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Category: Net: Blogging

Blogging: Redesign completed

Blog view on 9th Jan 2005Well, I’ve now finished the redesign of my blog (I think it’s the 3rd redesign so far) . It makes use of PHP, Javascript and CSS – and looks best in Mozilla Firefox (the little “date tabs”/”comments left” etc have rounded corners in Firefox instead of just being square tabs). The HTML (at least of the index page) validates and the CSS nearly validates (just the -moz specific attributes fail the validation – the W3C CSS validator should skip over ‘vendor specific tags’).

I’ve now reinstalled MT Refsearch (which performs a search on the site if a visitor comes from a major search engine), CacheRemote (to cache my blogroll: I did want to get it working with Gravatar – but they seem to be having DNS issues at the moment), MT Blacklist (to help block out spam), MT Macro (for the little smilies and Amazon links), and finally Neil Turner’s PHP TypeKey system.

Now just to get another site designed….

Blogging: Blog So Far

blogsofar.jpgRight, I’ve done a bit of redesign work (as you may have noticed) with a nice little picture of yours truly and a blueish fixed header, “fluid” three column layout and without using pixel-specific font size (so it should resize simply in any web browser). Still a bit of work to do on the columns though, but it’s coming along nicely – however, I’m back at work in the next 8 hours, so I just hope I can find some time to finish this off (then I’ve got another couple of sites to build after that).

Anyway – I’m having trouble getting Brad Choate’s “MTMacro” plugin working with Movable Type 3.14 – with Smarty template errors when ever I use <MTMacroDefine> or <MTMacroApply> : is there a “secret” setting I’m missing?

Blogging: New URL

Well, I’ve upgraded to the latest version of MovableType (3.14), installed MT-Blacklist, moved all the content to a NEW URL of https://blog.rac.me.uk and setup redirects from the old URL to this new one.

Now I’ve just got to do a redesign, get a few things working again (such as MT-RefSearch, RemoteCache and Amazon linkage) and then I’ll start blogging again.

Yeah me!

Blogging: No more comments

Due to the high level of spam comments I’ve been receiving recently, I’ve decided to close all comments on all previous entries.

I didn’t want to have to do this, but whenever I felt like blogging, I found I had to spend more and more time just cleaning up comment spam (20 contact lenses spam today alone). Easiest solution was just to close commenting. This will probably impact on the “popularity/usefulness” of a few entries (the Mystry of Time And Space game solutions and the Premium rate spam details), but, alas, there’s not much I can do at this point.

When I upgrade to MT 3 (which I still haven’t decided if I’ll do), I’ll probably install MT-Blacklist, but spammers have just taken all the fun out of blogging for me. Sorry.

Blogging: Spam Attack

I’ve just had 72 spam comments submitted to this blog, but running the following query through phpMyAdmin:

DELETE FROM mt_comment WHERE comment_email=’stro_se@hotmail.com’ OR comment_author=’viagra’ OR comment_ip=’66.36.249.149′;

and then putting an IP block on 66.36.249.* and adding various checks to /lib/MT/App/Comments.pm means that this idiot shouldn’t be able to easily spam me again.