Meta: May 2004 Archives
I temporary disabled the comments on this site. The last days I have received too much comment spam.
Until two weeks ago, I could control comment spam by using the MT-Blacklist plug-in. Unfortunately this plug-in does not work on the latest version of Movable Type, so I had to remove it. MT 3.0D has the option to require commenters to sign up first before posting a comment, but I have not yet been able to get the JavaScript to work on XHTML 1.1. Until I fix this, I simply keep a close eye on my comments, and remove any suspicious comment immediately. But the coming week I will be on a trip, and thus can't watch my comments. Therefore I decided to disable the comments until I am back home again. If you have any comment, just use the Feedback form.
Four days ago I upgraded the motor of this site to Movable Type version 3.0D --- the D is for Developer edition. Unlike many others who installed this version, I was fully aware that this developer edition could have some problems with plug-ins. Here are my findings of the first days playing around.
I have upgraded to Movable Type 3.0, and am trying to fix the templates at the moment. During the next days, posting comments might give some problems, but I am working on it.
On the web a lot of people complain about the new licences, but I haven't got any problems with it. As this site uses only three webblogs ---the main site, the photo site and one for static content--- and has only one author ---that's me :-D---, I fall exactly within the limits of the free licence. And if I really need more, I have no problem paying for it. Let's face it, they made a far better CMS than I will ever be able to make myself.
The installation went without any problems, the pesky part is in the Individual Archive templates. There have been many changes, and I will have to go through my code line-by-line to see what I have to change.
To make it even more difficult, they did not escape ampersands in their code! The same thing happened in their 2.66 update, and I really expected that they'd learned something. Anyway, soon I expect version 3.01, which fixes these errors in the JavaScript.
Another problem I ran into is their use of JavaScript as: document.comments_form.email.value = getCookie("mtcmtmail");, which typically won't work in documents served as application/xhtml+xml. I have to change all these lines to use the document.getElementById function.
You notice: work enough to do, so I'll better get back into debugging mode.
[Update 2004.05.17]: They did escape ampersands, but that I was using the wrong version of their code.
Since September of last year, this site is also available in WAP format at http://wap.braintags.com/. As you might imagine, there are not many people using this feature, I guess only 2-5 visitors per day.
With my new phone I also had a look at this site over WAP, and ran into an error. Clearly the template I was using was not OK. I made this template myself, because at the time I could not find a suitable template on the internet.
I decided to search again, and found Building a Better Wap Diary describing how to set up a WAP site with individual archives. This sounded interesting, since until now I published the last X items in a single file, without the possibility to view archived posts.
I quickly set to work, using the provided templates as the base for my own styled pages. I checked the result on two different phones and on a WAP emulator on the internet, and it looked alright on all of them. The new WAP site is better in three ways:
- The index page contains only the titles of the last entries. Before it contained also the full texts. Therefore, the index will load much faster;
- Now all texts are available, in stead of only the latest ones. I only have to wait for Google to pass by, and I expect an increase in the number of visitors;
- I also included the comments and trackbacks in the individual archives.
Todays trend in weblog country is the Ego Watch: looking at which position you end up on several search engines. It started with Brad Choate, directly followed by Baviaan. And here are my results:
| TERM | Yahoo | Altavista | Lycos | Excite | MSN | A9 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| jeroen | 60 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 7 | 4 | 85 |
| sangers | 3 | 5 | 8 | 2 | 12 | 45 | 4 |
| jeroen sangers | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| jeroensangers | 1 | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| brain tags | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| braintags | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 8 | 1 | 1 |
It looks like I'll have to use my surname Sangers more on this blog, and somehow I'll have to convince Google that I am an important Jeroen. Excite obviously does not like me.
[Update 2004.05.07]: Added MSN
[Update 2004.05.11]: Added A9
You might already have seen it, I added some new pictures to my photo gallery. You'll see some typical tourist photos as well as some pictures of our bachelor day.
