blivet.com

Even a poorly read, and apparently poorly maintained, blog like mine gets spammed. You can read about my first attack last year in the archives. I’ve never received a barrage like Diane but lately it’s been once or twice a day, never on the front page, always on an archived entry, just enough to be annoying. Like gnats buzzing around my head.

And I’ve gotten tired of swatting them away. Especially with a blunt instrument like Movable Type. Rebuild, rebuild, rebuild the entire site whenever you delete one. Hurt me. I understand that Six Apart will add comment registration to version 3.0 of their publishing system. Unfortunately 3.0 has been long delayed (due to its developer’s understandable distraction from TypePad) and what it really needs is comment moderation instead of just registration, i.e. comments escrowed until the author, me, approves them.

I suppose I could install MT-Blacklist, since I’ve had good luck with similar tools to combat the swarm around my email inbox, and not worry about registration or moderation. But that rebuild, rebuild, rebuild thing about Movable Type has really started to bug me. So I started looking around for something to squash all of these insects.

Last week I discovered WordPress. It’s the successor to b2, a publishing system I looked at two years ago but decided was a little undercooked for my tastes. Still, it was PHP- and MySQL-based, two of my favorite web technology ingredients, and showed a lot of promise with its dynamic “no rebuild, no static pages” delivery model. And now WordPress may have delivered on that promise with even more nifty features like search engine-friendly permalinks.

But I’ll find out in a few days how good it is when I install it to run this blog. I hope to say “goodbye” to spam and the rebuild, rebuild, rebuild cycle. In the meantime, comments are disabled. I’d like to read your feedback about this on the site but that will have to wait. My apologies.