Movable Type 3.0D

mt30d

sixthseal.com is now running on MT 3.0. I love the comments
interface, it can list ALL the comments in a descending order. I
already anticipate this will be my favorite feature in this release. I
have waited for this day for so long…the day, the glorious day, when
I can mass delete those spambot comments in seconds! I shall finally be
faster than a bot! πŸ˜‰

Anyway, I was torn over MT or WordPress, coz MT with it’s Perl and
CGI bloat, really stresses my server while I rebuild the database. I
installed WP 1.2 and was mighty impressed by it, the easy set up
(imported my MT export file within minutes, faster than even MT can
import!). It can be easily set up within seconds and I like the PHP
type UI – reminded me of the stuff I used to write for the uni last
time. Heh.

It was really fast too, I know that MT rebuilds make a huge spike in
CPU utilization but surprisingly, extreme administrative stuff – I was
continuously right clicking Delete links and opening it in a new window
to see how fast it can delete, and even after 115 windows popped up,
all of them deleted fine, as PHP commands issued should. It’s just a
quick right click, close on each docked window, and there you go.

I went into my box via SSH and ran top in shell (no I wasn’t trying
to be smart, and not use WHM, I was already in there to do some dig
soa’s) and was surprised at the vast different between MT rebuilds
(heavy CPU and memory usage) and WP admin stuff (very, very low).

The only thing stopping me from installing WP is due to the
unfortunate “single php file with templates” design. You can opt to
have each post named according to the title of the post, but it’s
generated dynamically – there are no flat files, it usually ends with
something like this:

/archives/this-is-wordpress-posting/

The problem with this would be apparent if you go to WP blogs and
I’ve been to many before deciding that I’ll better stick with MT. The
WP system doesn’t pass PageRank down to the individual pages, except in
unusual circumstances.

Anyway, I’ll be adding the rest of the sidebar soon and do some general redesign of the blog later today.

Wow, is this a boring post or what? πŸ˜‰

Spam in Movable Type

spamheh.jpg

There seems to be spam bots crawling indexed pages and leaving
comments with heavy keyword density and offsite links in an attempt to
drive PageRank and SERPs to their spam site. I’ve seen several these
few days in sixthseal.com, which is running MT 2.63. castitas.com is
running MT 2.64 and doesn’t seem to have that problem. However,
castitas.com isn’t ranked by Google yet, though it is indexed, as can
be seen by the high SERPs with certain keywords related to drugs. I’m
not sure if upgrading to Movable Type 2.64 would foil the spambots but
in the mean time, I’m manually deleting the spam (and the URL, leaving
just the email intact) so there’s no PR leak. πŸ˜‰ I even came up with a
haiku to insert in all deleted spams:

Spam is bad mmmkay?
Your kind is not welcome here.
Go back home spambot.

Inspired by the various racist comments directed towards ethnic minorities in Caucasian countries. πŸ˜‰

First bitch!

I’ve finally installed and configured Movable Type
[movabletype.org]. It took a while because I had to manually mput,mkdir
and lcd to create all the directories. I use a command line FTP client,
you see. After all that, I had an error while building MT and had to
search around to find it. It turns out that I had placed one of the
language Perl files in a wrong directory. That happens when you do
things manually. I would use a GUI FTP client, but my Uni’s proxy is
set in such a way that I need to tunnel through one of their Unix boxes
to get to an off campus FTP address.
Anyway, everything loaded properly after that and I was in with the
default Melody/Nelson password. Due to a temporary lapse in good sense,
I deleted the Melody login before creating a new one. It should be
okay, I figured, coz I can create a new one before I log out. Well,
apparently not. MT logged me out straight after I deleted the default
login and there I was, locked out of my own blog.
I tried using one of ther resetauth.cgi scripts, but those don’t work
coz the database didn’t even have any authors in it. Thus, I had to use
phpMyAdmin to drop all the MT tables and start again. phpMyAdmin is
under https (secure http) in my host, and my Uni’s proxy does not
access off campus https servers without tunneling.
I couldn’t do it thru the Unix box, so I’m stuck with…HTTPort. Yes,
the public server proxy tunneling program. God…using a public proxy
on a Saturday night is an exercise in patience indeed. Just the login
page took 30 minutes to load.

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