Category: MovableType stuff

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Broken auto-save

Been using the Auto-Save plugin by Patrick Benny for a little while now. It was pretty cool when I first installed it, but for some reason now it just times out when the auto-save kicks in for the first time. The entry still gets saved by MT, but the browser doesn’t seem to get any notification of it. If the entry is saved before the first auto-save attempt kicks off, then the plugin works fine.

Just another thing I need to dig into that I think may have been related to the server upgrade. I’ll get to it one of these days.

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Blog search spamming

My MT activity log shows several days worth of high volume searches for random names which makes me suspect someone’s bot is trying a DoS attack against MT blogs (or blogs in general) using the blog’s search service. MT’s built-in search script is pretty painfully slow, so a high enough search volume can potentially bring a server to its knees.

Fortunately for MT, an easy way to mitigate this type of attack (if that’s what this is) is with the Fast Search plugin, which mostly replaces MT’s built-in search script. It’s not a complete replacement because it doesn’t handle tag searching, but for the plain old Search box for your blog it works quite nicely.

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Hang on, I’m not done waiting yet

The server that hosts radinfo.musc.edu is hardly a speed demon (it’s a dual 450 MHz Pentium II), so for most things I’ve got running on this server, I’m used to waiting a little bit for things to get processed.

Lately I’ve been running the wheeljack dev build of Movable Type (I like to be on the bleeding edge of software) which has incorporated support for FastCGI (recently rolled out with MT 3.34). I finally got around to building FastCGI and incorporating it into the Apache config to see how it would help with the back end of MT. While it’s not much of an improvement on this pokey slow machine, it’s definitely faster than pre-FastCGI. MT’s user interface has become noticeably faster although I’ve had to give up an old hit counter CGI program that just didn’t want to run under FastCGI. It’s definitely enough of a speed improvement to make me happy.

Still need to test things to make sure everything works. If anybody happens to notice something got busted, let me know.

Update 1: Well, publishing an entry took a curiously long time. Normally once I hit the publish button I usually see the next screen that say things are getting published and sites are getting pinged. This time it stayed on the entry screen for several minutes before switching. I wonder if this is normal…

Update 2: Looks like commenting is really slow too. Seeing a lot of error messages in the Apache error log about the mt-comment.cgi and mt.cgi processes getting killed and restarted during comment processing. Seems like anything involving rebuilding takes a long long time. Might have to back out the FastCGI stuff.

Update 3: There were too many unexplained errors showing up in the Apache error log so I decided to back out the FastCGI stuff for now, at least until after the weekend when I might have some more time to investigate.

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It’s Dan’s fault

Thanks to Dan for getting me stuck on Google Reader.

Here are some of the tidbits I’m sharing via Google Reader. I even added a new module to the sidebar. I need to find out how to style it so it fits the look of the blog a little better.

Now to figure out why my random image block isn’t working anymore…

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Trying out a new look

It’s the Note Taking theme from The Style Contest. I thought it was kind of neat. Still tweaking it a little bit here and there.