Recently in Movabletype Category

Update - Comments seem to be working now. I was up emailing back and forth until about 2am this morning and just got back up. Something was wrong with my comment response template, it had been replaced with an older version. Still not sure how. My host says they haven't done any kind of upgrades, so heck if I know. I ran into a couple of issues with upgrade stuff back about six months ago but haven't seen them in recent versions of MT.

Still haven't gotten all my issues fixed but the important one was comments. Let me know if you have any other issues with it.

Also, I currently have the blog rebuilding all of the entry pages so that the comment links point to the correct script, it will most likely take a half an hour since I have over 5,000 posts. It's currently 7:50 so probably after 8:30am all comments should be back to normal.

I noticed that I haven't received any comments since yesterday morning and while that was strange I just figured it had been a slow day. I have since received an email from the Sassy Southerner who has informed me you get errors when posting comments. I had the same results when I tried.

I think that my host upgraded the MT software with an upgrade I didn't need because comments and some other stuff has been broken since Friday. I have submitted a ticket and hopefully it will be fixed shortly.

If you've tried to comment and couldn't get through I apologize, it will be fixed soon.

Update - Comments should be working on the entries now.

About a year ago (or more) I tried using FastCGI with Movabletype and it didn't work worth a crap. Lots of errors and unexplained stuff. Now after a few more versions have been released and bugs fixed I am trying it again. It's not something that you will notice on the front end but it should speed things up even more than they already are. I am also going to be putting in some of the sidebar stuff as php server includes as well. If you get any kind of weird errors, please let me know so I can reset it to the way I had things before.

I am also going to start paginating the main page and the comments so that they will be shorter and load a bit faster.

OK, for whatever reason Pagination doesn't seem to work with my setup. It may be because I am using the MT Order plugin or it may just need to be updated for MT 4.2. I don't know. Otherwise everything seems to be working OK though.

Over the last couple of years blogging has gone beyond just writing and posting an entry. Now lots of people are mini-blogging using places like Twitter, Identi.Ca, FriendFeed and others. I have been using some of the services as well but being able to pull them all together in one place would be nice. I am able to do that over at FriendFeed but that's their site, not mine.

As you may have noticed by looking at the main page of my site i have finally figured out how to integrate my "Action Streams" inline with the entries in chronological order. If you aren't familiar with Action Streams it is a Movabletype plugin that can be used to track your progress around the Internet. It allows for "Life Streaming". There are plenty of plugins for it that will pull in info from Flickr, Twitter, LastFM and Fireeagle just to name a few. The plugin allows you to set up a new blog that displays just a listing of your "actions" OR have a sidebar widget on your main site. That's all fine and dandy but I want the stuff to be right there on the main page.

For the last few months I have been using a plugin called MT-Twitter by Brandon Fuller. It pulls in your Tweets and posts them as entries. By using the MTIfCategory tage I was able to change the display of it so that just the one liners showed up with no comments or title. That is exactly what I wanted to do when the Action Streams plugin was released. The big problem with MT-Twitter is that it creates a new post for every tweet. When I finally got the Action Stream working and deleted all of the twitter posts I had over 500 blog entries that were one line. That's an awful lot of junk in my RSS feed. Now the only thing that will show up in my feed is the actual posts themselves.

Action Streams seem to have gotten pretty popular with some of the folks that run MT 4+ sites and there are a few of them that have come up with some interesting ways to integrate their posts and web snippets. Some of them have written their own site specific plugins and some of the others have been able to code their pages so that things show up right. This one guy had it set up exactly how I wanted to do it but unfortunately the instructions on his site are in German and try as I might I just wasn't able to get it working. I don't have the link with me or else I would post it as well. He's got a very nice looking site.

Recently Mark Pasc released a new plugin call Order which lets you have lists of data ordered in different ways, for instance by descending date. When I was over at the Movabletype site yesterday I came across a post complete with video that shows how to do exactly what I have been trying to do. I checked out Nick O'Neill's site and the code he uses is full of some divs and stuff that just crapped out my page so I went through it line by line until I got it working just the way I wanted. He has his entry summary code right their on the page but I wanted to leave it where it was in the Entry Summary template at and not mess with any of that. It actually ended up being pretty easy. The code I am using for my home page is below.

