Everyone

kwc.org offline (mostly)

A Slashdot post on the D-Wave Quantum Computer linked to one of my recent entries -- it's simply not something that my setup can handle. I'm hoping to get connectivity back by tomorrow, but for now I am sans brain.

Styles for Everyone!

With a lot of help from bp we've upgraded the site to support the StyleCatcher plugin. What does this plugin do? If you find a design you like over at The Style Archive, you can easily update your own blog to look exactly like it.

When you login to mtypo, click on the plugins page and scroll down to StyleCatcher, or just click on this link. You'll need to give it the URL of The Style Archive page that you like.

You can also browse the Movabletype Style Library if you are looking for something more basic.

Closed comments / comment spam

Some of you may have noticed brief resurgencs of comment spam. My active countermeasure more recently has been to close comments on entries that are over a month old. This, naturally, caused comment spam to go down quite a bit; however, it also means that you cannot receive comments on your older entries.

I realize that I should have cleared this policy with you all first; if you wish for me to leave comments on your older entries open, let me know and I'll do so. Spam tends to come in waves, where each wave can be caught with a filter if you know what to look for. We can work to try and keep spam to a mininimum if you wish to keep you older entries open.

The never-ending battle

As many of you mtypo-ers have noticed, the spam problem has gotten much worse on movabletypo.net. Part of this is more movabletypo pages showing up in search engines, part of this is due to spammers figuring out how to circumvent MovableType 3.2's comment spam protections. I have been cleaning out the spam on a daily basis, so feel free to toss the comment spam notification e-mails if you wish.

To try and combat the increasing spam, I went ahead and turned off comments on older entries on some of the blogs (cshell, littlestar, and kenjisan) that are currently the top targets of spam. After I get back from Comic-Con I'm going to try out the new MT 3.3 to see if it offers better protections. If not, I will seek out some other spam protection filters to see if they improve conditions. I'm wary of trying out too many protections at once, as I find that they sometimes result in no comments making it through. The closing of comments on older entries should alleviate a lot of the problem, so hopefully that will provide more than brief respite.

Fixed (very, very belatedly)

Many apologies for the prolonged issues with the perpetual login screen. After many communications with the official support people, we finally stumbled upon the problem. Two of our database tables crashed: mt_session and mt_log, which contain your login cookies as well as the log of what goes on with the MT system. Neither or those contains any information pertaining to your blogs, so all of your entries should be fine (and bp keeps a regular backup of those anyway).

Again, many apologies for how long this took to figure out. I've gone through and tried to clear out some of the comment spam that was impossible to delete, as well as approved comments that were stuck in the mess.

Updated directory

yonashi, the Tokyo invader himself, will be posting on his two new blogs decaffeinated and rockstarprogrammer. decaffeinated will be the one that shows up here as he doesn't want to awe you with his programming awesomeness. Both blogs are rather sparse right now as he's probably busy giving Bay Area Japanese restaurant recommendations to people, but hopefully yonashi will provide enough clues to his identity for the confused readers here.

parakkum has left his LJ roots behind and gone all MovableType, all the time: http://movabletypo.net/parakkum/

My (kwc's) blogs have undergone surgical separation to spawn forth spare cycles and mythbusters episode guides, neither of which will appear here directly (mythbusters guides will be mentioned in my normal blog).

Front page issues

Update: bp got it fixed real quick. It appears that the feeds are all back now.

The front page is currently omitting some blogs, a problem which will hopefully be fixed soon. Any blog not hosted on Movabletypo as well as some on mtypo -- ln m, horizonline, metamanda, pqbon, myself -- are affected. Some entries you may have missed are:

elle corazon (metamanda)
saint judas (metamanda)

The Declining State of the Games Industry (ln m)
Sci Fi Dating Site (ln m)
On Rosetta (ln m)
Recent del.icio.us entries (ln m)
Playstation 3 in November (ln m)

3.2 Style Generator

Those of you considering moving to the new 3.2 style templates may want to try out the Style Generator. It allows you to customize the more basic elements of a page (colors, borders, etc...) without having to get your hands dirty sifting through the CSS stylesheet.

Welcome 3.2

Movabletypo has been upgraded to version 3.2, which has many numerous changes. You'll probably notice the aesthetic changes the most and hopefully benefit from the improved spam control as well. There are also new templates/stylesheets as well for 3.2 that are cross-compatible with TypePad and LiveJournal. Though you may not care too much about the cross-compatibility, it does mean that there are more designs available for you to use for your site if you don't want to fiddle with the CSS too much. You can see some of these designs over at the MovableType Style Library. Feel free to contact me with any questions or problems you notice.

One more addition

Some of you have shown interest in stats on your blog entries, so I've added a little widget from mybloglog at the very end of this page that shows the "Top 5" links from the previous day. If you really want to know you can scroll down and see if one of your links made it to the top five, with the knowledge that the difference between #1 and #2 is often three total clicks versus two.

Right column begone!

I decided to get rid of the two column layout on the Everyone page. I didn't like the competition for space between the blog entries and the links on the right. About the only downside is that I had to push the "Everyone Else" links to the bottom of the page. If you dislike these changes, let me know.

Comments unbroken

It appears that our ongoing server move, or some other haywire-ness, has caused comments from July 26th to August 1st to be lost. As we try to combat comment spam, we have to rely on tools that can be a bit too successful and a bit too finicky. Apologies for the lost comments -- hopefully there won't be any other hiccups.

Welcome horizon line

horizon line has been on movabletypo for some time now, but I've been keeping her off the front page, lest you see her superior Portola Redwoods, Pinnacles, or Getty photos. I can only abuse my power for so long, so at long last you will now see her photo entries appear here. Those interested in city planning/education reform should check out the rest of her entries.

Welcome Offtopicartisan

Time to welcome another friend to the movabletypo blogging community: offtopicartisan. Some of you might recognize him by his handle, others by his entry, 1:48am BST: "Blair heads for historic victory -- the rest of you, well, that's all the hints you get. He's posted a few entries that won't show up here, so be sure to visit his site to quickly catch up.

Welcome Wombat

wombat's feed has been added to the everyone list. This will allow me to vicariously experience PSP ownership without violating my Sony boycott :). wombat does a good job of disguising his identity on his blog, but the PSP ownership should identify him to some of you...