The original registration of sea of flowers as a domain name was effected through Domain Direct, which is affiliated with Tucows. I had signed up for a year. I didn’t buy a particularly expensive package, and I think their pricing was competitive, but I bought a bigger package than I needed. I thought I was going to host my web site and blog there, but they didn’t support server side scripts at that time. All I really needed was registration and DNS settings. Blogomania, where I host my sites, is not a registrar. Domain Direct extended my initial one year account to two years,, which put off the need to make any changes until early April. They started sending me renewal notices months ago. The renewal messages had links to pages on their site which gave me the option to renew my existing service or to upgrade. While Domain Direct offered simpler and cheaper services, there was no way to order them except by ordering a new account. Meanwhile, there are lots of services advertising domain registration service, with domain transfers priced at $10.00 or $15.00, with a year of service. I have a .ca domain and I need a CIRA Registrar, which narrowed the field.
Category: Web Log Notes
Dynamic Publishing
Another change, after some reading and experimentation. I installed partial dynamic publishing for archive posts this weekend. I had to run at it twice. It involves creating an .htaccess file and installing it on the server, and customizing some lines in it, creating a new directory on the server and changing some settings MT. The first time I omitted some slashes in some path names in the .htaccess. Once again, the MT documentation was right – just not clear.
The article about the benefits and drawbacks of dynamic publishing at Learning Movable Type may be out of date. It warn that plugins often involve Perlscripts (and I still can’t use the word Perl.) which may not run in the dynamic environment. One plugin generated a Smarty error – so I removed it. The important ones, like Spamlookup, are written for php and run under Dynamic publishing. I didn’t have a lot of plugins and the one that didn’t work has been superceded by newer MT tags, so I am not worried about it.
It makes rebuilding of the blog so much faster, which is convenient when I get into design changes, changing category names and all the other changes that show up on the published page. Rebuilding all the individual entries took a couple of minutes, and it was just annoying.
Site Tuning
Upon installing MT 3.2, I took the plunge and refreshed the templates, which brought me to the MT default Vicksburg Style. I spend some time with the Site Styles sheet, changing colours to get my old scheme back, and then in the Main Index and Individual Entry Index. I was still writing CSS by trial and error, so I invested in an O’Reilly book and spent some time on a few Web sites.
MT 3.2 Installed
The upgrade to MT 3.2 was fairly smooth. I ran into 2 problems before being able to post this entry.
Upgrade to MT 3.16
My upgrade to MT 3.16 was reasonably smooth, but there were a couple of annoyances, which relate back to the upgrade instructions and documentation. It has some nice improvements in the interface – for instance a more clear listing of categories and subcategories in the category selector field box in author post screens.
The Sister Jane Query
Last week and the week before I noticed that someone kept running searches for Sister Jane or Jane on this Web log. The IP addresses varied, but they all were within a range. The most recent searches were today, April 21, 2005 at 13:06 and 13:08. (The activity log shows the times in Greenwich Mean Time). The visitors haven’t left comments or sent me an email so I don’t know what they are looking for.
Spam Fighting
A few weeks ago Jay Allan, the designer of MT Blacklist posted some suggestions for new plugins to fight spam. I followed up at the time and installed Trackback Moderation. I also went back later and installed MT-Keystrokes. The idea is that it blocks any comment that does not contain a bit of code that can only be created by a human user who has opened the comment window in a browser. The template that creates the comment field in the browser for the human user has javascript that inserts the special code if the user types something or pastes the comment into the comment window. Spiders can’t comment, which should screen out a lot of comment spam.
Trackback Moderation
Late last week Jay Allen, the designer of MT-Blacklist posted recommending a plug-in called MT-Moderate and some other anti-spam tools. MT-Moderate originally force-moderated comments, which is basically one of the things that MTB does, but it has been redesigned to force-moderate trackback pings too. That was a privacy hole in MTB (and MT) which doesn’t have a trackback moderation feature. Some blog spammers send pings – usually in large waves. If they managed to evade the MTB blacklist scan, the pings got into the public site. Spam comments that got around the blacklist, on the other hand, usually ended up in moderation.
Shuffle
Today I changed the names of many of my top level categories, shuffled and renamed some sub-categories and shuffled a few posts into different sub-categories. I didn’t like some of the category titles, and I wasn’t writing anything new in many categories, so I reindexed the material and changed the index.
MT 3.15
Within a month of the last MT upgrade, another upgrade. This time, to fix a vulnerability in the program. The details are at MT’s site, access through the “powered by Movable Type” link in the side column. Well, I’m getting my money’s worth out of my FTP client. I like the program, I like the company’s diligence at fixing problems. I do get bored sitting around while the FTP client uploads whole directories of unchanged files in upgrade packages.