January 29, 2005

Room to Breathe

Steve, here, with the first posting in Ian's upgraded blog.

Notwithstanding my whining comments about Movable Type last week, I did finally manage to migrate Ian's web site to Movable Type 3.14.

Why do you care as a reader? Well, I hope this will boost Ian's morale, by making it easier and more fun to keep this blog!

The new MT will, we hope, reduce the time Ian spends defending against comment spam. There's comment moderation now, and a new version of MT-Blacklist that can do lots more, easier.

At the same time, I made a few other improvements. We're on a much faster server now, with pretty much unlimited disk space. (That'll make my job easier, since I won't have to constantly manage the disk space.) I also switched to a faster, more capable database.

I put a lot of time in on this. I hope it helps Ian stay enthusiastic about blogging, and I hope it helps the readers stay engaged.

Let me know how the new system works for you!

Posted by sbw at January 29, 2005 7:22 PM
Comments
Posted by: Steve Williams at January 29, 2005 7:42 PM

Here's a first comment, as a test.

The new MT's comment system has moderation features. I'm still learning exactly how moderation works. Evidently you can authenticate your email address here on this site or through TypeKey (ptui!) in order to get your comments approved automatically. But we may not have that turned on yet.

Posted by: Greg at January 29, 2005 9:50 PM

Is this comment approved?

Posted by: Greg at January 29, 2005 9:50 PM

You might want to adjust the fonts on your comment verification page...

Posted by: flaco at January 30, 2005 12:31 AM

fix the cnames!!! xtcian.com no longer points to correct url

Posted by: caroline at January 30, 2005 2:28 AM

Woot!

Posted by: Christopher Smith at January 30, 2005 3:13 AM

Hello there,
I'm Chris from England.
Tonight I watched this DVD with my friends:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0002CTZS4/qid=1107047681/ref=pd_ka_0/026-1320305-3971628
I found your website by typing the words "ignominies enchantress" into Google.
I'm pleased to inform that YOU ARE A GOOGLEWHACK !
If you don't know what that means, check this site:
http://www.googlewhack.com/
Anyway I just wanted to tell you about this !!!
Cheers !
Chris Smith

Posted by: Steve Williams at January 30, 2005 5:32 AM

Greg: I know the comment "thank-you" page is ugly. Has something to do with upgrading an older MT site to the new MT templates and stylesheets. I'll fix it eventually!

Posted by: Steve Williams at January 30, 2005 5:37 AM

flaco: Thanks for the heads-up! Actually, the cname was correct, but no virtual host was defined for xtcian.com, so it went to the default. I added a new virtual host and redirected it to www.xtcian.com. (On the old server, xtcian.com was just an alias for www.xtcian.com. Now it redirects.)

Posted by: Ian at January 30, 2005 9:18 AM

Wow, I didn't even know this was here until now. Thanks, Steve!

Posted by: litlnemo at January 31, 2005 3:03 PM

Finally this site shows up in my blogroll as "recently updated." It never did before, so I'd forget to read for a few days and then have to catch up. This is much better. Thanks!

Posted by: Steve Williams at January 31, 2005 4:06 PM

litlnemo: Cool. MT 3.14 includes a "ping" feature, which we've turned on, so weblogs.com and Technorati are automatically notified when it's updated.

But I see you're using Wordpress. Does Wordpress generate the "recently updated" flag from one of those sites? Or perhaps Wordpress uses Ian's RSS feed to watch for updates. (If the latter, I wonder why it didn't work before.)

Posted by: Peter Rukavina at February 1, 2005 8:05 PM

Any chance we can get a full-post RSS feed now?

Posted by: Steve Williams at February 1, 2005 8:55 PM

Peter: Done! Thanks for the suggestion.

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