Category: Admin

An administrative note: I’ve modified the comment forms for the blog to require you to enter a security code – a four digit number corresponding to a grey image. This is necessary to foil the increasingly aggressive blog spam bots – I receive literally dozens of attempted intrusions every day.
If anyone reading this blog is visually impaired and can’t cope with this system, please drop me an email.

OK, I misread the info on NetNewsWire 2.0 and assumed that the blog editor was “broken” rather than “broken out”. So this is what it’s broken out into: MarsEdit.
The overall appearance of MarsEdit is nice. However it hasn’t imported my blog categories, and I’m not sure how to get them in. I’ll see what happens when I upload this.
Also the Format option only seems to offer None – will it convert line breaks to paragraphs, which is my preferred style? I like the option to use either style for italics – i or em – although I was surprised to find it in a submenu at the bottom of the HTML menu, rather than in Preferences.
Having the MarsEdit Add Link up in the HTML Tags menu really sucks – 90% of my blogs entries involve banging out a bunch of text with a few links in, and I’d like the Add Link to be on the toolbar. Also I’d like the Edit menu to support Paste and Paste as quotation, as in Mail.app.
The XML-RPC Console is a really useful idea. Of course you should never need to use it – except for the situation when nothing else will do….
Highlighting text and hitting cmd-B for bold or cmd-I for italics is nice – but why not cmd-U for underline?
[Updated] OK, that first post looked awful. But after I hit Refresh (how obvious is that?) I pulled in a bunch of recent posts, and it populated my Categories and allowed Convert Line Breaks. Hint: perhaps force a Refresh first time out? And who would know that to set the properties and defaults for a blog you had to double-click the blog in the Weblogs drawer with apparently no menu alternative?
[Updated] That fixed the paragraphs.
The blog entry editing window is a bit schizophrenic. If it really wants to be like mail or word processing, I want formatting items on the toolbar. And the section of the toolbar that includes the Weblog: menu and the Body|Extended… stuff is just clutter. I imagine if I had multiple blogs I could refresh the entries in one, double click a specific entry, select a different blog, and post it. Blog-to-blog cut’n’paste. Cute, but useless to all but 5% of us. An option to hide that stuff would be good, and would free up space for formatting options.
Let’s try inserting a picture. Again, that’s on the HTML menu rather than the toolbar. The New dialog is nice; the Previous one is odd, and didn’t seem to work – perhaps it only shows images that you’ve previously uploaded with MarsEdit. But neither of these lets me link to a third party image, as far as I can see.
[Updated] On the image question; it’s a shame to lose the cool MovableType feature of creating a thumbnail linked to a popup image.
Overall this feels nice – a bit smoother than Ecto. More expensive, of course.

This is the Mac version of the ecto blog editor. It’s visually much nicer than the Windows version.

Strangely, even though I specified a default of “convert line breaks” during initial configuration, it seems to have been lost. Or at least the “Options” menu has it set wrong and greyed out. The “Preview” looks ok. We’ll see.

I keep getting “The underlying connection closed” messages – odd. Also my modification to the previous entry didn’t look quite right, because (I guess) when you edit an entry ecto forgets my default formatting mode (convert line breaks).
Overall I think this will definitely be easier than hacking raw HTML, as I do now. The other candidate is the full version of NetNewsWire, but I may have complicated life for myself by testing their latest beta, in which the editor is apparently broken. And of course NetNewsWire is Mac only, which is OK in principle and awkward in practice.

Testing Ecto for blogging. So far I’ve created an entry, created a second entry, deleted that entry, and now I’m modifying the first entry. The UI is a bit clunky under Windows – small unintuitive icons scattered all over the place – but the basic functionality seems to work after a shaky start. Spell-checking is OK. Default post settings are broken; there’s a documented workaround on the support forum. It works with my Movable Type 2.64 version out of the box.
I”ll try the Mac version later. (I’m in the middle of backing up everything to my new LaCie 200GB drive.)
ecto is shareware… or rather trialware – it stops working after 14 days without paid registration. (That’s not my definition of shareware, but never mind.) It’s $17.95 for either Windows or Mac OS X; if you use both, you need two licenses. If the Mac version is as good as I expect, that will be a very reasonable price; I’ll just have to decide which machine to use as my primary blogging vehicle.

[composed and posted with ecto]

FYI, there’s now a new way to contact me: first.last@gmail.com. Make the appropriate substitutions.

I’m planning some major revisions to this site over the next week, and there may be occasional outages. (That’s above and beyond the recent outages due to Logjamming.) Bear with me….

After spending far too long groping blindly around the Movable Type templates and Perl scripts that drive this blog, I’ve found The Source Of All Wisdom: at Elise.com. Thanks, Elise.
(Watch out for rampant and tasteless experimentation in the look and feel of this site!)

OK, the blogspamming on this blog is now reaching ~10 per day, which is enough to be seriously annoying. So I’m going to be spending the next few days installing and testing countermeasures. If this causes problems, please be patient…..

As I mentioned a week ago, one or more spammers are now generating spam with my (work) address as the sender. Since I left work last night, I’ve received 80 messages on my Sun.COM account. Of these 40 are “Undeliverables” of some kind, and 20 are spam (not caught by the corporate filters). The signal to noise ratio is declining rapidly….
I wonder how quickly they will move on to some other address to avoid spam filters. I also wonder if any of my legitimate email is being lost because of filters that have “learned” my address.
On a related topic, I still haven’t done anything to block blogspam on this account. It seems manageable for now: two or three times a week I’ll get a comment notification email for blogspam, and it only takes a couple of clicks to delete it. I wonder if tweaking the comment template would help….