Operational, more or less

Short version of this entry: I think most aspects of this blog are working again. Anonymous comments are still disabled, but I'm hoping the sign-in system will work better now; give it a try, and if you can't comment, drop me a note in email and I'll try and fix it.

Longer version:

Woke up too early, decided to poke at blog again. When I went to sleep, the comment system didn't seem to be accepting anonymous comments, but apparently it actually was, because I awoke to find over 500 pieces of comment spam that had gone live.

Spent a while clearing those out.

Also re-added my Movable Type hack to automatically mark comments on old entries (from unapproved commenters) for moderation.

Then I decided it was time to finally try Akismet, which I've been hearing good things about for years. But I ran into some weirdnesses (like there's no sign-in link from their page, only a signup link, and using my registered email address and key doesn't give me access to my account), and then I discovered that both of their Movable Type plugins have apparently not been updated since 2006. MT has changed an awful lot in the past four years; I'm not up for installing a plugin that old until I have some assurance that it still works in MT5, and I can't find anyone talking about this. (The first search result for [Akismet MT5] is an entry of mine from a few weeks ago.) I'm beginning to think that almost all individual bloggers have abandoned MT.

Anyway, so as a stopgap measure I turned off anonymous comments. I like allowing anonymous comments, and I know some friends of mine have had trouble with the signin system here in the past, but the new signin system allows signing in from lots of other systems, so I'm hoping it'll work better.

So by all means, stop by and try it out.

What I'd really like to do is enable Facebook signin. But that apparently requires creating a Facebook app, and I'm not sure it works in MT5 (all the documentation links in the README file for the plugin are broken), so I've put that on hold for the time being.

Then I spent a while poking at the templates to figure out why my sidebars were missing. Turns out I was using MT modules to include the widget sets, and those modules disappeared in the upgrade. (Note to self: if you upgrade MT again in the future, figure out a way to back up your templates first.) But it also turns out that the preferred way of including a widget set is the MT:WidgetSet tag, so I switched to that, and all seems to be more or less well.

There are a bunch of tweaks I still need to make. And the blog has become extremely slow to load for some reason; I need to figure that out too. But that can all wait.

For now: off to shower, have breakfast, and go pick up Rob at the airport.

2 Responses to “Operational, more or less”

  1. irilyth

    I was able to sign in via LJ, and quite promptly, where it used to take a while.

    reply
  2. shmuel

    LJ sign-in worked fine here as well!

    reply

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