No Lump of Coal for Movable Type
posted by DL Byron on December 23, 2004
An Update and Apology
MT responds to comment spam with an update and apology - there's an MT blacklist update as well. Thanks MT and happy holidays.
Pam and I are finishing up our vacation; waiting at LAS for a delayed plane, feeling much more relaxed. I'll apply the MT updates across our sites when I get back and see how it goes. Considering comment spam, Timothy Appnel posts his thoughts and Jay Allen responds with hopeful thoughts.
As Tim notes, "Blogging is at a Crossroads," in more ways than comment spam. It's also at a crossroads as an application. An example is a very useful comment status code (none, closed, open) posted by Todd Dominey from an email conversation he had with Ben Trott. I found it randomly in a related search for comment spam solutions. The problem is that I'd never seen that code before. It's not on MT's site, in their manual, not in a knowledge base, or a FAQ, or available from tech support -- it's floating out there in the blogosphere and in MT developer's heads.
Googling for code and hoping for a solution is not sustainable when you blog commercially for clients. Searching through forums is not any better.
My holiday wishes, in regards to blogging, is for a Movable Type Developer Network (MTDN), the collected code of MT bloggers hosted by MT. There's a start with the Six Apart Professional Network, but it's not there yet. I learned that while struggling with the premature end of script headers error.
The Winged Figures
The photo is one of the Winged Figures of the Republic from Hoover Dam. The figures stand firmly guarding the flagpole and express, "the immutable calm of intellectual resolution, and the enormous power of trained physical strength, equally enthroned in placid triumph of scientific accomplishment." I realized later, as we drove back into the excesses of Vegas that the Hoover Dam was the most powerful example of form follows function I'd ever seen. It was as if we had walked onto the set of Fritz Lang's Metropolis and observed the streamlined shapes, the smooth, curving surfaces of the spillway, and the space-age industrialism.
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