As many of you who maintain public weblogs with Movable Type know, there's an increasing problem with comment spam on many weblogs, and we've discussed some of the ideas for how we'll be dealing with the problem in the future on our company weblog. While we're working on integrating these spam protection techniques into Movable Type and our recently-launched TypePad service, you can protect your site in the mean time by trying out Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist plugin, which is a clever solution to most common kinds of comment spamming, as well as being a great demonstration of the creative ways people are extending Movable Type through plugins.

Also, if you're interested in joining...

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03.25.2005

InfoWorld review of Movable Type

InfoWorld has just published a review of Movable Type 3.15, with the ultimate conclusion that "Overall, Movable Type delivers a solid blogging experience." There's a useful overview of the platform's features, along with some legitimate points about what needs improvement, but we're just as glad to see users explaining why Movable Type is the right choice for them as well.

Posted by anildash in Press Mentions at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

03.25.2005

Politicians with Permalinks

The Christian Science Monitor has a broad look at politicians using blogs to better communicate with their...

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We've just launched Movable Type 3.16, which we previewed to Professional Network members on the email list and members-only blog last week. We've heard a lot of good feedback from you about Movable Type since the launch of the Professional Network a few months ago, and this release addresses many of your requests.

The focus for Movable Type 3.16 is on code quality and cleaning up little issues and bugs that have crept into the code base, either in the past year or, in some cases, since Movable Type was first released.

To get started, you can get Movable Type now, or log in to your account to upgrade. Or, read on to find out more details.

A solid, high-quality platform

First, above all you've told...

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There are several features of the <MTCommentAuthorIdentity> that annoys me.

target="_blank"

I absolutely hate links opening in new windows/tabs without my permission. My view on this is that if I want something to open in a new window/tab I will instruct it to do so! A bug with the developers (#1313) to remove the target="_blank" but its still not happened. So, in lib/MT/Template/Context.pm and php/lib/function.MTCommentAuthorLink.php search for

<a target="_blank" title="%s" href="%s%s?__mode=red;id=%d">%s</a>

and

<a target="_blank" title="%s" href="%s">%s</a>

and remove the target="_blank"

Redirecting

With MT-Blacklist protecting my Movable Type...

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12.22.2004

MT-Blacklist v2.03-beta

As part of the ongoing efforts against comment spam, Jay Allen has released Blacklist v2.03-beta. This release is designed to take advantage of the improvements in Movable Type 3.14, and the combination of the two is an excellent way to manage comment spam while not imposing too much of a burden on your web server.

If you're using an older version of MT-Blacklist, it's strongly recommended that you update to this new version. And just to review, MT-Blacklist, despite the name, MT-Blacklist offers a wide variety of techniques to manage or moderate comments or block spam, in addition to its namesake Blacklisting feature.

Posted by Anil in Plugins at...

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The Movable Type team has been hard at work and we have some very exciting things coming in the 2005 release schedule. To kick things off we are proud to introduce Movable Type 3.16.

Movable Type 3.16 sports significant improvements to application security and over one hundred other fixes which really make it a highly recommended upgrade for all users.

Movable Type 3.16 is a simple drop-in replacement for any user who is running version 3.1 or higher. As long as you are running one of these more recent versions, there is no need to run an upgrade script or do anything other than upload the files in the upgrade distribution. Of course, if you're running a version older...

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07.27.2005

Dynamic Publishing support for PostgreSQL and SQLite

It's a common refrain for us to talk about Movable Type's wide platform support, but we really are committed to making sure Movable Type's full power is available on the widest variety of platforms. It's an investment that takes a lot of care and attention, but we think it's well worth the effort.

For example, take databases. Movable Type has long supported multiple databases, with MySQL and Berkeley DB being among the most popular. But two mature, popular open-source database technologies that a lot of our users have requested have also part of our platform support for over two years: PostgreSQL and...

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Skip navigation. • TypePad • Movable Type • LiveJournal • About Us • Support

October 2003

10.15.2003

Moving Forward with Movable Type

As many of you who maintain public weblogs with Movable Type know, there's an increasing problem with comment spam on many weblogs, and we've discussed some of the ideas for how we'll be dealing with the problem in the future on our company weblog. While we're working on integrating these spam protection techniques into Movable Type and our recently-launched TypePad service, you can protect your site in the mean time by trying...

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01.31.2005

BlogBinders: Publish your blog in print

If you're looking for a way to hold your blog in your hands, BlogBinders.com offers a simple and clever service to turn your blog into an attractive, customized book. BlogBinders supports LiveJournal, Movable Type, and TypePad.

Posted by Anil in Web Services at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

01.31.2005

Gawker launches Lifehacker and Gridskipper

Gawker Media's just added two new Movable Type-powered weblogs to its media empire, as announced by Nick Denton. Lifehacker is a friendly geek site and Gridskipper is a travel site aiming for selectivity.

Posted by Anil in New Sites at 10:45 AM | Permalink |...

