WILL THIS THING WORK??????????????
Archive: Technical
Right about the time Bit.ly Pro was announced and they were taking invites, I wanted to setup our own URL shortener. Short URLs are very important in the Twitter World, and brand recognition is also important. As it turns out we finally got our Bit.ly Pro invite about a month and a half after setting up YOURLS. And frankly, I would rather have complete control anyways.
Feature-wise, the one we were currently using was not cutting the mustard. I took a good hard look at Agile Carousel, and even started writing Movable Type code to work with it. But its not exactly easy to use. Then I ran into AnythingSlider by Chris Coyier and eventually an even better fork of it by Dean Sofer on GitHub. That is the history lesson, now lets move on to AnythingSlider for Movable Type.
Thanks to the CoPress Google Group and @nacin, my life in WordPress is that much easier. By about 100%. Let me explain.
The drop down menu on the Export page (in 2.9.1. and before) is an absolute mess. It does not list authors in alphabetical order. It lists them in the order they appear in the database. We have 10 years of archives to go through - that equates to a lot of authors! (Plus countless duplicates, thanks to the way College Publisher works.)
Quickly after posting my concern asking how to fix the $authors array, Andrew came up with a superb solution. You can find it on the WordPress Trac and make the modification yourself. This change will make it into WordPress 3.0. It also looks like the database query has been cleaned up quite a bit from the original code.
Many thanks to Andrew and his help. It has made the absolutely painstakingly headache-inducing task of going through our old College Publisher archives a little bit easier at the end of the day.
The drop down menu on the Export page (in 2.9.1. and before) is an absolute mess. It does not list authors in alphabetical order. It lists them in the order they appear in the database. We have 10 years of archives to go through - that equates to a lot of authors! (Plus countless duplicates, thanks to the way College Publisher works.)
Quickly after posting my concern asking how to fix the $authors array, Andrew came up with a superb solution. You can find it on the WordPress Trac and make the modification yourself. This change will make it into WordPress 3.0. It also looks like the database query has been cleaned up quite a bit from the original code.
Many thanks to Andrew and his help. It has made the absolutely painstakingly headache-inducing task of going through our old College Publisher archives a little bit easier at the end of the day.
One of the biggest challenges in moving away from College Publisher has
been the 10 years of archives we have had online. As I am sure you are
aware, those were abruptly taken down in January.
Simply put, there was no other way to switch from their servers to ours.
We are working tirelessly to get the archive back online, and today I would like to share (a new) update on that. I sent out an update on our Facebook Fan Page on Feb. 8, and I wish I could say we have made progress since then.
Hit the jump to hear the (somewhat condensed) updated info.
Simply put, there was no other way to switch from their servers to ours.
We are working tirelessly to get the archive back online, and today I would like to share (a new) update on that. I sent out an update on our Facebook Fan Page on Feb. 8, and I wish I could say we have made progress since then.
Hit the jump to hear the (somewhat condensed) updated info.
The launching of a web site is a stressful one, but the re-launching of one can be enough to kill you. Lucky for me things went smoothly in the wee hours of January 12 (and I am not typing this from the grave).
I would like to say the transition away from College Publisher has been a smooth one, but it in fact has not. Just today the domain name was finally transferred into our account, and it is still not resolving all over the Internets yet. And we do not have our database of past archives, last I talked to CP it looked like I would have them by Friday.
So if you are just tuning in, the entire BG Views Network of sites is running under Movable Type, including The BG News, which was previously partnered with College Publisher. We are by far not the first school to leave College Publisher in recent months, and no doubt won't be the last.
But this post is not about College Publisher, it is about Movable Type, and how we are using it to produce a daily newspaper online.
I would like to say the transition away from College Publisher has been a smooth one, but it in fact has not. Just today the domain name was finally transferred into our account, and it is still not resolving all over the Internets yet. And we do not have our database of past archives, last I talked to CP it looked like I would have them by Friday.
So if you are just tuning in, the entire BG Views Network of sites is running under Movable Type, including The BG News, which was previously partnered with College Publisher. We are by far not the first school to leave College Publisher in recent months, and no doubt won't be the last.
