Update (12/17/04 08:57 EST): I have just received a report that this trick does NOT work using the Safari web browser. This is likely becuase this is not the "proper" way to use BASE HREF. I will be posting a javascript version soon.

I tried this about 5 hours ago, and it works. I have received ZERO spam since I implemented this -- and I usually get hundreds a day.

The trick requires a simple template edit and works by tricking the spambots into think that your comment script is somewhere else. So when they try to spam you, they get 404 errors. Everyone else can post fine as usual.

Steps:

1. In your Individual Entry Archive, look for the following:

<form method="post"...

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It's not that new an issue, but this is a pretty good overview of the state of the battle against comment spam.

One of the key points that ought to be explored in future stories on comment spam is how much of comment spam is a problem with current versions of software, because it appears there's two key problems. There's fighting newer spam techniques with current versions of blog platforms ( TypePad's made as much progress in this regard as Movable Type and TypeKey have), and there's the separate issue of getting people to update to current versions of software so that they'll be protected.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Should NewsGator change its name?

Next Entry: Search Engine Watch launches a blog...

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Kristopher Krug of Digital Web has a fairly detailed interview with Mena Trott up today, covering a wide range of topics about Six Apart, TypePad and Movable Type. One of the best quotes is from Mena, talking about the staff here at Six Apart, "[T]here are so many smart people here who love what theyre doing and love blogging."

Though this interview was done a few weeks ago, today seems like a good day for it to be published, since it's somebody's birthday today.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Search Engine Watch launches a blog

Next Entry: Unsubscribing from the publisher's side

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Introduction

All roads in weblogging lead to posting entries, for without posted entries there is no weblog. It should come as no surprise that the Entries Listing and New/Edit Entry screens are where most users will find themselves when working with Movable Type.

In these screens a user can view what entries are in a weblog, filter them based on certain criteria, make new posts and edit existing ones.

Entries Listing

The Entries Listing screen displays either all the entries for the weblog or just the entries made by you. What gets displayed depends on whether or not you have...

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MTDynamic is a Movable Type plugin that is designed to facilitate the dynamic rendering of Movable Type blogs, using URL parmaters to control the display of entries and comments.

Download (v0.6)

Installation

1. Movable Type ships with a dynamic viewer (mt-view.cgi), which is described as an "experimental feature". To use to the viewer, you must turn "SafeMode" off. To do this, edit your "mt.cfg" file such that it includes the following:

SafeMode 0

There should already be a SafeMode section near the bottom of the cfg file.

2. Download and extract Dynamic.pl to your hard drive.

3. Upload Dynamic.pl to the "plugins" directory in your MT Installation.

Template Tags

MTDynamic creates two new...

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The old Wired search engine, HotBot, recently made news by switching to an all–CSS design. Now they're rippling the waters again with their latest news:

Hack HotBot is a unique design contest. We are asking our users to "HACK" HotBot's look & feel by creating their own customized skin.

Serious Designers Wanted. Faint at heart need not apply. Knowledge of CSS technology is necessary to enter. This must be your own design work. Copyright and trademark rules will be enforced. Winning entries may be offered to all HotBot users to select as their skin. Your design will be shown to the HotBot world.

Now this is a design contest I'd love to...

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Introduction

SpamLookup is an anti-spam plugin created by Movable Type engineer Brad Choate, which identifies spam based on a number of unique characteristics and administrator based tests. It includes: • IP address blacklist lookups • Domain name blacklist lookups • IP address source correlation • Lookup whitelists • Link limits • Email and Link memory tests • Keyword filtering

This plugin has been updated for Movable Type 3.2 and utilizes the feedback rating framework. Each test that is enabled contributes to the final composite score of a feedback item. The final score after all tests...

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It seems that the folks at Six Apart have released a new plugin for tags on your entries, which seems to replace and/or to complement categories. I've talked about tagging before. I think it's a phenomenal technology. The problem with this, and with categories in general, is that those are my tags. This has been covered here before, by me and by others.

Adding tags to an entry doesn't help anyone any more than categories do, both because they are my tags and not yours, and also because it means someone needs to come here to find them. That doesn't make any sense. At any given blog, you can go and look through tags is great - but to find them, you have to go to each blog. Using a...

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Greg Reinacker of NewsGator has as smart post about security in XML feeds where he makes a strong argument for reusing prior art:

My advice for now? Don't worry about it. RSS today is transported via HTTP. Sure, you could use other protocols - but almost no one does. This same argument came up some time ago about SOAP web services...a lot of work went into making sure everything was portable enough to deliver SOAP messages through any arbitrary transport. But in real life? Almost no one is doing it.

We don't need more protocols. We don't need yet another encryption standard. We don't need yet another authentication mechanism. Use what works today - it's proven itself already.

It's a compelling argument,...

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MTDynamic is a Movable Type plugin that is designed to facilitate the dynamic rendering of Movable Type blogs, using URL parmaters to control the display of entries and comments.

Download (v0.5)

Installation

1. Movable Type ships with a dynamic viewer (mt-view.cgi), which is described as an "experimental feature". To use to the viewer, you must turn "SafeMode" off. To do this, edit your "mt.cfg" file such that it includes the following:

SafeMode 0

There should already be a SafeMode section near the bottom of the cfg file.

2. Download and extract Dynamic.pl to your hard drive.

3. Upload Dynamic.pl to the "plugins" directory in your MT Installation.

Template Tags

MTDynamic creates two new...

