The Playground

The image on the left is a system-wide snapshot from October 25, followed by a snapshot from today. Obviously the spammers are loving my sites more and more, because the default on all my blogs is to delete the spam after 14 days. There's definitely been an increase in the number of times I've been hit.

TypePad Anti-Spam is doing the best job of all the anti-spam tools I've used on Movable Type over the last 4 years, and I've used quite a few different approaches over those years, sometimes relying on MT but most often relying on plugins or a combination of plugins, including comment challenges. I posted how pleased I am with TypePad Anti-Spam very recently, and have written numerous posts on the virtues of other plugins over time, but I can't stress enough just how good this latest Movable Type product is. I've had no spam comments, but plenty of trackback spam, and TypePad Anti-Spam hasn't missed a beat marking the nasty ones.

Posted by Toni at 6:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Posted by Toni at 10:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

The upgrade to Movable Type 4.01 turned out to be easier than I expected, even though it took quite a while to complete. Not surprising when 8 different blogs needed changes made.

Movable Type has made no reference to Fast CGI with the new version so I can only assume that this version incorporates the benefits proclaimed for FCGI. I had so many problems with this that I'm glad to see it go.

I read lots of articles before I upgraded and would recommend that anyone thinking of an upgrade do the same. The MT Upgrade Guide lists important changes you may need to make, including plugins that are no longer compatible with version 4.0.

To set up reCaptcha on all the blogs I followed the instructions from Retrofit Your MT3.x Templates With New MT4 Comments. This article explains how to take advantage of the new commenting features of MT4 and is easy to do.

If your old blog listed categories in the sidebar, these won't show up in MT4. You need to edit the template and change <MTSubCategories> to <MTTopLevelCategories>. Remember to change the closing tag too.

Posted by Toni at 11:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I haven't posted to this site in a while, and in fact I don't very often because I use it more for testing than anything else.

I have another MT install where I have 6 blogs and am running FastCGI with MT version 3.34. Switching to FastCGI caused me no end of problems, and here, where I have normal CGI running, it's good to see what the differences are on the two blogs.

I've been testing a new version of Better File Uploader for Dan Wolfgang and couldn't get it to work on my other install, wondering if FastCGI was the problem. However, trying to upload an image to this post has generated the same error, so we can safely rule that out. What the problem actually is, only Dan will know.

Update: After uninstalling the new version, and reinstalling the old version, you can see that it works great, and is worth the $10 that Dan is asking. Lots of work goes into creating plugins for any web application, and the time saved using the features in this plugin will soon cover the small cost.

Posted by Toni at 10:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I've had more problems with MT-Autoban when I empty the junk mail and junk trackbacks. Instead of resetting the .htaccess file, the whole file was wiped, including the White List I created, and the AddHandler directive.

I've had a couple of days away from the computer, and everyone has probably been denied access since before the weekend. As much as I love this plugin, it's causing me some head-aches. I re-implemented a copy of the .htaccess file, and deleted the portion that MT-Autoban places in there. So far it's ignoring all my directives in the configuration.

Versions prior to 1.0.3 had a bug where multiple instances of could interfere and scrozzle the .htaccess file. The symptoms are that any access to MT scripts causes a 500 (internal server) error. If this occurs, simply delete the .htaccess file via FTP or your webhost’s standard file management then install a version 1.0.3 or later.

I'm using version 1.2.3 but seem to still have this problem. I really would rather not uninstall the script. I'm constantly under attack by spammers (though why my small space on the web gets hit so hard is beyond me) and Autoban does a terrific job of denying access to most spambots, and even me sometimes.

This code should give you the latest Autoban stats:

MTAutoBan updated <$MTAutoBanLastUpdated$>
<$MTAutoBanObjectCount$> Junk objects (CT) with <$MTAutoBanUniqueCount$> unique addresses.
<$MTAutoBanBannedCount$> banned at threshold <$MTAutoBanThreshold$>.

Check out the last line on the index page.

Posted by Toni at 9:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I've been using the AutoBan plugin from Solid Wall of Code for some time and am deeply impressed at it's ability to ban spammers, but yesterday I found myself locked out. I eliminated lots of reasons before I thought it was AutoBan. When I looked at the .htaccess file in MT I discovered that the upgrade to 3.34 had cleaned it out. Therein lay the problem.

