpler than I thought. The old Gallery version had about 8 files that needed to be changed. This new version only needed one file updating, the theme.tpl and adding a few lines to the css file. You can view the new Gallery by choosing the above tab.

Although the whole thing was extremely slow, and I had a permissions problem to begin with, I managed to eventually get it done. For me it's all trial and error, and much perserverance. I'm pleased I took the time, because now I've deleted the old folder and don't have both versions installed. I expect to have quite a few errors but if people were coming to the site and viewing the gallery properly, there should be no errors. Unfortunately, there's spammers who like to link to the photos as well. Sorry spammers!!

I've had another week of problems with Movable Type. Comments and Search weren't working under the FastCGI install I'd done, so I decided, last weekend to upgrade to version 3.34 again. Then I couldn't get FastCGI to work at all and I've had error after error. It's been so frustrating. I've re-read every entry I could find on the subject but to no avail.

Last night I re-installed 3.34, because I realised that version 3.33 was still showing up as the installed version. I'm not sure what happened with the last install, possibly I didn't upload the files in the correct format, although everything else seemed to be working okay. Well now, at least, the version seems to be correct, so I'll start again. I had set everything back to normal CGI and noticed how slow rebuilds seemed so I definately want to get the FastCGI back up and working, but there could be more problems on the horizon.

The comments and search features are working properly, fingers crossed that they'll continue to do so.

Remember...
Never be discouraged…
because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.
Alva Edison, 1847 - 1931

For the last couple of days I've been doing some overdue maintenance on this site, in particular, getting the random images to open in a new page, and getting the tabs to display correctly in IE and Firefox.

I had my random photos embedded in iframes and it seems there was no easy way to get these to open in a new page. I must have read a hundred other requests for help from people with the same problem. To overcome the problem I upgraded from Gallery 1.5 to Gallery 2.2. Embedding the new random photos was so easy, just a matter of copying and pasting a snippet of PHP code into the sidebar. The latest version of Gallery is very different to my original install, and integration is no simple matter, so I have both versions on the server at the moment until I decide what to do about my templates.

I have the tabbed browsing working properly now, and it looks the same in different browsing environments. The only problem I have now is when I move to the Gallery tab, and the whole tab bar drops down about 20 pixels. I tried using hacks, but it didn't seem to solve the problem, and after working on it all night I had to walk away. Any clues as to what I'm doing wrong with the CSS is most welcome.

I did another config today for the Fastcgi install for MT 3.33 by following the instructions in Mark De Soto's article. I had lots of errors in my server's error log that I hope this install will fix. Mark provided a new index.cgi that I created, and a few lines of code to add to the .htaccess, renaming the cgi files in the process, and it all seems to be working well. I had to rebuild all the blogs on my site for the changes to filter through.

Another thing I did tonight was set up Feedburner to manage the feeds on this site, after reading an article at SixApart about MT Performance Tuning. It required changing the links to the atom and rss indexes in the header of ALL my templates, and it took me quite a while, but I can now safely turn off the need to rebuild these pages every time my blogs rebuild. I'm doing nearly everything they suggest:

• Use FastCGI or mod_perl
• Run the latest version of Movable Type (nearly)
• Use an SQL database
• Eliminate unused or redundant archive maps (in some blogs)
• Reconsider redundant feeds
• Avoid wasteful rebuilds of index templates
• Avoid performance-killing plugins
• Avoid overuse of categories
• Use Mullet category archives (this weblog)
• Use the master archive index

The whole point of this preoccupation with getting FastCGI to work properly is to power-up MT and eliminate excessive server loads.

I have a few crontab jobs set up now and am able to schedule posts and do nightly rebuilds on a couple of the blogs. The shell commands aren't so daunting now, and I'm very adept at "Touch mt.fcgi" every time I need to configure a plugin.