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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Mon, 24 Feb 2014

In Movable Type 4, comment spam was overwhelming

So I'm working on a blog that I moved from Movable Type to WordPress in early 2012 but haven't touched since.

There were about 8,000 spam comments that weren't marked by the system as spam from 2009-11.

That's a lot of spam, and I remember now how hard it was to keep up with at the time.

Posted: Feb 24, 2014 8:00pm UTC

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Category: /blogging_systems/movable_type/

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Thu, 21 Nov 2013

Yes, you can still download the free, open-source Movable Type

For one reason or another, I've been thinking about Movable Type. I went to both of the web sites associated with the blogging software -- movabletype.org and movabletype.com and found no mention of the formerly "free," open-source Movable Type software I used for so many years.

Instead, MT 6 is for up to five users and $1,195 for unlimited users. Ouch. There's quite a gap between /home/public//cgi-bin/ode.cgi and $1,195.

Nowhere on those "official" sites could I find a link to the /home/public//cgi-bin/ode.cgi versions of Movable Type (i.e. everything up to Version 5).

I did some searching, and here they are. Start a directory up and there are downloads of MT 6, which I presume will ask you for some kind of licensing information.

But if you want MT 4.x or 5.x, they are available.

And the software that swallowed Movable Type's user base whole is still available -- and still free.

Movable Type was always a great platform, and it still handles multiple blogs and multiple users better than WordPress in my opinion.

But you really need a full-time hacker on the job if you want to use Movable Type seriously. There never was enough of a community out there with plugins and themes to get you going.

Posted: Nov 21, 2013 5:19pm UTC

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Category: /blogging_systems/movable_type/

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