I was able to gain access by White Listing my IP address after reading the following:

MTAutoBan has its own section of the .htaccess file and preserves content outside of its area when updating the file. This is done so that other, non MTAutoBan directives can be kept in the file. The most common expected use of this feature is white listing, i.e. allowing specific hosts / IP addresses access regardless of what AutoBan does. For example, if your ISP supplied IP addresses was 192.168.56.56, you might want to white list it to decrease the risk of losing access. To do that, you would put the following in the .htaccess file.

order deny,allow
allow from 192.168.56.56

Deleting the .htaccess file is supposed to reset the plugin, but this didn't work. I had to delete the plugin and the file, and re-install after I was able to get back in.

Posted by Toni at 10:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

If you're getting hit with comment spam, here's a life-saving plugin from Jay Allen. Comment Challenge is an effective and accessible CAPTCHA plugin to prevent spam for Movable Type 3.2 and above.

The benefits of Comment Challenge are many:

• Cuts spam almost entirely out of your daily, weekly or even monthly routine
• Text-based CAPTCHAs don't discriminate against the visually impaired
• None of the CGI calls or processor overhead for computing image CAPTCHAs
• Installation is simple: A plugin and one single template tag!
• Challenge only displayed to unauthenticated (i.e. anonymous) commenters
• Compatible with both static and dynamic templates

Installation requires entering the template tag into the Individual entry and comment preview templates but the instructions are easy to follow and most MT users should have no problems. I've been using this plugin for a couple of weeks and have noticed a marked decrease in the amount of junk comments.

The challenge will appear like this, below the comment textarea:

Another spam protection plugin is Better Spam Protect, which upgrades the email spam protection offered by the <$MTEntryAuthorLink$>, <$MTCommentAuthorLink$>, and <$MTCommentPreviewAuthorLink$> template tags.

<$MTEmailLink name="my name" address="name@example.com"$> will display my name with the email address encoded using javascript.

Posted by Toni at 8:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Thanks to a very timely email I received from Tim Appnel, I have installed two new plugins that I hope will solve my comments and trackback spamming problem: MT-Akismet and MTAutoBan. Tim explained how they work together:

MT-Akismet is a spam filter plugin which automatically submits all comments (and trackbacks) received to Akismet, a distributed spam filtering service, to be rated ham or spam. MTAutoBan can be periodically run and will write out a htaccess file blocking the IP addresses of junk once it goes over a certain threshold like 3 junked comments in the past x days. AutoBan is really helpful because it blocks most spam floods without starting up MT, usually starting up so many instances of MT during a flood is what buries a server. What's nice is that AutoBan will eventually release an IP address from being blocked. The built-in MT IP Blocking keeps an IP address until you remove it.

Tim also suggested that closing comments and trackbacks on older entries reduces the likelihood of spam and attack. He recommends mt-closure, a script that can be periodically run as a cron-job to close entries over so many days old.

I am extremely grateful to Tim for going to the trouble of contacting me after my hosting providers had disabled my comments and trackback scripts for causing their servers to overload. Everything is back up and working now.

Posted by Toni at 8:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

With the New Year comes the task of updating the copyright year for you website. Andy Schott has written a plugin for Movable Type that lets you set and forget. The years for the copyright are determined from the created on dates of the earliest and most recent entries in your blog. If you have been blogging for less than a year, then only one year is displayed.

If <$MTBlogCopyright$> is used within the context of an entry, the code displays a copyright string in the following format: Copyright ©2002-2003 <owner>, where <owner> is the nickname of that entry's author.

If used elsewhere, the nickname of most recent entry's author is used. <$MTBlogCopyright owner="owner_name"$> displays a copyright string in the following format: Copyright ©2002-2003 owner_name.

Check after you've republished, because I had to change "owner_name" to my own name.

Posted by Toni at 8:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Merry Christmas everybody, I hope you all enjoyed the festive season.

Comment and trackback spam have been my biggest nightmare this year. Spam in particular has gone over the top, especially for all my web-based email addresses. For every normal email, I'm getting 6 that are junk mail. Lately it's been the share market emails that are filling up my junk mailbox and it seems to be getting worse by the day.

This morning I decided to clean out the junk comments and trackbacks and was amazed at how many I had. The plugins I have installed are doing a fine job of choosing which among them are junk but I may have to consider an alternative plugin. Akismet works well, but it still processes the junk mail and leaves a copy on the server. A plugin I use on my other sites CCode and TCode from Alogblog's MTy Plugins does the processing before it hits the server, therefore using no system resources, and the junk comments and trackbacks are usually empty so there's nothing to clean up. There's some template tweaking, but it's worth the effort and instructions are easy to implement.

Posted by Toni at 10:23 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) |

If you used Better File Uploader before you updated to the latest version of MT, and miss the ease that you could upload photos to where you want them, you'll be pleased to know that BFU2 has been released and I fully recommend downloading a copy.