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04.28.2005

Blogs as a complement to newspapers

Forbes online picked up an Associated Press story about the eleven blogs being published by the editorial staff of the News & Record in North Carolina.

The broad range of Movable Type-powered blogs have earned high praise from others in the journalism business. As Editor & Publisher said:

"When the paper's overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years," wrote the industry-watching magazine Editor & Publisher. "Greensboro will be the first place where this conceptually...

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One thing that disturbs me about a blog is that the conversations don't necessarily flow. Sure, if you happen along and add a comment, it might prompt someone after you to do the same. But what if the topic is one that really interests you and you'd like to keep up on it? There just aren't many options.

I think the most common option taken is to just revisit the site to check for updates. I don't know this for certain, though, as if you watch the comments on blogs, you'll often see the comments expanding, but rarely does anyone come back for a second round (blog hosters, such as myself, are of course exceptions to this rule).

Some enterprising folks in the blog space have taken to...

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01.14.2004

Version 2.66 Released

In recent weeks, open comment systems, and Movable Type weblogs in particular, have become a target for comment spam and comment flooding (automated scripts that send many comments at a time to a weblog entry).

As a stopgap before we release comment registration in Movable Type 3.0, we've released version 2.66 of Movable Type, which includes some protection against comment flooding. We've included a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can only be posted every N seconds, where N is configurable ( documentation on the setting that controls N). We've also added a measure to automatically ban an IP...

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In recent weeks, open comment systems, and Movable Type weblogs in particular, have become a target for comment spam and comment flooding (automated scripts that send many comments at a time to a weblog entry).

As a stopgap before we release comment registration in Movable Type 3.0, we've released version 2.66 of Movable Type, which includes some protection against comment flooding. We've included a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can only be posted every N seconds, where N is configurable ( documentation on the setting that controls N). We've also added a measure to automatically ban an IP address based on an abnormal number of comments from the...

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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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One site that's been getting a lot of attention of late is PWNtcha, a project which is demonstrating the inefficiency of many of the CAPTCHA systems designed to verify human identity. CAPTCHA is still, of course, a useful tool, but it's important to be aware of potential weaknesses.

CAPTCHA is just one of the techniques we covered in our Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam, and can be a good choice in conjunction with other spam-fighting options.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Newspaper transparency through blogs

Next Entry: Looking deeper into blogging and journalism

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Hacking Movable Type, the long awaited book by MT experts Jay Allen, Brad Choate, Ben Hammersley, David Raynes and Matt Haughey, is now in print, shipping, and available at Amazon.com.

From the book's back cover:

Ready to push Movable Type to the max?

Movable Type, that amazingly powerful personal publishing application, is the superhero of the Internet age. But when you push, poke, stretch, and otherwise coax it into producing even more, the possibilities for your Web content are simply superlative. Roll up your sleeves and get movinghere's the first book to tell you how.

Discover how to do all this and more

1. Hack the perfect installation 2. Hack the database 3. Play with Atom, Perl, and XML-RPC APIs...

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We realize that official news has been scarce over the last 6-9 months. During this time, our company has grown from two people to seven, and we have launched TypePad. Now that we have hired more engineering resources (and we are still looking for more), we are able to focus again on our Movable Type product line. As mentioned in this post on the Six Log, we're focusing on releasing more personal features in the basic Movable Type package, and concentrating features for businesses, organizations, and large content-driven sites into Movable Type Pro (which, needless to say, has been delayed).

The next version of Movable Type will be version 3.0, a significant and free upgrade....

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Now that Movable Type supports a real database with the MySQL support in version 2.2, it's time for some new tags that can let you select entries, comments and categories using any criteria you'd like. Click the 'more' link for full docs and download link.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtsql-1_52.zip

Installation

To install, place the 'sql.pl' file in your Movable Type 'plugins'...

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12.22.2003

Movable Type 3.0

We realize that official news has been scarce over the last 6-9 months. During this time, our company has grown from two people to seven, and we have launched TypePad. Now that we have hired more engineering resources (and we are still looking for more), we are able to focus again on our Movable Type product line. As mentioned in this post on the Six Log, we're focusing on releasing more personal features in the basic Movable Type package, and concentrating features for businesses, organizations, and large content-driven sites into Movable Type Pro (which, needless to say, has been delayed).

The next version of Movable Type...

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09.29.2004

Behind the Scenes - Brenna Koch

Behind The Scenes is a new series where we here at Six Apart discuss what tools (software, technology, etc.) we use to do our work.

I'm Brenna Koch and I work in technical support for Six Apart. If you're curious, "Cook" is how you pronounce my last name. I usually hear "Cotch" since that's how it is said in some areas and I also hear more ah... interesting variations. But now you know.

We have many browsers around in the support department but my favorite is Safari. I utilize keyboard commands with my bookmarks bar for fast access on the sites I use all the time like my test weblogs and pages in the help system...

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