Tag: ‘movabletype’ · TangleBones

BoingBoing Bettered

The good people at Boing­Bo­ing have upgrade to Mov­able Type 4.0, and with that upgrade comes the return of com­ments. The new site has an improved look with better read­abil­ity and (to my eye) fewer ads. In addi­tion, they’ve hired Joel from Dethroner and Giz­modo fame to run Boing­Bo­ing Gad­gets, a new sub-​site focus­ing on per­sonal elec­tron­ics. Wel­come improve­ments all around.

But noth­ing that changes ever improves with­out a few mis­takes, not even Boing­Bo­ing. In order to bring back com­ments with­out feel­ing the pain of com­ment spam and inter­minable flame wars, BB has taken two steps. The first, and some­thing I think we all wish we could do, is to hire Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light to manage their com­ments. Great move. The second step was to require com­menters to choose between being anony­mous (cow­ards) or cre­at­ing an account at BB. That’s right, one more account with a user­name and pass­word to forget.

What’s sad is that there are at least two better options. The worse of the two is to set up Type­Key authen­ti­ca­tion. Yes, it’s another user­name and pass­word, but at least it’s usable across mul­ti­ple sites. I have a Type­Key account just to be able to com­ment at the Dooce.

The best solu­tion, which Mov­able Type 4 sup­ports, is OpenID. This open authen­ti­ca­tion system allows users to authen­ti­cate through a number of dif­fer­ent meth­ods (for instance, by having a free Live­Jour­nal or Vox account), and MT’s sup­port is very flexible.

So please BB, please open up a little. Don’t make me get a spe­cial account just to com­ment on your pages (okay, I already did, but still).

Getting back to Normal

I think I have my Dreamhost prob­lems sorted - or at least the Mov­able­Type ones. I’ve switched all of the weblogs I main­tain (no, really, there’s more going on than you real­ize) to Mov­able­Type 3.17, and after tweak­ing some tem­plates and losing some fea­tures (tem­porar­ily), every­thing seems to be work­ing again.

I’m also trying out other blog­ging soft­ware for my site - I got Typo up and run­ning yes­ter­day, but it wouldn’t import my com­ments from Mov­able Type for some reason. I’d like to switch to that since I’d finally get a chance to learn Ruby on Rails, but it’s awfully spar­tan. I had Textpat­tern installed on my last host, for test­ing pur­poses, and it was fine, but I didn’t feel like learn­ing an entirely new tem­plat­ing language.

I was all set to try out Word­Press, but after the link-​farming inci­dent, I don’t really trust their dev team. I do like their default tem­plate (obvi­ously, and the work Michael is doing on K2 looks good as well. A bit blank, though.

Either way, I have a ton of posts in my head that I’d like to get up (even though my read­er­ship has dwin­dled to 2, and one of those is just me proof­read­ing), and a whole redesign planned in my head. Maybe one of these days I’ll have the time for web­sites again.

Comments not working

Well, I had thought that my tran­si­tion to Dreamhost had worked out won­der­fully, until I tried to com­ment on one of the pages I moved over. (Inter­nal Server Error!) It seems that some­thing deep in the bowels of Mov­able­Type is freak­ing out, and I can’t figure out what. I changed my mt.cfg, I changed the info in the mt_blog table, but there’s some­thing else that needs updat­ing and I don’t know what it is.

So, until I do know, thing will still be quiet around here. Sorry about that! If I can’t get any of the com­ment­ing work­ing, I may have to do some­thing dras­tic like replac­ing each of the blogs with Word­Press or Typo or something.