Recently in Movable Type Category

How Many Posts Are on Your Front Page?

By
Dr. Mike
on November 9, 2008 8:34 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
I find blogging_tips.jpgmyself wondering about this, not only because Problogger asked about it way back when, but because I'm sitting here looking at this site.  One of the features of WordPress is that you can have multiple index pages.  Movable Type doesn't do that out of the box but it's a two second fix with Alden Bates' Paged Archives plugin, a plugin that that I've blogged about before.  If you check out the main index page for this site, you should see the links near the bottom of the content column.

It's not a big change.  I mean we already use category pages as well as monthly ones.  I also have a complete post list, something that WordPress doesn't do out of the box.  I did a test of 5 Posts on the front page instead of the normal 10 but quickly changed it back.  I hate it when the sidebar is longer than the content.  You're usually stuck with that on individual post pages unless you normally write a bloody book each and every post.

The image is from Sue's post about Blogging Tips with EDUBlogs.  It came up when I did a few keyword searches for an images to use on this post.  Maybe we can get her to do an article on the subject.

New Theme: Abstrakt3c

By
Dr. Mike
on November 9, 2008 4:51 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
abstrakt3c.png
If you haven't noticed, I've updated the theme here on the site.  It's Abstrakt3c.  It was originally a WordPress theme created by Ivan Garcia (I don't see it listed anywhere on that site so I'll just link to the site in general) and was ported to Movable Type by Mike Thomsen.

What do you think?  I'm a bit torn on it.  I wish the content area was a little wider.  We shall see.

Christian Children's Fund Rejects the Goodwill of RolePlaying Gamers

By
Dr. Mike
on October 31, 2008 3:04 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
bill_bronx_cheer.jpg
Stories like this trouble me.  Every year GenCon, what's probably the largest annual gaming convention, holds a charity auction for the sponsored charity that year.  Two years ago, it was Make-A-Wish.  Last year it was Christel House International.

This year, the charity was supposed to be Christian Children's Fund. They were chosen by Gary Gygax's estate because he had supported the organization previously.  Some folks state that they were his favorite charity.  Instead they turned down the money as well as their status as official charity.

It's being reported that the organization turned down the money because they felt the money would have been tainted since it was coming from gamers and from the sales of gaming material, specifically Dungeons and Dragons material.  Or as Rich Burlew puts it "puts an irrevocable taint of evil on the filthy lucre that us demon-worshipping gamers might want to use to, say, donate to starving children."

Now there's two sides to this story of course along with some gray area.  CCF is stating they they turned down the position because of misuse of their logo.  Not sure why they couldn't work with GenCon to straighten out the mess nor do we know what these other reasons were because the logo misuse but that is their response.  Folks are also stating that they'll never give the organization another cent while others are suggesting that we should all remain calm and hope and pray that things will work out.   Others are quesioning their "Christian" status.

But then we have the gray area.  Folks seem to be forgetting that GenCon is currently being sued for an outstanding donation by LusasArts for the Make-A-Wish Auction a couple of years back.

Who's right and who's wrong?  Well the money this year went to Fisher House Foundation and they received almost twice what was raised the previous year.  CCF's response really sounds like butt covering and damage control to me but they may have had an issue with the use of their logo.  We don't really know and chances are we'll probably never know.  They have every right to reject and and all donations that they receive.  Politicians do this all the time.  Of course nothing was stopping them from taking the money and keeping their mouths shut.

Me?  I'm just impressed that I actually wrote an actual blog post.  Even with that annoying bug screwing up the editor.  How often do you see that?

Image taken from here.

edit: There's an interesting thread on the Giant in the Playground forums that's worth a read.  And, yes, I'm aware that there's a number of typos in the Post.  I'll fix them later when I have the time.

Yes, Jane, you are a Platformist

By
Dr. Mike
on October 30, 2008 3:04 PM |
drmike-128.jpg
Jane Wells asks if she's a platformist.  Well, considering that her blog will only accept comments from those who have wordpress.com accounts [I won't remind you that Matt Mullenweg censors accounts] and she didn't bother to mention which Movable Type designer she slighted, I guess the answer to that question is yes.

edit: I've decided to turn off commenting on this post until she returns the favor.  I'm sure it's just an oversight on her part and she'll quickly fix the situation. (Can you tell I'm working on my sarcasm?)

Which Method of Listing Threaded Comments Should I Use?

By
Dr. Mike
on October 18, 2008 10:09 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
Movable Type allows me to determine which method of displaying comments that I want.  I'm looking for folks' opinion on this one.

Should I do Chronological Threading which provides a link back to the original comment?

chron_threads-thumb-400x135.pngOr should I go the route of Hierarchical Threading?
digg_hier_thread-thumb-400x124.pngOpinions? For reference, the methods are discussed here.

