Originally posted 9-28-04.

The ability to leave comments on other people's weblogs and accept comments on your own is one of the features that make blogs so compelling. Accepting comments on your blog however, can be like having an open house party where ill-behaved uninvited guests show up. TypeKey, a free service from Six Apart, can help you control who gets to comment on your weblog.

If you are setting up a new weblog in MT3.x, adding Typekey authentication is easy. You'll need to get a TypeKey token from TypeKey.com and select various comment settings in your weblog config preferences. If you have upgraded to MT3 from an earlier version of Movable Type and want to use TypeKey...

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One of the best ways to improve the community around your weblog is to encourage accountability. But to make that happen, you have to have a consistent identity for each of the people who contributes comments to your site, so that you can know who each person is. This is especially important in Movable Type 3.2, where each commenter has an individual page where a blog owner can see all of that person's comments across all the blogs in the system.

To make this kind of accountability possible, we introduced the TypeKey authentication service last year. Since then, millions of people have signed in with the service, and dozens of tools have sprung up around TypeKey, either serving as...

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Authentication status

This option allows you to set up TypeKey (or a compatible service) on your blog to enable authenticated commenting. This is highly recommended as an extremely effective and easy anti-spam technique.

The "Setup Authentication" button will launch a wizard in a pop-up window that will easily allow you to complete the setup. You may also enter your TypeKey token (found on your TypeKey profile) manually into the space provided.

If you are not using TypeKey, but instead a TypeKey-compatible service, you must enter the token manually....

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Over at Spaceship No Future, some indispensable notes on integrating a custom login system with Movable Type using the TypeKey API.

Through a combination of the official documentation for creating a drop-in authentication service for Movable Type, the tk PHP library from Stuart Parmenter, and the resources from Everything TypeKey, it's possible to use an existing login system in place of the central TypeKey service to authenticate commenters.

Some of the steps are specific to this particular installation, but the general concept should work well with any existing database which needs to be integrated into Movable Type's comment authentication.

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A little bit more blogger triumphalism at CNET, where John Borland says Forget the political conventions in a story about the blogosphere's in-depth examination of the controversial National Guard documents that CBS News presented last week.

Though there are lots of intriguing details to the story, this particulra topic is probably polarizing enough that it's hard to point to this story as an example of the blogosphere's strength at finding information. If you're not talking to a business audience, or you can frame it in a context that focuses on the obscure information that's been dug up, this one might be worth referring back to.

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This setting controls who may comment on your site. There are three choices: • Anyone • Authenticated commenters only • No one.

Anyone and No one are self-explanatory except that the latter effectively disables commenting on the blog. If you are using the new template structure introduced in Movable Type 3.2, a rebuild of the Index templates will also remove the comment form from all of your individual entries. If not, you must rebuild all Individual archives to remove the comment form.

Autheticated commenters allows only commenters authenticated through the TypeKey service (or another...

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3.16 (2005.04.13)

Security

• Made several important improvements with regards to application authentication and security.

Notifications

• Fixed ``Send Notifications'' feature for multiple recipients. • Fixed a bug where comment notifications weren't being sent for some moderated comments.

Error checking

• Improved validation of user input in many places. Leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed from author names, category names, and blog names. None of these can be left blank except for a known issue with editing the...

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Introduction

Weblogs are not just a one-way medium for publishing. With the use of a singular, often conversational voice, enhanced by the loosely coupled nature of the Internet and lightweight syndication formats, weblogs are akin to conversations, regardless of the size and makeup of the audience. "A" writes about something on their mind -- an experience, the news, or a project's status. "B" reads it and expresses their take. "C" finds both posts interesting and notes something A and B has not mentioned and so on.

Not everyone has a weblog (sadly) and not everyone wants to make...

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Setting Comment Policy

Problem

You want to set commenting policy for your weblog.

Solution

Use the controls under the Feedback tab of the weblog's Settings screen.

Discussion

When Movable Type Version 3.0 was released, its most significant enhancements came in the area of comment and TrackBack management and moderation, providing publishers numerous means of controlling the community elements of MT-powered sites.

While the Comments and Commenters Listing screens provide the ability to manually tend to comments in a more efficient manner than previous versions, MT also added...

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Weblogs are not just a one-way medium for publishing. With the use of a singular, often conversational voice, enhanced by the loosely coupled nature of the Internet and lightweight syndication formats, weblogs are akin to conversations, regardless of the size and makeup of the audience. "A" writes about something on their mind -- an experience, the news, or a project's status. "B" reads it and expresses their take. "C" finds both posts interesting and notes something A and B has not mentioned and so on.

Not everyone has a weblog (sadly) and not everyone wants to make a post to their weblog for everything...

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After having played with Movable Type and saving all data in the filesystem for a couple of days, it was time to migrate to an SQL database. As a developer for MS SQL Server or Oracle I do know SQL. However, I have never had any experience with MySQL. Although I am not the best man for this job, the installation succeeded.

