Time to switch…

This blog has been under blogspam attack for the last couple of days, and I haven’t been able to fix it. It seems from searching around that I’m not the only vicim (which is good). Curiously the attacks seem to be purely disruptive: the comments being injected don’t include commercial messages, or p0rn, or URLs to be pagerank-promoted. All the same, the cost/load/admin effort involved is significant.

More worrying is the fact that I haven’t been able to stop it. I downloaded a couple of bulk update scripts, but they wouldn’t work on my MT configuration. And as I tried a few fixes, I found that some existing mechanisms weren’t working quite right. It looks as if my setup is just sufficiently non-standard to cause some things to break, and I don’t have time to debug the Perl.

So here’s what I’m going to do. First, I’m going to have to crudely disable comments completely for a while. Sorry about that. Second, I’m going to follow the crowd, and migrate from MovableType to WordPress. According to Steve, mine is the only blog on grommit that’s still using MT, and there’s safety in numbers. This change will almost certainly break any deep links into my site. I’ll make sure that the top-level and RSS work OK. (Perhaps I should leave the existing configuration in read-only mode… but that would be confusing. We’ll see.) One benefit will be that I can update my template to something that is a little fresher and which works better on mobile devices.

Anyway, hang in there. Normal service will be resumed as soon as we’ve worked out what “normal” is.