You can upload several photos at once, add formatting and styles to images, and even have the whole process automated how you like so the code is dumped straight into your post. I've been beta testing the new version and am impressed with the options available. This version isn't free but the meagre outlay for a personal licence will quickly pay for itself with the time-saving features of the new Movable Type plugin.

Dan Wolfgang has provided some examples for formatting and styling your images that shows you some of the power of BFU2.

Posted by Toni at 8:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Seems I've had a problem with the MT-Mail-Entry plugin I use on Spitting Into the Wind and Loving You. The program sends the whole entry, formatting and all, instead of just a link, when the user clicks on Mail Entry. The problem had to do with the database type, and after looking on the error log on my server, I discovered that the cgi script was calling mt.cfg, which isn't there in the latest version of MT.

I had created an mt.cfg file recently to fix a problem with the Typemover plugin by copying mt.cgi and saving it as mt.cfg. It solved that problem, but something was missing for the mail-entry script to work, so I copied over the database details from the mt-config file, and wallah, everything is working again properly.

Posted by Toni at 6:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Lots of weblogs are centered around images and alogblog's MTy plugins has a great plugin to make the process quick and simple. QuickImagePost allows you to right-click an image while surfing the internet, drag some text from the site to the image entry screen, and post it as an entry into your Movable Type weblogs.

It works the same as QuickPost, and is configured via the QuickPost link on the Main Menu in MT. Click on set up a quickpost bookmarklet, select QuickImagePost and press create. Here you'll find links to download a registry file to add QuickImagePost to the right-click context menu for IE, or an extension for Firefox to do the same.

There's good instructions for installing on alogblog.

Posted by Toni at 7:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1) |

I have a nice new interface for Movable Type since installing EnjoyYourPosting from alogblog's MTy plugins, which enables you to use a nice WYSIWYG editor (FCKeditor) in the MT entry editor, and also in QuickPost's editing, and provides some MT interface styles.

This plugins provides 3 rows of formatting tools, sadly lacking in the default MT interface. This plugin gets my thumbs up!  There's lots of features in the menu bar, insert smilies or a table, insert characters, strikethrough, search and replace, text and background colour, text positioning, even flash objects. You can switch between WYSIWYG editing and source code, add styles, change fonts and font-size. The list goes on.

There's 3 user interface styles to choose from, which center the MT interface and adds a menu-bar at the top instead of the sidebar in the default layout. Tagging is enabled for Technorati, Flikr, Delicious, and Wiki Encyclopedia.

Posted by Toni at 12:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1) |

EnjoyYourPosting, a Movable Type 3.3 plugin, enables you to use a nice WYSIWYG editor(FCKeditor) in the MT entry editor, and also in QuickPost's editing, and provides some MT interface styles. The first positive thing I noticed after installing this plugin was that now the MT screens are centered, something I've always thought should happen. Instead of the list of actions in a sidebar, they are now positioned across the top of the window.

I tried using the previous version of FCKeditor last year, but the screen kept flickering in IE and Firefox also had issued with the display. This version is stable and displays very well, with no adverse effects. My few disappointments with the new interface is there is no way to decode text, eg if I wish to enter code, it has to be decoded first. I had a button on my normal MT entry screen that would decode text (an idea I got from Movalog's js quicktags) for this purpose. This is lacking from the WYSIWYG editor.

Another annoyance is that LivePreview only works if the entry is saved first, which detracts from the usefulness of LivePreview. Page loading times are a little longer, and adding text before or after a hyperlink, extends the link. You can fix this by switching to source view but it's annoying to have to do so.

This plugin is from alogblog's MTy plugins site and is the 3rd plugin I enjoy using from this author. I have previously installed and enjoy the benefit of QuickImagePost for MT 3.3 and CCode and TCode for MT 3.3. I recommend all these plugins.

Posted by Toni at 2:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) |

I discovered a nifty plugin today while reading alogblog MTy plugins today. I've been visiting this site for months and only tonight got the meaning of the name of the site. MT is empty. We can fill it with our imagination.

QuickImagePost allows you to right-click an image while surfing the internet, drag some text from the site to the image entry screen, and post it as an entry into your Movable Type weblogs. It works the same as QuickPost, and is configured via the QuickPost link on the Main Menu in MT. Click on set up a quickpost bookmarklet, select QuickImagePost and press create. Here you'll find links to download a registry file for IE, or an extension for Firefox. There's good instructions for installing on the MT3.2 page.

Posted by Toni at 11:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I uninstalled this plugin after discovering it no longer worked with the newest version of Movable Type and was delighted to read in a comment from Jesse Gardner:

Just wanted to let you know that there is a hackish workaround for TypeMover. I just used it the other day and it complained because it couldn't find mt.cfg -- so what I did was make a copy of my mt-config.cgi and called it mt.cfg, and it worked like a charm.