I am not particularly good with code but if you have any questions about it feel free to ask in the comments and I will try to answer as best I can.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, Social Media, Life Streaming, Action Streams, Movabletype

I am in the process of doing a full backup of the site. Movabletype put out version 4.2 release candidate 4 and since I haven't heard any horror stories in the last week I am going to run the upgrade.

There shouldn't be any noticeable differences in the site after the upgrade but as usual if you notice any issues please send me an email to rm_blogger@yahoo.com

I am getting ready to take another plunge and upgrade Movabletype 4.2 release candidate 2 to 3. I made a full backup of the system last night in case anything gets hosed so if the sites go down shortly, they'll be back up eventually.

Still can't get the friendfeed comment importer to work, I am hoping after the upgrade that it might...

After I strangle someone...

I got off on sort of a strange tangent yesterday morning. I have been pretty tired the last few weeks, working my ass off and I guess I just sort of got well away from what I had originally planned on posting. That's what I get from putting in the title first, although I've had some pretty decent entries after sitting down with only a title.

Anyhow, lately I have been getting more than my share of spam comments and MT isn't catching them all with the settings I have, so I end up manually deleting them (after flagging them). The same thing goes for trackbacks as well. I hate spam. There are some other options of course but I did away with the captcha because it's a pain in the ass and I don't plan on putting them back in, nor do I want to go to registrations being required. It's a fucking quandary I suppose.

Damn.

I don't know what it is. I normally back up this site every couple of months, at least doing an export of the entries, that's the important part, but not quite as often with my other sites. They don't get as much traffic for one thing.

Anyhow, I ran the Movabletype upgrade last night here and early this morning at two of my other sites. It's fine here but it hosed both of the other sites, which encompass four different blogs. I am not very happy about it right now. I am in the process of trying to downgrade them but if it doesn't work I'll put them under this installation and try to recover as many entries as possible. It won't be all of them simply because I don't have the darned time. There will probably not be much posting here tonight as a result.

So I have upgraded to the new version of Movabletype. There are supposed to be several speed increases. So far I had not noticed any of my plugins on the other site not working so I went ahead and uploaded it here.

The iPhone UI support is broken and I was no able to log in until I disabled that plugin but other than that it seems OK. I have gone back to real-time publishing of entries and comments so definitely want feedback if there seem to be any issues with it. There are a ton of other improvements and changes but I have to go pick up the girls, will post about them later, or you can just head over to movabletype.org and check them out yourself.

I haven't installed it here yet but MT 2.15 Beta 3 is out there. I am in the process of uploading it to one of my other less trafficked sites. Supposedly there are some really neat speed increases. It would be pretty cool if I could leverage some of the changes and switch back to using static pages that are indexed in real time.

I'll be sure to post how well it works here (particularly if it gives me something to bitch about) and how it interacts with some of the plugins I am using.

I don't know what it is. This whole deal with not being able to write posts in the MT web UI is really starting to piss me off. I've never seen it happen before. Gonna have to send a ticket in. I forgot I pay these guys to troubleshoot my MT setup as well. I am going to have to quit busting my ass trying to figure it out and let them handle it.

I seem to have broken something in Movabletype here and I am not sure how to fix it. I haven't made any major changes that I know of but when I log into the web UI to type a new post I can put in a title and change the category but it won't let me type in the text field. It's all grayed out and whatnot. Weird. Anyone have a clue as to what it might be?

Oh, this entry? I am using Windows Live Writer. I occasionally use it although lately I prefer to just use the built-in MT editor because WLW inserts crazy crap and I have to use the html view if I am inserting any kind of JavaScript because it screws it up and sometimes doubles up videos and stuff.

Guess I will just have to deal with it for a while.

Speaking of the site, I went through and got rid of a couple of now non-existent blogs from my blogroll and added a couple more that I have been wanting to. I used to use blogrolling for it and then tried an MT plugin which got broken with MT4, now I just manually edit the code. It's a bit harder but I don't have to worry about upgrades breaking my list.

