Category Archives: Administrivia

I installed Movable Type 3.2 over the weekend. When I came back to the office on Tuesday, I noticed that my main page displays incorrectly on my PC here. Though my stylesheet did not change, it appears that the main … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I have just completed the long-overdue upgrade of my system to Movable Type version 3.2. Far as I can tell, everything is working, but on the not-completely-unlikely chance that you run into an odd error commenting or sending a Trackback, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

In case you’re wondering why this site was unavailable earlier, it’s because my webhost was affected by this. A power failure in Los Angeles, the second-largest U.S. city, darkened downtown and several nearby cities, trapping people in elevators, disrupting refineries … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Now that I’ve got my legs back under me, let me extend a warm and hearty thanks to all of my guest bloggers from this past week. I think they did a great job, and it helped me to enjoy … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Well, since Chucky has fled the Lone Star State to prevent a quorum of revellers for the I-day celebration, it looks like he’s made the grand mistake of entrusting me as part of his cadre of pinch-hitters. So, by way … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I’m going to be taking a few days off to spend with my family. We’ll be taking off later today to fly to Portland to spend the week with my parents and various other members of the Kuffner clan. Since … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I saw a blurb about a new service called MyBlogLog on the SixApart blog, and it looked interesting enough to give it a try. This is a service that will capture stats on outbound clicks from your blog – in … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Since Bloglines is my tool of choice for blogreading, I don’t update my blogroll as frequently as I should. I finally did so today, adding some sites that were long overdue for the sidebar. When I get in a frenzy … Continue reading → Continue reading →

My comments have been infested by a particularly obnoxious troll over the past couple of days, someone who seems to think that because I allow feedback, he’s free to leave offensive and racist remarks and that I am somehow obligated … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Movable Type 3.14 has been released to address the problem of excessive server load when one is under attack from a comment spammer. From the Movable Type blog: Because these attacks are increasing in both frequency and severity, we strongly … Continue reading → Continue reading →

SixApart says the following about comment spam: We’re in the process of identifying all the separate issues involved, coming up with some concise and effective recommendations, and then outlining our plan going forward. We’re also going to be reaching out … Continue reading → Continue reading →

OK, I got a response to my support ticket, which seems to have resolved the problem of all comments needing to be approved before they appeared. I needed to delete the following old MT Blacklist files: extlib/jayallen/*.* (three .pm files) … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I’m liking the new version of Movable Type so far, and other than the sheer drudgery of FTPing all the new files to my webhost it was pretty darned easy to do. One problem I have noticed, and I’ve got … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Had a little time to myself this afternoon, and upgraded to MT 3.121, apparently without any problems. I was a bit macho about it, in that I didn’t make a backup of my existing installation first, but I figured if … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Last night I finally got around to downloading the latest version of Movable Type. I’m hoping to do the upgrade in the next few days, Copious Spare Time permitting. I’ve got a couple of questions for those of you who … Continue reading → Continue reading →

If you’re a MT-Blacklist user (and you should be), there’s a new maintenance release, version 1.65, available. If you’ve got version 1.64, it’s a minor change to one line of code in Blacklist.pm. That change was added because some spammers … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Apparently, I had a repeat of the webhost problem which gave “permission denied” errors when commenting, and which also prevented me from posting before now. I saved a few things in draft and have now published them. Dreamhost has assured … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Looks like I’ve been suffering from the same Dreamhost permission problems that Byron, Orange Politics, and several folks in this MT support forum thread have been having problems. The fact that I can now save this post and see it … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I just deleted 10 comment spams from a weight loss site. If you’re using MT Blacklist, save yourself some grief and add the following regexp to your ban list: weigh[\w\d\-_]*less[\w\d\-_]*rx[\w\d\-_]*\.[a -z]{2,} Take out everything between the brackets and put a … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I just checked my activity log, and I’m seeing hundreds upon hundreds of comment spam attempts for “listbanx.com” and “leadbanx.com”, all coming from the same IP address (65.91.30.30) and all in the last two days or so. Do yourself a … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Just finished upgrading to version 2.661 of Movable Type. I’m hoping this will fix the Atom bugs that people have reported. I’ll see what the Feed Validator says after I rebuild all my index files. Let me know if you’re … Continue reading → Continue reading →

All right, it appears that my Atom feed fails to validate (thanks to Danil for pointing me to the Feed Validator). I’m not really sure how to fix it, but I have verified that the current version of MovableType does … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Well, it appears that I now have a full-post Atom feed, which should be located at this address: http://www.offthekuff.com/mt/atom.xml. I’ve subscribed to it myself in Bloglines so I’ll know when it’s working or not. You can see it for yourself … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I suppose I should’ve subscribed to my own blog’s feeds from the get-go, but after reading David’s post about Atom, I learned that I don’t have a full-post feed of my own. I’ve created an Atom template, and once I’m … Continue reading → Continue reading →

First of all, Kriston Capps has moved Grammar Police off of Blogspot and onto its own MovableType-friendly domain. Among other things, this means he now has a working RSS feed. Update your blogrolls and aggregators accordingly. I’m more or less … Continue reading → Continue reading →

It’s probably unnecessary, but after the Kos/Kerry kerfuffle, I’ve decided to update my Blog Policies page to cover the (in my mind unlikely) possibility that someone will attempt to make another party responsible for my words or the words of … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Apparently, my webhost is having some mySQL problems today. Slow response and an involuntary morning hiatus are the symptoms, but it appears they are finding a cure. Obviously, since here I am. Right, then. Continue reading →

If you’ve sent me email since last night, I’m not ignoring you. My web host is experiencing some technical difficulties, and one of them is affecting webmail. I haven’t been able to log in all day. Hopefully this will be … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I’ve had a free Sitemeter counter for nearly two years now, and though it has its wonky moments it’s always worked. For some bizarre reason, yesterday the counter at the bottom of this blog became inaccessible to me – if … Continue reading → Continue reading →

There’s a new version of Movable Type, version 2.66, which is apparently a stopgap to help deal with comment spam until Version 3.0 is released. It will allow you to require that a certain amount of time pass between the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I seem to have avoided the recent comment spam outbreak that infested a number of folks’ sites, such as Teresa. Just lucky this time, but I will say this: If you’re using Movable Type and you allow comments, but you … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I’ve configured my MT Blacklist to reject any comment that contains a .biz domain in it, since it seemed to me that the only comments I ever saw with that in it were spam. If this causes you any hardship, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Seems like there’s been an uptick in comment spams lately. I’ve had new comments to delete and new URLs to add to my spam blacklist most days over the last two weeks. I even had my first trackback spam in … Continue reading → Continue reading →

One of my readers just sent me a note saying he’s been spammed by some outfit that referenced a blog post of mine in which he’d left a comment, of which his email address was a part. I hate spam, … Continue reading → Continue reading →