Yes, it’s another “I upgraded my blog and aint I great” post only this time it’s in the form of thanks to a couple of different parties.
First off, I decided to upgrade the blog to Movable Type 3.2. On a Sunday evening. Right before bed. After a migrane. Without backing up the database. Note to everyone out there: do not hire me as your sys admin. Net Result? One mildly screwed install. The (apparently slicker) upgrade process hung tring to upgrade MT::Log without giving me any helpful information. Luckily some kind soul came to be rescue, and as a result you get to see a useful post like this.
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Since I lost the use of the subscribe to post plugin (for reasons known only to the Perl gods) I’ve wanted to add some other way for people to stay tuned to changes made to interesting posts – especially to see if replies are made to comments they’ve left. The obvious solution was staring me in the face – RSS feeds for each post. Using phil ringnalda’s similar template, I’ve updated the template to RSS 2.0, added a full HTML version of the post itself, and using MTSimpleComments include both trackbacks and comments. So now if you see a post that interests you, you can subscribe and get updated when the post changes, or someone leaves a comment or trackback.
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SpamLookup’s DNSBL Configuration
I was about to roll me sleeves up and get busy with mod_security this weekend with a view to further tackling my trackback spam issues, but luckily (for my Apache install if nothing else) Movable Type hacker extraordinaire Brad Choate has released SpamLookup to save me the effort. Where Jay Allen’s well-known MT Blacklist plugin uses centralized URL filters to block spam, SpamLookup concentrates instead on looking at where the trackbacks/comments come from. First among its arsenal of spam fighting techniques is the ability to talk to DNS-based blackhole lists such as the default Blitzed list and the Blog Spam Blocklist. These services publish a regularly updated list of IP addresses – in the case of blitzed and the blog spam blacklist, these IP addresses are known open relays which spammers love to use to cover their tracks.
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I’ve put an additional anti-spam measure in – comment preview is now forced. I’m having probems with the preview comment template right now (it looks very rough and ready) but I’ll put it right soon.
Once again comments seemed to be missfiring, which I only found out thanks to a helpful soul out there (thanks Shane!). This stumped me a bit, as I’d assumed the problems I was having was down to MT-Blacklist not working with my ISP’s Perl install. The other odd thing was that I was still recieving comment spam (which thanks to MT Moderate was not reaching the actual site). A quick poke around showed that I’d fooloshly left mt-comments.cgi in place, which was obviously how the spammers were getting in.
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A quick post those people reading this site via JavaBlogs. You might like to know that you’ll no longer be receiving my del.ico.us links spliced in with my feed. If you still want to get them, you’ll need to subscribe to my FeedBurner feed. All available feed-types are listed on my feeds page, or are available via the normal auto-discovery techniques.
Updated: Fixed some typos and the table formatting
Jumping belatedly onto one of the recent blogging bandwagons (by now looking quite unsafe, with peeling paint and all those credible bloggers long since having abandoned…well, wagon) I thought I’d have a look at the browsers people use to view the site in the wake of the release of Firefox 1.0.
Lets look at Analog’s results:
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A friend of mine pointed out that under RSS Bandit, links to my posts are broken. I took a look, and it seems as though it is using the @ element from my RSS 2.0 feed as a link, rather than the more usual @. My @@’s are fairly standard (in an MT sense), and look a little like this:
314@http://www.magpiebrain.com/
Thinking that RSS Bandit was misusing this value, I thought I’d do a little research.
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I’m not sure how I missed this (although I suspect a recent spring clean of my subscribed feeds is to blame) but I managed to miss the announcement that both NetNewsWire and FeedDemon are to integrate with Bloglines. I wasn’t wowed by the original announcement of the Bloglines web services API – I just saw it as an obvious move to enable the development of notifier tools and the like, as well as reducing bandwidth usage, but I certainly welcome the move of commercial rich-client aggregators to use Bloglines to enable synchronisation across multiple machines.
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So let’s look at the figures. Number of posts: 272. Number of comments: 506. Number of trackbacks: 12. Spot the odd one out? Trackbacks have been enabled since virtually day one of this blog, and have been surprisingly underused. I’m starting to wonder if they were worth the bother.
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An email from Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes pointed out something which I really hadn’t noticed – the del.icio.us links being spliced in using FeedBurner seem to be getting a huge number of hits – not just compared to the normal dross I put out, but compared to everyone else too. So far I’ve been unable to see how this could be happening – Javablogs only tracks reads made via JavaBlogs itself, which implies someone/something is hammering these specific entries via Javablogs itself. I think Mike is going to look into this a little more, but if we can’t find a fix I’ll pull my del.icio.us links from the Javablogs feed.