Upgraded to Movable Type 4.21

By
Dr. Mike
on October 17, 2008 9:28 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)
Just a quick mention that I've upgraded to Movable Type 4.21. Please let me know if I broke anything.

I've already see one bug.  While you're writing, the system will autosave posts for you as you write.  That's cool and all that but after doing the save, it relocates the cursor to the beginning of the post content.  So, if you're not paying attention, you'll wind up with your writing in the wrong place.

That really bugs me. :(

edit: Reported here.

Damn Spam

By
Dr. Mike
on October 12, 2008 9:09 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
damn_spam.png
What's with all of the trackback spam lately?  That picture to the left there is the count for the last 20 hours or so since my last post.  Add 600 trackbacks that I've already deleted as well as the 303 comment spams from the other page and you get 2,886 of those little annoying buggers.  All caught by TypePad AntiSpam of course but then you have to go through and double check them.  At least I hope folks do that like I do.  Would hate to see something get caught by accident.

edit: OK, I found one issue that I fixed.  MT Auto Ban was not configured correctly.  That's now been fixed and hopefully will be dropping bad IP addresses into the correct block list. (Just in the five minutes I've been looking at the plugin, I received 147 more trackbacks that got flagged as spam.) Maybe that'll give me some breathing room.

Surviving A Slashdotting With a Celeron 466

By
Dr. Mike
on June 24, 2008 10:52 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
A few days ago, two of my posts here about mediamax/ thelinkup got listed over at Techcrunch.  I'm happy to say MovableType took the extra traffic without issue.  Had about an extra three thousand visitors each day for a couple of days. (Played havoc with my Google Adsense numbers though. )

Anyway I was looking for an excuse to post about one man's experience about surviving a Slashdotting with an older computer.

I would make a comment about how it's a pity that he had to go find a plugin to deal with the extra traffic while my site took it fine without issue but that would probably just generate some more posts out of the wordpress camp that cloud issues and are so far from the truth, it's actually funny.

How to fix "403 Throttled" errors for trackback pings in Movable Type

By
Dr. Mike
on May 21, 2008 5:26 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
For a while now, I've been having problems with getting trackbacks sent out of this blog. (Mostly to Wordpress blogs using Akismet I've noticed but that's besides the point.) 

I did note a number of times I received a "403 Throttled" error within my activity logs.  A quick google search pulls up this article on Richard Green's site on How to fix "403 Throttled" errors for trackback pings in movable type.

Richard tells us to add in the settings OneHourMaxPings and OneDayMaxPings to your site's /mt/mt-config.cgi file. (I note that as SixApart's docs don't actually say where to put those settings.) I've gone ahead and placed both lines in my config settings and saved the files.

...And watched the number of spam trackbacks go skyhigh.

Oh well.  At least my trackbacks are going out now.

Fixing the Comment Links

By
Dr. Mike
on April 30, 2008 9:39 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Some thing that has bothered me for quite some time is how Movable Type does it's comment links. Instead of just a normal link to a website, it does this weird internal redirect. I'm sure the software does this to help prevent spam but with all of the protection built in, there's really no need for something like that.

It's easy to fix.  Here's the code for the Comment Detail template.  You'll find it under Design -> Templates -> Quickfilters -> Template Modules.

<div class="comment"<MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled archive_type="Individual"> id="comment-<$MTCommentID$>"</MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled>>
    <div class="inner">
        <div class="comment-header">
            <$MTCommentAuthorLink default_name="Anonymous" show_email="0"$> <MTIfNonEmpty tag="CommentAuthorIdentity"><$MTCommentAuthorIdentity$></MTIfNonEmpty> said:
        </div>
        <div class="comment-content">
            <$MTCommentBody$>
        </div>
        <div class="comment-footer">
            <a href="#comment-<$MTCommentID$>" title="Permalink to this comment"><$MTCommentDate format="%x %X"$></a>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

See the line up there with $MTCommentAuthorLink? That's where the "Commenter bla-bla says:" get generated along with the link. All you have to do to get rid of the weird redirect link is add in no_redirect="1" to the line.

So the new line will look like this:

<$MTCommentAuthorLink default_name="Anonymous" show_email="0" no_redirect="1"$> <MTIfNonEmpty tag="CommentAuthorIdentity"><$MTCommentAuthorIdentity$></MTIfNonEmpty> said:

Why am I posting this? Because it's missing from the docs. Rather annoying actually. Almost like reading Wordpress' codex once again. There used to be a plugin for this but it's no longer needed.


Hopefully this will help someone else out. (And maybe get the docs edited to show this feature.)

Now I'm off to regenerate about 200 comments. :)

edit: Also considering that I don't use nofollow on this blog, I think it's important for folks to get credit for their comments.

reedit: You have to do the same to the Recent Comments widget.

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