I've tested it myself after re-installing and can confirm that it works beautifully. I'm happy again!

Download the plugin from Zonageek and upload to your mt/plugins directory. The trick is to get the path right to your mt folder. On my install it goes something like:

ftp://username:password@ftp.bestoday.com.au/public_html/cgi-bin/mt

From there you can back up and restore all your weblog data, including settings, templates, categories, authors, notification subscriptions, trackbacks and pings.

TypeMover is one of those must-have tools if you need to re-install or move your mt installation to another server.

Posted by Toni at 10:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Spam is the bane of the internet and you've probably noticed how much rubbish can get downloaded to your inbox. Comment and trackback spam is the latest target from advertisers and unscrupulous website owners and can cause real headaches.

Movable Type has several plugins available to control comment and trackback spam. The one I have chosen to protect this weblog is Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short), a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again. Akismet was developed initially for Word Press, but has since been made available to many more blogging platforms.

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Part of the idea of Akismet is that you're always protected up-to-the-second from the latest dirty tricks of spammers. There's no maintenance, no upgrading, no hassle.

MT-Akismet is a plugin that transparently integrates Movable Type's junk handling capabilities with the Akismet collaborative spam filtering service.

For many people, Akismet will greatly reduce or even completely eliminate the comment and TrackBack spam you get on your sites. If one does happen to get through, simply mark it as "Junk" and Akismet will learn from the mistake.

You need to get an API key by signing up for a username at Wordpress.com, and enter it in the plugin configuration page.

Posted by Toni at 5:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) |

I've come across a few small plugins from Kevin Shay over at Staggernation.com that enrich the Movable Type user experience even further. Kevin has created a stack of plugins that you may find useful, with versions for all flavours of MT. Three of Kevin's plugins in particular grabbed my attention:

1. MainMenuRecent is a plugin that modifies the interface of Movable Type. When the plugin is installed, MT's Main Menu will display the three most recent entries for each weblog. A great idea for installs that have several blogs. When MainMenuRecent is installed and you view the Movable Type Main Menu, for each weblog listed, if the weblog has any entries, you'll see "Recent Entries:" and the titles of the most recent entries, separated by a | symbol.

2. UpdateEntryDate is another plugin that modifies the interface of Movable Type. When the plugin is installed, you can click a button to set an entry's Entry Date timestamp to the current date and time.When UpdateEntryDate is installed and you edit an entry, you'll see an Update button above the Entry Date field.

3. WeblogsActionMenu is the third plugin I've installed that also modifies the interface of Movable Type. The dropdown menu of available weblogs in the header of every Movable Type screen is a handy way to jump from one weblog to another. WeblogsActionMenu lets you jump directly to a specific action for a different weblog than the one you're in.

Posted by Toni at 9:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I've spent the last couple of days beta-testing version 2 of Better File Upload. I used this Movable Type plugin in the previous version of MT and was delighted to be able to use my personal preferences for uploading files, instead of having to change the defaults every time I added an image. I came across a post on Planet Movable Type (an excellent site for all the latest MT news from lots of sites) from Eat Drink Sleep Movable Type calling for feature requests for the next generation of Better File Upload. There's a version available that's compatible with MT 3.2.

The new version is great and I can't wait for the finished product. There's lots of new features and more configuration, that can be customised for each blog. It's going to make uploading several images much faster.

Because this beta-testing involved uploading lots of images, I created a post on Fully Sick that is image-rich. I hope it's not so overloaded that the page is too slow to load. I tried all sorts of configs to test the plugin and settings are easily changed.

Update: The link to Better File Uploader has been fixed. This version requires the BigPAPI plugin and is not compatible with MT 3.31. Stay tuned for the next version release.

Posted by Toni at 11:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) |

Tonight I've added a couple of "can't live without" plugins to the MT installation.

1. Plugin Manager - a must-have for installing and upgrading Movable Type plugins, just point Plugin Manager at a URL, or upload the plugin into MT directly, and Plugin Manager will do the rest.

2. LivePreview - allows you to view an entry in your weblog's context, i.e. with all the styling applied to it, rather than with Movable Type, as with the default previewing mechanism.

3. MT Blogroll - a powerful link manager capable of synching with Technorati for last update times.

4. Acronym - a plugin for Movable Type that adds acronym tags to known acronyms. You need to modify the MT templates to use this, and add a line of code to your stylesheet.

5. Markdown - a plugin that allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

All these plugins have been updated or tested to work properly with Movable Type 3.3.

