CogBlogged Tagged ‘using mt’

I’ve been tinkering with my simple approach of using MovableType as a publisher engine to create podcast feeds and content listings for audio content that is used across several different web sites. While there are many ways one could go about this, I am finding this to be efficient and fast. I only have about 7 feeds set up, but they are pushing across multiple web sites, with different design layouts. This allows me to create a single directory of content and RSS files that can be accessed by any of our other PHP web pages. So the main podcast entry page lists all the casts on our site, and th elistings provide links to web sites connected to the audio, a description, a URL for the MP3 file, and now, stealing the idea from the EDUCAUSE blogs, the slick niftyplayer, and embedded flash audio player, e.g.: But by setting [...]

The kiwis have a great expression about being able to fix anything with some number 8 bailing wire, sort of the down under flavor of duct tape. I just spent about 90 minutes cobbling together what I hope to be a framework for supporting audio content across a number of our content sites. I’ve yet to join the merry gang of Podcasting Is The Greatest Thing Since ________, but I do so a value of adding more audio content to our site, capturing events, meetings, interviews etc. This will be a hasty and haphazard explanation of what I did, cause I really want to get home and have some dinner ;-) First of all, I will be capturing the audio on the cheap, plopping down a new iRiver iFP 799 MP3 recorded (1 Gb model with external line and input ports). It’s a love hate relationship -I love being able [...]

It’s only been… what, a few days?… when I insinuated that Trackback was not such a major problem. I just took a look at one of our MovableType 2.66 sites (that will remain nameless, linkless from here) that I’ve not scanned in a while, and saw a whole raft of Trackback spam sitting in the bins. Sigh. It took about 30 minutes of adding new filters to the MT Blacklist, running the Despam routine. I deleted somewhere between 150 and 200 ping spams. The interesting thing was among the usual suspects (pills and porn) was a majority of links to various Mp3 sites– what’s with that? Other preventative measures included: * renaming the Trackback script and adjusting the MT config files. This necessitates rebuilding all pages of all blogs running off of the site * deleting the option of Trackback email notification. Since there have been no legit trackbacks in [...]

For some long lost reason, I was looking at my first WordPress entry from April 2005, following the easy and recommended migration from MovableTyoe. First I had not responded to the comment about updating my Feedburner settings. Well, 4 months later, and I sprung into action, updating the blog URL, and making sure my links were now coming from del.icio.us rather than furl. I’ve tagged it into my WP templates, but my feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/cogdogblog is now up to date. The other topic I never mentioned was dealing with the 2+ years of old entries at CogDogBlog 1.0. When I did my migration research, there were alot of methodologies for the migrate in place, where one tries to replicate all of the old Movable Type URLs into the new site, so there are no lost links. My strategy was different. I left the old blog as is, although I did [...]

I just added a new feature to this blog’s templates, likely the last tweak I will do as I am rather dead set on moving soon to WordPress (especially after seeing D’Arcy’s demo of the flickr gallery plugin). The new feature is a link along the front page and archive pages (and individual entries) where the line has links for comments, trackbacks, etc that says “IM this”. Clicking the link will open an iChat/AIM client chat window with the URL in the chat entry area, so all you need to do is pick a buddy to share the URL with. Stealing this from Preshrunk’s entry on “Feature Creep” (who stole it from someone else, go stealing!), it is a simple matter of a link that looks like: <a href=aim:goim?message=http://www.blah.com/blog/the/url/for/this/post">IM this</a> where in MovableType templates it looks like: <a href=aim:goim?message=<$MTEntryPermalink$>">IM this</a> Okay, this is pretty low on the potential use scale, [...]

Although I noted yesterday that my own technical gaffs had erase all of our blog comments going back to September 2004, I did comb through the last database dump from early March 2005 and sifted out the legit comments for Sept 2004 – March 3, 2005, so the loss was the last month and a half. It was fairly trivial with BBEdit to semi-manually sift out all the spam roach poop. There were a total of 1947 rows in the comment table of the database (for about 6 blogs, mostly inactive) and out of those, I deleted 1662 spammies, easily identified by their repeated patterns, url encrusted comments, and general stench. There were sequences of more than 150 in quick succession to a dormant blog (which is now fenced off). And the captcha security code on the comment form is working like a dream, perfection, baby.

It’s a new spam free day for CogDogBlog and our other affiliated MovableType 2.661 blogs here. I’ve successfully integrated James Seng’s captcha plugin, so that all comment posts require a human to type in a randomly generated security code that appears on screen as a graphic image or ‘captcha’. Spambots cannot automatically read these, so any spam that dribbles in is human posted. Spammers thrive on automation, not manual effort. This would not have been possible had not Audree, our eportfolio programming genius, been gracious enough to help with the cryptic perl installs of the GD.pm and GD perl libraries. Thanks Aud! Some notes: (*) Yes, D’Arcy, I know that captchas are a total barrier for the visually impaired. My plan (not fully implemented) is to provide a link to our standard feedback form which is accessible. This form publishes no content online so is useless for spammers (though they [...]

Since I am pondering doing the MovableType to WordPress conversion, I’ve done a bit of reflecting on the last two years of blogging. Nothing profound has emerged, but I did start to think about the part of a blog post I spend the most time on (obviously it is not spell checking) — coming up with a good title. A good post title, grabs attention, sets the mode, and I often tried (in vain) to hit the punny spot. It’s worth being original, and just not having a dry, ‘just the facts ma’am’ sort of title. So I thought, why not peruse all of them via a MT template that displays all blog entries listed my title in alpha order? The template was a snap, the meat of it being: <ol class="posted"> <MTEntries sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend"> <li> <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"> <$MTEntryTitle$></a>   (<$MTEntryDate format="%B %e, %Y %I:%M %p$>) </li> </MTEntries> </ol> So here [...]

Day number 578 without an iPod… No, I have no intent to start regular podcasts, enough other people with velvety FM radio D.J. type voices that never say “ummm” are at it already. There is no time to jump into this endeavor. But never say never. On the other hand, twice or more or in the last week. I have included references to .mp3 files in a blog entry, and there is no reason those could not be made podcast-able. So to investigate what it would take, should ever a leap month appear in my calendar, here is a simple recap of how easy it was to add the proper RSS tags to my MovableType blog to make it “podcast” ready. All you really need is Brandon Fuller’s MT-Enclosures Movable Type Plugin: Audio blogging is starting to take off. Currently, Movable Type has no support for audio blogs so I [...]

With exceptions of newer systems (yes, Drupal fans, that is you), many blog software packages are designed from the perspective of single author weblogs, but with some digging you can expand their functionality for multi-author sites. We’ve recently released the Low Threshold Applications (LTA) site, recast as a blog from a once manually edited HTML site. To make the index of LTAs by author work, we had to assign the blog entries to accounts for the people that wrote the content (we are doing all the blog posting from content written by others). One limitation of MovableType is I can give author credit to only one person, so posts with multiple authors needed some under the hood tinkering to add new database tables and use PHP/mySQl query to pull out entries by “co-authors”. This also means that comments posted to an entry go to the actual author (a good thing), [...]