Other blog stuff I am doing include setting up a new domain but this time it's not a blog. Armchair Detectives is a forum built on Movabletype using MT-Forums by  Mark Carey, a very prolific plugin creator for MT. I use several of his plugins here and they are among the few that I have been willing to purchase. Anyhow, Armchair Detectives is for people interested in crime, murders, missing people, etc...If that's your style, head on over. There isn't shit for topics right now but I am certainly open for ideas. I am also looking for a couple of folks that might be interested in being admins and posting new topics, moderating, etc. This are is one of my interests the last couple of years but I just don't know if I have the time to devote to make the forums stand out. I lurk in some of the other forums like Web Sleuths and have come across some really interesting material there but along with it I have come across some real dumbasses and would like to have some serious discussion here. Feel free to sign up and if there are any bugs or anything looks weird, let me know. MT-Forums is fairly new and I need to make sure the site is working properly.

One of the really cool things that Movabletype allows me to do with my templates is to put different widgets and things in the blog, in this case my sidebar, depending on what category or page you are looking at.

I actually have cut down on the amount of things in the sidebar over the last few months and some of the feedburner stuff in the footer of each post is going to be gone soon as well. I am attempting to use mostly local content to speed up the page display.

I have gone against that decision though with what I have recently added in. Depending on what page you are on it will start showing relevant news feeds. I only have it on a couple of pages right now. If you are on this page, the main index, you will see a widget down my sidebar with videos that have something to do with Georgia. If you are on, for example, one of the Natalee Holloway category pages, there will be a newsfeed related to Natalee Holloway news.

I work so much that often times I miss out on reports and stuff that I might post on or at least be interested in and this way I get to see some of that stuff.

I am also going to be redoing my site soon, but nothing noticeable here. Mainly for phone/blackberry/pocket PC since I am away from home so often. I want to be able to post from my blackberry and while I can currently do so via email/flickr/twitter I want something a bit less painless. I also want to be able to get to the comments and be able to reply to those as well from my phone.

Nothing like tooting your own horn...

I haven't looked at any of the stats on the site lately other than tracking some of the search terms that are bringing people here and I notice that I hit several 'milestones' if you will recently. I have over 5100 posts over the last few years, somewhere in the same vicinity of comments and 300k+ visitors (not page views, that's closer to 500k). Sometimes it amazes me that people don't have anything fucking better to do than come here. That reminds me. I have to head on over to Cafepress at some time soon. I had designed a shirt last year and ordered one to be sent to Imp, one of the users here, when I hit 200k visits and the damned thing never got there. I've been fighting over it with them and I have about decided to give it up and do something else. The shirts weren't all that great anyway, I think I may use a local guy for them now, as well as a couple of bumper stickers and some business cards.

I am trying to implement something a bit more simple than the damned captchas to fight the comment spam. They have worked very well for everything except for manually entered spam comments which I can just delete myself but the captchas are difficult for everyone including myself to see. I am going to use a simple Comment Challenge (eventually) and a couple of other things. One major change is that if you don't have JavaScript turned on you won't be able to comment.

I have disabled the Captchas but have not rebuilt the 5000 or so entries so if you are on an entry other than this one prior to 10pm or so you may get an error when trying to comment.

MT-Visitor Stats Tracker is one of the plugins I had disabled awhile back that I really missed having. Now that I'm on the new server I have reinstalled it and hopefully there won't be any issues getting into my dashboard anymore. I did notice that it took about 40 seconds for me to get to the main dashboard tonight with it installed, as opposed to about 2 seconds without.

I did select for it to generate the stats with a cron job, so hopefully it will stop trying to rebuild those stats and generate them the way it's supposed to. That seems to be the biggest problem.

There is also an iPhone/iTouch plugin for the interface I am itching to try out. I may be able to access the site that way rather than through my damnable Samsung cell phone this weekend.

Update - I may have to end up uninstalling something. The stats are updated now and it isn't taking so long to load the dashboard anymore but even though I have posted about three more entries, the main index isn't being updated. What's up with that I ask you?