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06.30.2005

New in Movable Type 3.2: A home for administrators

One of Movable Type's biggest strengths is the platform's support for an unlimited number of weblogs. Once you've got a thriving community of bloggers creating entries and publishing their thoughts, though, it quickly becomes necessary to manage the weblogs on your system.

To meet this need, we've introduced an entire new area of functionality in Movable Type 3.2: The System Overview. We've chosen the System Overview as the first feature to highlight in this new release because it represents a single home for administrators. It's one place to go to oversee everything that's happening across your...

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Integrating A Remote System with Movable Type

Problem

You want to integrate a remote system with Movable Type.

Solution

Use one of the supported web service protocols.

Discussion

Movable Type supports a number of means of remote systems integration.

Syndication

Before reviewing the "proper" web service protocols supported by Movable Type, it is worth mentioning the use of syndication for integrating Movable Type with other systems. Essentially syndication formats over the web (HTTP) are simple read-only web services. The most popular and widely deployed of these services are...

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You may have been recently hit by several waves of Trackback spam, including a major assault over the last 24 hours. These attacks are clearly automated, sending many pings in a short period of time. Even if MT-Blacklist is effecting repelling these attacks, it can still cause problems for some. In the past few weeks, MT-Blacklist was working so hard to block all the spam that it contributed to a heavy CPU load on the server, resulting in several crashes (I have since moved to a dedicated server). So I have been looking for ways to ease the burden of MT-Blacklist. For trackback spam, one of the first things I tried was to rename my Trackback script from the default 'mt-tb.cgi',...

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During the comment spam crisis, before 3.14 was released, my host installed something called mod_security. I have noticed that ever since it was installed, the comment spam flood I normally experienced turned into a trickle. mod_security helps with a lot of things. It's good for helping block a lot of the script vulnerability attacks like cross-site scripting, bad PHP includes, etc so there's a good chance it will be installed on your host, if not ask them.

If you do have mod_security installed, I will guide you through setting it up such that it blocks of comment spam. What is the advantage of mod_security over MT-Blacklist? mod_security scans the comment before it hits MT-Blacklist or...

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Ok, I entered the weblog arena rather late. Initially I probably did not estimate the consequences correctly. For me blogging meant users who sat down in the evening for telling the world about their daily problems. There were cooking recipes here, and essays about presidential elections there. Sometimes interesting, sometimes boring - but nothing I was interested in doing myself.

When working and reading in the internet you can hardly avoid finding weblogs all over the place. Sometimes I quickly move on, sometimes I start reading a bit. But starting a weblog myself? I really had no interest in this.

This month I had found the way to Six Apart. Six Apart is a company offering products...

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Learning Movable Type has a tutorial on how to apply MT 3 styles to a 2.x blog but what about the other way around ?

I scanned two similar stylesheets to see what changed, basically the only thing you need to change is the definitions names mostly, the actually style definitions can stay the same. I am assuming you are using the default MT 3 templates Here is what has changed with the CSS from MT 2.x to MT 3 styles - it may not be perfect but it'll be darn close. I have listed the MT 2.x definitions and then the MT 3 definition it needs to be changed to: • .description becomes #banner h2 • #content and .blogbody becomes .content • #links becomes #right • .title becomes .content h3 • .date becomes...

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I've been updating the method for specifying URLs throughout the site this morning. In general, this means that instead of page names such as 000001.html, you will see link_changes.html. In practice, this should mean nothing to you, and you may not even notice a change. Hopefully you will not notice the change, anyway!

One place you may notice a change is on the old archives. These old links will continue to exist for a while, at least - however they will not be updated any longer. Each of the "old" archive pages has been updated to include a link to the new URL for that page. In this way, you should be able to find your way to the new page if you end up on the old one somehow. If...

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With Ryan Holsten and Michael Krisher

The year 2000 came and went. Where did design go? As sad as it sounds, not terribly far. It was a year of trendiness, inspiration, imitation, and the imitation of inspired trendiness. What we can take away from the past year in digital design is the knowledge that the new medium is still deep in its early discovery phase.

Y2K (for lack of a shorter term) was going to change everything. Flying cars, artificial intelligence, talking toasters – this was our supposed fate. So where's our Jetsons lifestyle? Maybe Y3K would have been a more practical projection!

It's 11 p.m. Does your Mom know where you are?

The web is now recognized as...

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I've read several HTML references, online and off, and all seem to make some mention of the dichotomy of style and content, presentation and structure, appearance and substance. The good designer is admonished to keep them separate in order to ward off various woes: unmanageability, unusability, professional shame.

I think this is a myth. I think it has persisted for four different reasons. I don't think web designers need be concerned about it at all.

Vital to good web design is architecting data so the site is usable and maintainable. This begins only after a thorough grasp of mission and means. A textbook web site may fit together nicely with one simple separation,...

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Update April 9, 2005: Brad Choate has released a new anti-spam plugin called SpamLookup. Jay Allen, the creator of MT-Blacklist recommends SpamLookup over MT-Blacklist.

Spammers have discovered Trackback and have recently been leaving their trail of unwelcome links all over the blogosphere. To get a sense of what we are up against, read The Register's interview with a link spammer. Listed here are some defensive measures you can take.

MT-Blacklist

As with comment spam, your first recourse is Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist. The blacklist will help you delete the trackbacks and ban the URLs the spammers leave. Note that if you are using MT2.661 and MT-Blacklist 1.65, Jay has special instructions for deleting trackback spam pings....

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