Category: Blogging

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It’s he-eeere

Movable Type 3.0

Mena explains.

And if you look at the trackbacks at the bottom of Mena’s post, it looks like the reception it is getting is terrible. No-one seems to be grumbling about the quality of the software (well, apart from the lack of revolutionary new features); it all seems to be about the pricing structure.

To me, though, it looks perfectly reasonable. Well over a year ago, I mused about how much MT Pro would cost when it was released. Well, MT Pro never really happened. Instead, we’ve got MT 3, and for personal use, my estimate from back then isn’t a million miles off. The big difference is the sheer variety of pricing options Six Apart have come up with.

It’s all good, people. Movable Type is high quality, sophisticated, and powerful software. No-one is forcing you to upgrade from your existing MT 2.x weblogs, and if you don’t want to pay for your using it to run a single, personal weblog, you can use the free version.

But if you want to run multiple blogs with multiple authors, and you want access to the latest features, then cough up already.

Movable Type 3 coming soon to this blog right here.

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Archive changes

I think I’m going to make some changes to my blog archives. I use SSI to show the same sidebar on all my home page and all my archive pages. One of the side effects of this is that a typical archive page is not static. If you go to a typical archive URL, say “http://www.sunpig.com/martin/archives/2003/12/28/oliebollen/“, the blog entry the page relates to is static (although the comments may change over time), but the sidebar information varies on a daily basis.

This means that when a search engine indexes a given archive page, the information it registers at that time may not be there at some point in the future. This is a bad thing. I know that I get frustrated if I follow a link from Google only to find that the information I was expecting to find at the other end isn’t there any more. I’m sure other people do, too.

On the other hand, not including things like the Quick Reviews in the sidebar of archive pages is going to decrease the number of people who will read them. Looking at the server logs, it is not uncommon for someone to find an archive page through a search query, and then browse around the reviews for a bit. So the question is: do I want more eyeballs, or do I want search engines to index me more accurately?

Seeing as I’m not trying to generate revenue from this site, the answer has to be: more accurate search results. Although the quick reviews feaure links to Amazon, the click-through rate is very low, and the conversion rate even lower. In the time I’ve been with the Amazon affiliates programme, I’ve earned just enough from referral fees to buy a single book. And I have no intention of running Google Ads any time soon.

Another benefit for readers and searchers is that removing extraneous information from the archive pages will reduce page download times. Basically, it sounds like a good idea all round. It’ll be interesting to see how the server logs change in response.

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MT-Blacklist

This blog is now protected by MT-Blacklist. I had hoped to wait until Movable Type 3 before implementing an anti-spam solution for the comments sections here, but the spammers went a bit nuts over the weekend. MT’s basic options for deleting comments are, shall we say, limited, so a more serious solution was needed. MT-Blacklist has caught 16 junk comments since I installed it yesterday evening. It rocks. Yay Jay!

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The dark side of blogging

If there was any doubt about the desirability of Movable Type’s forthcoming TypeKey authentication service for blog comments, what’s been happening to Kathryn Cramer over the last few days should provide ample justification:

“There’s been a lot of sanctimonious criticism, to which I will not link, about the inadequacy of Kos’s apology. Does anyone really think that if he had apologized and withdrawn his statement, all would be forgiven? Ask Kathryn Cramer. She went too far in her coverage of the Fallujah killings, and posted some unwarranted speculation. In response, she got vile pornography and death threats posted to her comments section. She took the errant post down and apologized profusely, and the hostile comments increased – because, apparently, taking the post down meant that she was trying to hide. She’s continuing to receive violent threats, some of them directed at her children.”

(from Respectful Of Otters, via Electrolite)

Parallels between TypeKey and the US-Visit programme are duly noted.