Posted by Toni at 9:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

FormatList v1.2 is the first plugin I've installed on this new version of Movable Type. FormatList adds buttons to the edit and entry screens to create bulleted and numbered lists easily. This version is built for MT 3.3 and doesn't use the BigPAPI plugin that previous versions relied on. The icons on MT's entry screens are bigger in this new version and so the FormatList icons need to be resized to look right.

Edit the FormatList.pl file, changing the file width and length sizes to the same as the rest (26x19).

Installation Instructions:

1. Download and expand the zip file

2. Upload the contents of the 'plugins' folder to the 'plugins' folder of you MT installation

3. Upload the contents of the' images' folder to the 'images' folder within the 'mt-static' folder.

This is the location of the images and docs for MT, for most people it will likely be in '/mt-static/images' (outside your cgi-bin).

Posted by Toni at 10:33 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) |

StyleCatcher is a Movable Type plugin that makes it easier to find and apply CSS-based theme designs to your weblog.

This plugin is supposed to work with any compatible style repository, but I've had a terrible time installing styles from The Style Constest repository. Sometimes they work, but more often than not they won't install properly.

Last night I went through all the files installed in my Themes folder, and discovered that many of the image files were enclosed in single quotes. After I renamed all the files, and stripped out the single quotes around image names in the CSS files, they worked properly.

The next thing I noticed in the StyleCatcher interface was that many thumbnails were "untitled". After looking at the style-site.css in my templates, I found that the theme's CSS was named the same as the folder name of the theme. I changed all the css files to correspond with the folder they were in, and then each template was named properly (except for the couple of templates that needed names inserted in to the css file).

While checking the css files in notepad I also noticed that nearly all of the base-weblog.css files were corrupt, and these needed to be opened in Dreamweaver (my choice) and resaved. This stripped out all the unwanted code.

Posted by Toni at 4:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

The comment and trackback spamming has finally stopped on my site thanks to the CCode plugin I added a couple of weeks ago. I came across another handy plugin that I found on David Reynes site and tonight I added extra protection to my site by turning off comments and trackbacks on posts older than a year. I could have set it for any length of time, but I figure a year, if nobody has anything to say for that long, nothing'll ever be said. On a very heavily commented-on site I would imagine 30 days would be plenty.

The plugin is really easy to use, you type the path to it, and can configure all your blogs in seconds, choosing the number of days to stay "live". Comment and trackback spammers seem to target older posts, so this plugin is another weapon in the war against spam.

Posted by Toni at 11:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

David Reynes has updated his Multiblog plugin and installation and use is now much easier.

MultiBlog is a plugin that provides the user with the ability to include templated content from other blogs in their MovableType installation. It also allows the user to define rebuild triggers as normally posts to one blog do not cause rebuild in another that might be including content from it. Finally, MultiBlog allows the user to define access controls for the blogs in their system, to prevent one blog from accessing the content of another.

The Recent Posts on my Other Blogs in the sidebar is dependent on Multiblog to add new posts and I'm pleased with how much easier this new version is to use. There's a new version 2.0 due out soon.

Posted by Toni at 11:41 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) |

I installed a new plugin today called Live Preview. It's a plugin created by Arvind Satyanarayan, and would you believe, he sat down one weekend and wrote it. If only I could do things like that. According to Arvind:

It adds a new button on the entry screen which when clicked causes a new panel to appear at the bottom. This panel will contain a preview of your entry as it would appear were it published on your weblog - styling, javascript, php includes etc. The best part about it is, you can keep going back and changing and live previewing your entry without having to save it whatsoever.

It works beautifully, and there was no problem with the installation. No more continually going to the preview window!

Posted by Toni at 6:15 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) |

I installed new plugins for my MT installation that are a must have for anyone using Movable Type. The first one is Enhanced Entry Editing.

This is one of the widget plugins that makes up Ajaxify. It adds the following to your entry screen:

• Resize Textarea Controls - You can now resize your textarea to any size without hacking any files.
• WYSIWYG Editor - Implements TinyMCE, one of the most powerful WYSIWYG editors available so you never have to worry about (x)HTML markup ever again.

With this tool you can add smilies to your post, have greater control over the placement and spaces around images, spellcheck, strikethrough, indents, bullets and numbering and much more.

The second plugin I installed is also a part of Ajaxify. It adds a search suggestion feature to the Quicksearch box. The suggestions appear as you type in the Quicksearch box.

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be working and I cannot access the Plugins settings in System Overview. Something is not right, but there's only 2 files for this and I've done the editing so it should work.

Posted by Toni at 6:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |