Mumbling Again

Upgrading my MovableType install to 3.3

With the release of MovableType 3.3 it became free again to personal bloggers. This was great news to me since MT 2.6 was starting to feel very outdated and could barely keep away the comment spam even with MT-Scode installed. I had considered porting everything over to Word Press but that seemed like a hassle and was my last resort. The upgrade was a complete success, though I had to disable MT-Scode rather than deal with debugging it. No loss there though since MT 3.3 has great features built-in to combat comment and ping spam.

New Design and Google AdSense

I've relaunched and redesigned. Hope you like the new look, I was getting sick of the old one.

The other thing that precipitated the changes was my desire to put up google ads. I want to upgrade my bandwidth but need to offset the cost. I think this is a fair trade off. These only appear on the inside blog pages and I will only display text ads. I hate animated gifs more than anything except flash so don't worry about that.

Comment Spam and Installing MT-Scode on OS X

Recently I've been getting a lot of comment spam. It ironic because I haven't even written anything lately. The truth is I've been distracting myself with installing Debian Sarge on my old Dell and I recently decided to pick up Objective-C and Cocoa programming. Needless to say, its frustrating that the only time I've been spending with my blog is removing comments about onl1ne gam6ling and pr0n. Porting the blogs hosted on my box to another platform was something that I didn't want to consider and my choices for solving this problem while keeping movable type 2.x.x were limited. I found mt-scode and now that its running I think it will solve the problem better then banning IPs or using mt-blacklist. However getting it to work on OS X 10.3.9 was a challenge.

Referrer Log Spam

I started noticing strange referrers in my web logs and they were pr0n and advertising sites. I guess this has been around for a while, Wired wrote about it in 2002. I found the article above by doing a google search on the keywords in the title of this entry. At least my Moveable Type installation is smart enough not to list them as TrackBacks. So far so good.

BBEdit HTML Entity Maker

I am constantly pasting text into BBEdit in the middle of markup. This copy often needs the entities to be encoded before the page can be published or it won't validate. I created this simple perl filter to automatically substitute the correct entitly code for each un-encoded character in a selection of text.