But this post is not about College Publisher, it is about Movable Type, and how we are using it to produce a daily newspaper online.
It seemed like forever between the time MT5 was released in Japan at the end of November until it was just released in the U.S. We found out the day after, because of a security update to both MT 4.33 and MT 5, but they wouldn't tell us that.
Telling us it was due to "wanting more time for coordination of the release and associated documentation" was frankly bull shit. Sorry guys. There still is hardly any documentation, scouring FogBugz seems to have offered the best loot so far. MT5 was released 4 days ago, and I still cannot lookup information on mt:Websites tag or the parent/child/sibling modifiers, for example. The mt:BlogParentWebsite is another tag I would like to know more about, too.
Come on guys, I thought you were putting a big effort into developing better documentation.
Telling us it was due to "wanting more time for coordination of the release and associated documentation" was frankly bull shit. Sorry guys. There still is hardly any documentation, scouring FogBugz seems to have offered the best loot so far. MT5 was released 4 days ago, and I still cannot lookup information on mt:Websites tag or the parent/child/sibling modifiers, for example. The mt:BlogParentWebsite is another tag I would like to know more about, too.
Come on guys, I thought you were putting a big effort into developing better documentation.
It is hard to imagine, but I have been blogging for close to seven years now, and I have seen comment spam of varying degrees. It used to be pretty easy to spot. Services like Akismet and now TypePad AntiSpam are there to help - and they do - but even trained computers fail at finding spam. Both Akismet and TPAS have been failing me lately, let me show you why:
If you read that, it is actually mostly literate English. This is one of dozens of spam comments we have been getting. They usually do not put links in the body of the comment, that is so yesterday's tactic, but do use the Author URL to link to their spam site. And some of the spam sites don't even look like spam site - they actually take a careful eye.
Spam is getting smarter. This is scary.
One solution is to use a CAPTCHA source, such as ReCAPTCHA, but these can be defeated, I have seen it happen. The drastic answer to this problem is to just turn off anonymous comments altogether, but for us, that is not an option. We want people to comment, and registration drives some people away.
The only good answer is that it takes a lot of hard work to combat comment spam, and having good policies in place help, too. See our Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, and Comments Policy. You may think that is a lot of mumbo jumbo - and it is - but it is very important for our users to know where they stand.
Such policies are required to provide a safe, engaging place for the community to not only consume, but create and share content.
Spam is getting smarter. This is scary.
One solution is to use a CAPTCHA source, such as ReCAPTCHA, but these can be defeated, I have seen it happen. The drastic answer to this problem is to just turn off anonymous comments altogether, but for us, that is not an option. We want people to comment, and registration drives some people away.
The only good answer is that it takes a lot of hard work to combat comment spam, and having good policies in place help, too. See our Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, and Comments Policy. You may think that is a lot of mumbo jumbo - and it is - but it is very important for our users to know where they stand.
Such policies are required to provide a safe, engaging place for the community to not only consume, but create and share content.
On October 1st, can't remember now, I tried moving all databases including the one used for Movable Type from /var to /home, as it is a much bigger volume. Movable Type kept sending me to an infinite loop to the mt-upgrade.cgi script, then telling me everything was upgraded.
So I had to move everything back to /var and wait until the weekend. I moved it the second time, and everything is working again. I am glad I did not have to restore from a backup, I thought I had hosed the MT database. For what its worth, the Six Apart support could not give me any advice or answers to why I was getting the "Time to Upgrade" and then immediately "Your Movable Type installation is already up to date." endless loop.
So I had to move everything back to /var and wait until the weekend. I moved it the second time, and everything is working again. I am glad I did not have to restore from a backup, I thought I had hosed the MT database. For what its worth, the Six Apart support could not give me any advice or answers to why I was getting the "Time to Upgrade" and then immediately "Your Movable Type installation is already up to date." endless loop.
The thing that people will notice most of all is the new Tag button which will analyze the current text and suggest tags for the article. This is great for people who don't know what they should use as tags. It does a really good job, and works on the text in the Body and Extended field without having to save the document first.