Installing MySQL

MySQL is a true SQL Server. It is under an Open Source Development and has won rising acceptance in the previous years. It is offered in the so-called "Dual Licensing Model". Suppose you develop an application but you do not want to publish the source code. If you then want to distribute MySQL as part of your own application, you have to...

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Tutorials in Alphabetical Order

"Email Me" Contact Forms A Safe Way to Upgrade to MT 3.2 Add Your Links Here Adding a Footer Adding a Sidebar - MT3.1 and Earlier Adding a Sidebar to the Default Archive Templates Alphabetize Your Entries Amazon Web Services An Overview of the MT Program File Directories Applying MT3 Style Templates to MT2.X Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Banner Images Blog Maintenance Blogger Audioblogging with Movable Type CGIWrap and suEXEC Category Archive Pages Category Customizations Closing Comments Colors - Background, Banner, Headline, and Font Colors - Experimenting With, Using MTSetVar and MTGetVar Combining Multiple Blogs Into One Concerning Spam Converting from Fixed to Fluid Style...

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With Movable Type 3.2's focus on enabling community, we wanted to make sure that a blog administrator can recognize the people who build the community around a weblog. And if you're keeping a personal blog, you want to make sure your friends feel welcome when they visit your site.

TypeKey Authentication

Last year, we released the TypeKey authentication service to allow commenters to identify themselves in a consistent manner. This lets site owners assign persistent rules to an individual that act every time that person visits a blog. Since then, over a million people have signed in with the service, and a thriving community has sprung up around the TypeKey service and protocol.

The TypeKey authentication...

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02.28.2005

TypePad UK Launches

We're proud to announce today that TypePad has launched in the UK. Though it was our least strenuous language translation ever, we're proud to have another country-specific offering to complement our current services in Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, Spain, and The United States.

Posted by anildash in TypePad at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

02.27.2005

Dreamforce, blogs for the Salesforce.com community

Salesforce.com is one of the most popular hosted business applications, with an active community of users and developers. One of the ways that they're keeping in touch with these diverse...

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The web services concept being championed by computing giants like Sun, Oracle, HP, Microsoft, and IBM doesn't contain many new ideas, but it is a great step towards simple access to software over the network. By promoting standards–based communication, web services might change the way we build websites.

What is a web service?

Web services make software functionality available over the Internet so that programs like PHP, ASP, JSP, JavaBeans, the COM object, and all our other favorite widgets can make a request to a program running on another server (a web service) and use that program's response in a website, WAP service, or other application.

So when I need to get some...

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Many people have complained about Typekey, how it has lost them commenters. I am currently beta testing out the next MT-Blacklist, so my use of Typekey will be slightly different.

None-the-less, I have Typekey as a method by which commenters can be assured of seeing their comment immediately show up on my weblog. In the new Blacklist, there is something called "Typekey Free Pass." If enabled, comments by TypeKey-authenticated users will not be scanned for blacklist matches, old entry moderation or max URLs. In this way I am putting a lot of faith into the Typekey system. Un-authenticated users will still be able to post, by MT-Blacklist will check the comment for a variety of things...

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A conditional tag that displays its contents if the email addresses of all registered users are required by the weblog.

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MTIfRegistrationAllowed

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Updated August 29, 2005. Originally posted in 2004.

Spammers have discovered bloggers and sooner or later if you allow comments or trackback pings on your weblog you will get spammed.

Blog spam appears in many flavors:

1) Basic comment spam. The spammer leaves a short uneventful message in a comment field in one of your entries. The spam comes from the URL placed in the comments URL field. These URLs link back to every conceivable scam. The spammers leave URLs here to create a link from your site to theirs, thus increasing their Google ranking. Spammers are also now linking to legitimate sites that have not cleared their pages of comment spam, thus increasing the Google rank...

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Immediately publish comments from...

This setting enables you to control what should happen to non-junk comments after submission based on the status of the commenter. There are four choices: • No one • Trusted commenters only • Any authenticated commenters • Anyone

No one will hold all comments for approval of the weblog owner or other sufficiently priviliged user.

Trusted commenters only and Any authenticated commenters will hold comments for approval unless they are submitted by trusted or authenticated commenter, respectively.

Anyone will immediately publish all comments from...

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Power Tools is one central place to get lots of open source code and components that Six Apart's team has released. Power Tools help you build better sites, apps, and platforms and to connect your applications to the rest of the web.

Most Power Tools code is released under open source licenses, making it possible to build on the work here in your own applications and services. Note: Power Tools are provided as technology demonstrations for our community, but we can't offer technical support for their use, installation, or configuration.

Plugins

• StyleCatcher 1.01: StyleCatcher is a simple but powerful plugin built for Movable Type 3.2 that lets you easily swap out any one of...

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