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).
August 28th, 2007 · Category: Technology, Web Sites · Tags: authenticate, authentication system, boingboing, dooce, flame wars, livejournal, movabletype, open authentication, personal electronics, vox · Comments Off
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.
June 22nd, 2005 · Category: Site Stuff, Technology · Tags: blogging software, dreamhost, k2, movabletype, ruby on rails, textpattern, typo, weblogs, wordpress · Comments Off
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.
June 20th, 2005 · Category: Site Stuff · Tags: blog, bowels, dreamhost, internal server error, movabletype, typo, wordpress · Comments Off