Today I received spam from a Cape Town based company, they sent it via a SAIX ADSL link and I just know complaining to SAIX will not get me anywhere.
So what to do?
I think putting the email addresses here for email harvesters to get and add to plenty of spam lists will be a good revenge, so here goes:
sales@compu-teers.co.za
john@compu-teers.co.za
rory@compu-teers.co.za
Have fun.
A new version of Movable Type has been released to fix a vulnerability that allowed attackers to send mail via your machine. You can get the upgrade here and the changelog is here.
Annoyingly this does not fix the known problem with email notifications not working so this is the 2nd release from Movable Type that has this bug and requires you to fiddle the source to fix it. You can read this forum posting for details of fixing the email bug.
I just completed the upgrade of my blog from MT 2.64 to 3.14. The upgrade was fairly painless except for one known problem. Sending mail notifications stopped working. There is a temp solution on the MT support forum here.
I have also now enabled TypeKey on the main blog and all non TypeKey comments will require moderation before they appear on the site.
I will have to fiddle the templates for comments a bit to give them the same look and feel as my main site, this is not something I have done for the old MT either but I suppose its a good idea.
So as I have been saying here I am hoping to launch a photoblog, I am now doing just that. It can be found at http://photoblog.devco.net/.
The idea is to post a photo a day, now I cannot take a photo a day, I am just too busy at work for that kind of thing. So I will get stuff from my 25gig or photos archive and will post new things as they come. As it is now there are posts for almost 2 weeks that I created.
It is powered by Movable Type 3.14 and making the templates was much easier than I first expected. My other sites are done from templates that I found on template sharing sites etc, this one I made myself so I’d appreciate any feedback on the design.
I like MT 3.x, I will be upgrading my other blogs to it, for now though I will need multiple installs of it unless I want to go and buy a full version of it, but I do not think this will break their T’s and C’s, I will just give each individual blog owner their own install which should be the same as someone on a shared hosting service installing their own copy, this should be well within the bounds of whats allowed.
On the comments question, I allow non registered comments but they need to be approved and I left TypeKey there in case people want to use that. Comments via TypeKey authenticated people will not need approval.
There are some changes I still want to make to the site:
1) Implement another RSS feed. Dave wants me to link to the full image in my feed, I guess this may annoy some people so I will make it a choice between thumbnails and full images.
2) Create some kind of people link section, like the one on this site, where I will link to other photoblogs that I like.
I set up a photoblog as I mentioned previously, I will put a more detailed item about it here when I am 100% happy with it. The main thing I am not 100% happy with is the comments situation.
If I allow open comments like I do on this site I will be battling comment spam all day and this will really annoy me. The alternative is to allow open comments but to moderate them, this will be even more work or I could use TypeKey.
TypeKey is MovableType’s single signon comment authentication service, you sign up once for an account with them and once logged in you can post comments on all TypeKey enabled blogs.
From the TypeKey Website:
TypeKey helps ensure that people who comment on a site have a verified identity, keeping conversations on track and helping to prevent abusive or offensive content (comment spam) from being posted. Sites that enable TypeKey have better accountability for the content that’s being published.
As a TypeKey user, you get your own free TypeKey Profile Page, displaying only the information you choose to share. Those who are interested in finding out more about the person behind the comments on a site can visit the identity page to see what information is publicly available. You can even publish a TypeKey Profile Page while remaining completely anonymous.
It sounds all fine and well, but will forcing people to use this service prevent them from commenting on my blog? I suspect it will, I know it was my first reaction when confronted with blogs that insists on TypeKey login.
If anyone has any views on this, I’d really appreciate some comments.
