Housekeeping
Posted by Bill Rini @ 7:27 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
In case some of you have wondered, I upgraded the blog software, MovableType, last night. I came under an intense comment spamming attack last night and so I had to make some changes. In case you’re wondering what comment spamming is (lucky you if you don’t know), it’s when spammers try to boost their Google rank by getting links to thier site on all sorts of other sites. Google ranks websites more “relevent” if many other sites link to them so these spammers post messages in the comments like “Nice site!” and when you look at their URL in their profile it’s to some penis enlargement website or an online pharmacy site.
I have MovableType set up to email me when people comment on the site so last night I was a little surprised to see 10 comments come in all at one time. I started to delete them and then another batch of 15 or so came and then another 10. I immediately threw up a .htpasswd file which forces people to login to view the site and that stopped things long enough for me to delete all the spammed messages.
I had heard that the new version of MovableType had better comment administration so I installed it but all it really did was give me the option of making people register with MovableType before they could post. Not exactly something I wanted to do. I did some more searching and found a hack that forces people to input a code before the post will be accepted which I think may be the best solution as most of these spammers are simply using bots to do thier work. The code is a graphic file so unless the bot is pretty sophisticated it won’t be able to read the code to input into the form. Hopefully this will put a temporary end to the comment spamming.
I really wish I could find the time to just write my own blog software. I like MovableType but I hate their licensing. I don’t use it for commercial purposes or run more than X number of blogs so I’m not in threat of violating the free use license but I feel like it’s limiting my options. I would like to use a blog on my consulting website but that would be commercial and so I would have to pay. I also might like to use this on several other of my websites and I might go over the MovableType limits. It just feels like I being pinned in by these guys.
The choice many seem to be making is to go to WordPress. I haven’t checked them out lately (I have a recent install on a dev server that I plan on reviewing) but I really have no confidence in this project based on my previous experience with them. They’re an offshoot of b2 which was a well written piece of software. b2 stopped development and WordPress became the official new fork of the product. I’ve been under the hood of both b2 and WordPress and about a year ago when I looked at WordPress it was a total mess. No offense intended but just looking at the code you could tell this team had never built large systems software before. In fact, they took some of the things b2 got right and mucked it up. They started combining the business logic and presentation layers and shoehorning in features. When I posted on thier support forum that this seemed to be 180 degrees in the opposite direction of good coding/architecture practices I was told that if I could do it better that I should build my own. It almost seems ironic that they tout their HTML/CSS compliance as one of thier biggest achievements and selling points but then violate so many software design best practices.
Well, until I get a wild hair up my butt and lock myself in a room for 72 hours to write my own weblog software I’ll either live with the limitations of MovableType or find some way to overlook the deficiencies in WordPress.
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COMMENTS / 3 COMMENTS
Joe Crawford added these pithy words on Aug 03 04 at 9:56 amWordPress is pretty darn good. It does what it says, and has only a few fleas. They have a development wiki, a plug-in architecture that I like, (i’ve added some nifty plugins to my install, which is painless and powerful), and it’s done very well for me on my San Diego Blog.
It’s not perfect, but in terms of php/mysql solutions, I think it’s best of breed and right on for a blog. If I had more general needs in terms of a CMS, I’d be looking at drupal or textpattern — I’m testing Textpattern out now, and it’s okay, but not mindblowing.
I’m curious to see how well things work out if you go to WordPress.
Also, MT has a number of plugins to handle comment spam, in particular ones to disable comments on older posts (which is where I have seen periodic attacks in WordPress). WP has a feature to disable comments automatically if they meet certain criteria (such as number of outbound links).
Eh, anyway. Good luck Bill, hopefully my post won’t get flagged as a spam since I included all these links.
Bill Rini added these pithy words on Aug 03 04 at 10:42 amJoe, long time no hear. Hope things are well in San Diego.
I hear ya on WordPress. A lot of people seem to like it. If you don’t have to do a lot of customization it’s probably fine. One of the things that concerned me when I first took a look at it though was that on their dev boards they were talking about 2 or 3 major changes to the plugin API. Not 2 or 3 changes in one release but 2 or 3 changes coming over several releases. In many cases people would have to re-write their plugins several times in order to keep up.
All in all, I think they have an ok product but I’m not sure I want to throw my hat in the ring with them just yet. To be honest, I’m really interested in writing my own. I think some of the stuff MT does is far superior to WP and WP has some features I wish MT would add. That and the fact there are some things I think neither of them actually got right and I’m sort of leaning towards finding a few weeks in my schedule to crank something out. Who knows, one day it might happen
Bill
Joe Crawford added these pithy words on Aug 03 04 at 5:53 pmCool. I think the way that the base has expanded will get them to reconsider “breaking” lots of existing installations as far as an API/plugin architecture.
At least, I think.
But I’d be interested to hear what kind of things you’d want to do with WordPress you think you can’t — I’ve found that when I think of a feature I want — I just google on the wordpress.org site and *somebody* has done something along those lines.
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