November 26, 2004
Comments will be approved before posted...
Posted by Jess in
Announcements
The comment spam problem is becoming too much to handle, and I found I could solve this problem by upgrading both Movable Type and MT-Blacklist (the comment de-spammer).
The upgrade went well, at least as well as Perl scripts can be (in between the chmod'ing, ftp'ing in ASCII, fixing the "Error 500 Internal Server Error", etc. But aside from some minor cussing, it went well, really.)
Sadly, after much debugging and telnetting to run the perl script on the server, I noticed that my web host is missing a crucial Perl module, 'storable.pm'. In the meantime, I've contacted them to ask if they will add it for me. Here's hoping.
I supose that's what I get for upgrading before checking to make sure my web host meets the minimum requirements. ;-)
So, due to this, no spam blacklist for me. However - the new features of the latest Movable Type alone will help me tremendously. One feature is that I can now approve comments before they are posted here. I am taking advantage of this. I apologize, but it will be much nicer for everyone overall.
I know I should be runnning this on Domino, the problem is that I really, really love my site's look and feel, and I just don't have time to see if I can convert the design over to a Domino database, as much as I'd love to.
However, I *am* in the process of learning how to develop databases for the web better, starting with my own business site. You can check it out here if your firewall allows outbound port 8081. I'm running it on my old-comp-wannabe-server from home, and my ISP blocks incoming port 80. It's not much yet, but it's a start! Right now the only link that is active is the "More information about Solace."
I'd love to hear some feedback. Developing on the web has always been something I wanted to learn how to do better.
Permalink
|
TrackBack (0)
Comments
Hi,
i also had the problem with comment-spam on movableType.
Just rename the mt-comment.cgi in anything you want and change the name of it in the mt.cfg on your server.
I did exactly that a week ago and had no more spam since this this day, before i had maybe 20-30 spam comments a day.
Give it a try,
greetings from germany
Maiko
WOW.....
I'm going to do that right now.
You rock! Thanks!
I am not sure how difficult it would be to convert design to Domino -- John Head and Steve Castledine did it for edbrill.com when I moved from an MT design and it seemed to go fairly quickly/smoothly. You could ask them.
Moving this site to Domino would be a great excercise in "pure web" development. A blog's a great place to start, since there really isn't a lot to concern yourself with other than creating the HTML you need from views and viewtemplates. (Blogsphere, though hugely configurable, is not your design goal -- there's way too much fluff in the way to make it a good starter project.) The object of the game is to create the same HTML you're getting now (and to remember to set the MIME type on your stylesheet to text/css so us Mozilla users can see the look and feel you like so much ;o) ), and as HTML pages go, this site is pretty darned straightforward. You know where to find me if you ever need a gentle push in the right direction.
Oh, and I really think it's about time someone took some initiative and started screening my comments. I do tend to babble on....
hey jess, steve castledine's template is great for the case where you have an html layout you are fond of. he has figured out a way to give you a configuration doc. you just put whatever html you want in there, and then add some "dx tags" to populate the html with the dynamic content. it is a highly original way to go about doing domino on the web. really neat stuff.
although a better exercise is certainly to "roll your own". :-)
