Category: MovableType stuff

Oooh, MT 3.1 is released! Fantastic, now I can go upgrade my 3.1 beta and upgrade my main installation. I’m really liking the dynamic publishing, which should really ease MT’s weblog storage requirements.

So for the past few days, I’ve been pestered by some annoying spammer who appears to be going through each of my posts and leaving spam comments. Nothing heavy yet, only about 7 or 8 a day. Thanks to MT3’s comment moderation, nobody has to sully their eyeballs with the spam because all I do is just go into the database and dump the comments.

There’s a pre-release of MT Blacklist for MT3 which I’ve been thinking about installing. I just haven’t found time to get to it yet.

In the meantime, I’ll just do the comment filtering manually.

Looks like there are a lot of new things coming for MT 3.1 that we can look forward to in about a month or so. Things like scheduled posting and the ability to publish dynamically, which should help ease the pain of rebuilding. Also a plug-in pack with the winners from the plugin contest.

Can’t wait!

In Your MT-Blacklist Wish List, Jay asks what should go into the next version of MT-Blacklist.

Here is what I’d like to see:

• Blacklist entry editing. Sometimes I make a mistake entering one of my own entries, and the only way to fix it is to delete the old one and add a new entry.
• Integration with comments and comment moderation (MT 3). Something like a button that says “This is spam” and would add the entry into Blacklist.
• How about storing the blacklist entries in a a database table? It might slow down the blacklist though

Although not plugin related, another thing I’d like to see is the format of the Latest 100 changes changed to something that could just be copy/pasted into the blacklist. Then I wouldn’t have to grab the master blacklist file all the time and have it tell me that most of the entries are already in the blacklist.

That’s all I can think of at the moment. If I come up with more, I’ll add them in.

In the latest entry to SixLog, the question is asked: “How are you using the tool?“

If free isn’t an issue for you and you’re willing to pay for a version of Movable Type (say the $69 version) and the blog/author limits won’t work for your current use, write a non-emotional post explaining how you’re using Movable Type and TrackBack this entry.

I work in the Radiology department of a university hospital. When I first decided to install MovableType on my server, it was in response to one of our radiologists who wanted some software that our residents could use to log the procedures they perform. A place where they could leave notes, pictures, descriptions, details, whatever. Our program typically has anywhere from 4-8 residents per year, so there would potentially be as many as 40 weblogs and authors. A weblog would be perfect for this kind of application.

Unfortunately, they decided to go with a different system, so now this installation of MT hosts 1 active author and 4 weblogs.

1. my personal weblog.
2. a departmental weblog used to post announcements, activities and department news and the like.
3. a private weblog used to track changes to the server and maintenance notes.
4. a test weblog that I use to experiment with.

In the near future I plan on introducing MT to our Radiology Informatics group to see if they might find it useful as a group communication tool. This would involve adding 5 additional authors and at least that many more weblogs. I also plan on introducing MT to the rest of our faculty to see if our radiologists and residents might find it of any use. Thats maybe another 30 or 40 authors. Of course I don’t expect all of them to use it. If 10 of them decide it’s useful enough to use regularly, then I would be impressed.