- Aug 13 2009 Final 'Tweet This' Bit.ly Script
- Aug 8 2009 Using the ShareThis API with Movable Type
- Aug 8 2009 Social Bookmarking Links
- Aug 7 2009 Setting Up RewriteRules for Profile and Tags
- Aug 6 2009 iMT won't work with FastCGI
- Aug 4 2009 Photo Gallery and FastCGI
- Aug 1 2009 Building BG Views Network - Part 2
- Jul 30 2009 Single MT Install, Multiple Domains
- Jul 25 2009 FastCGI Setup for Movable Type
- Jul 22 2009 A Note to AOL, MSN Explorer Users
- Jul 18 2009 BlogShow MT Preventing run-periodic-tasks Execution
- Jul 18 2009 BGSU Email Problems Resolved
- Jul 17 2009 Upgraded to Movable Type 4.261
- Jul 14 2009 Email Problem with BGSU Update
- Jul 14 2009 Twitter Commenters 2.1 Doesn't Work in MT Pro
- Jul 14 2009 Trying Twitter Commenters 2.1
- Jul 12 2009 Building BG Views Network - Part 1
- Jul 12 2009 Frustrating Email Issues With BGSU
- Jul 10 2009 Two More MT Plugins Updated
- Jul 9 2009 More Custom Fields Updated to 1.0.1
- Jun 29 2009 Testing the Wibiya Toolbar
- May 6 2009 BGSU RSS Reader
- Mar 31 2009 Cron Resources for Movable Type
- Mar 31 2009 Cron Issues, Batch Template Options
- Mar 31 2009 Adblock Plus screws up Joomla Template
- Mar 27 2009 First Impressions of Movable Type Motion
- Mar 25 2009 Add Custom Header support to Movable Type Motion
- Mar 25 2009 Poll Position and Champion now work in MT 4.25
- Mar 24 2009 Modifying alt-tmpl Files for Movable Type Motion
- Mar 24 2009 Why does Movable Type Motion use two Login Forms?
- Feb 28 2009 New Administrative Category
- Feb 20 2009 Facebook Javascript Issues Resolved
- Feb 20 2009 Allow EMBED Code in YUIEditor
- Feb 10 2009 Mobile Search is Live
- Feb 8 2009 BG News Sports Blog Moved
- Jan 29 2009 TemplateExporter Makes Life Easier
- Jan 29 2009 Action Streams So Close to Complete
- Jan 27 2009 Creating a Better Category Archives Template
- Jan 26 2009 Motion Beta 2 and BG Views
- Jan 16 2009 Error 404 Entry Not Found
- Jan 7 2009 Testing Out Custom Header Plugin
- Dec 18 2008 MT Motion and Facebook Connect
- Sep 13 2008 Using YUI Editor In Place of Default
- Sep 11 2008 CAPTCHA Redux: TypePad AntiSpam Plugin
- Sep 5 2008 Using ShareThis for Bookmarking/Email
- Sep 4 2008 Using reCaptcha for Comments
- Sep 3 2008 MTCS Becomes MT Pro, Back in the Saddle Again
- May 2 2008 Podcasting Support on BG Views
- Mar 26 2008 Bookmarks Plugin for MT4 Installed
- Mar 24 2008 SEO Friendly URLs
Network Search
Custom Search
- AnythingSlider for Movable Type
- Setting up a URL Shortener with YOURLS
- Movable Type Facebook Connect and Internet Explorer 7
- Testing the Wibiya Toolbar
- Why does Movable Type Motion use two Login Forms?
- IE 7 Facebook Login Works, Logging Out Wonky
- Two More MT Plugins Updated
- Do you use Google Reader?
- Yet Another Yourls Test
- Download BG Views Desktop Wallpaper
- Setting Up RewriteRules for Profile and Tags 6 Comments
- Testing the Wibiya Toolbar 4 Comments
- The Changing Face of Comment Spam 2 Comments
- Final 'Tweet This' Bit.ly Script 2 Comments
- Movable Type 5 Impressions 2 Comments
- Twitter Commenters 2.1 Doesn't Work in MT Pro 2 Comments
- Database Move a Success, the Second Time 2 Comments
- Adblock Plus screws up Joomla Template 2 Comments
- Upgraded to Movable Type 4.261 1 Comment
- Two More MT Plugins Updated 1 Comment
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