Blogging Geek

I updated to Movable Type 3.0d last night and it is pretty cool. I had intended to change over to WordPress which is publishing software totally based on PHP. WordPress installed very easily and has a lot of excellent features unfortunately when I updated the Admin password and it locked me out. Many other people had the same problems and the steps they gave did not help in my case. Another reason I decided to not change to WordPress is that it works by building the entry that is viewed as it is requested. This has some advantages in that it will use a minimum of web space since individual entries are not archived on the hard disk and changes made to the template are generated instantly and do not require any rebuild. The downside is that since there are not individual html pages, Google and other search engines can not find entries to link to. I get a fair amount of traffic from search engines and my referral logs show that some go on to reading other posts.

Originally when Movable Type 3.0 license agreement was first reported it said that the free version would allow one author and one blog. They must have changed it since the free version now allows one author and three blogs. This was ideal for me since event though I only run one blog through my server I maintain a test blog to test out and refine any template changes before applying them to the main blog. In the past I have also helped design and build the templates for other bloggers in St. Blogs, so the maximum of three blogs was fine for me.

MT 3.0 has greatly enhanced comments by more easily allowing you to review them. Previously you could only see the last five comments, now you can see all of them. You can also turn on authentication where people would have to use a Typepad generated pin (which you only need to register once to work on all MT and Typepad blogs). That feature would totally block comment spam. Even without authentication you can still approve/disapprove comments. The overall layout is sharp and easy to use and the added the ability to generate ATOM feeds in addition to RSS. In addition you can now choose to have archived post file names to be year/date and then text from the title instead of having a name generated like http://www.splendoroftruth.com/curtjester/archives/004874.php. I would like to change to this new format but I don't think I want to break links to my other posts. They have also speeded up tasks such as rebuilding by assigning them as background tasks.

So if you are using MT and have thought of updating I would strongly urge you to go ahead.

In other geeky news I have totally gone over to using the Firefox browser and the latest version has a lot of feature to make it easy to transition from Internet Explorer. This is a tabbed browser where you can have new windows open up in tabs instead of opening another window. This browser besides being 100% compatible with web standards is fast and easy to modify. They have extensions that easily allow you to modify its behavior to your liking and to add other features. This browser is also highly secure since it doesn't have the security holes that IE does. One of the extensions is the Sage RSS reader which will read RSS/Atom feeds and is totally integrated into the browser. When you update feeds it gives you an icon indicator of what feeds have been updated since you last checked. So if you grabbed this browser make sure you look through the various extensions to make browsing easier and more powerful.

Update: If you use the MT-Blacklist plugin and want to install MT 3.0 you must remove MT-Blacklist since it will not work with 3.0. To do this the author of this plugin says to simply delete plugins/Blacklist.pl. Otherwise it forces comment moderation where comments must be approved prior to them being seen.